Books: Night Vision – Photographs by Troy Paiva

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.
“A booming subculture is on the rise: dubbed Urban Exploration, it involves sneaking into abandoned or off-limits factories, aviation “boneyards,” decommissioned bases, and other derelict features of the military/industrial landscape. Troy Paiva is a foremost photographer of the UrbEx (as it’s known to its devotees) phenomenon, and his distinctive blend of atmospheric night photos and lighting effects are the visual hallmarks of a scene that has drawn the increasing attention of the media and the public—as seen in recent programs on both the Discovery Channel (“Urban Explorers”) and MTV (“Fear”). Illuminated by histories of the sites documented, Night Vision reveals the remarkable discoveries of a new generation of explorers.”

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. by Troy Paiva
Buy it here: Amazon

Books: In Plane View

In Plane View: Abstractions of Flight

The many types of aircraft held at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC no doubt attract their fair share of aerophiles. But now even those with just a passing interest in aviation can marvel at the beauty of flight as depicted in the pages of In Plane View: Abstractions of Flight, a new collection of imagery from Carolyn Russo, the Smithsonian’s photographer. Russo’s work focuses on the details of a range of different aircraft and it’s from her re-examining of their various forms and structures that this collection of striking shapes, patterns and abstractions has been brought together.

Buy it here: Amazon

Jeffrey Milstein: Plane Spotter

Often it takes an artist to show us that the familiar is in fact truly remarkable. Jeffrey Milstein’s elegant photographs of commercial airliners have quickly become contemporary icons, exhibited at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in NYC and Paul Kopiekin Gallery in Los Angeles.

Buy the book: AirCraft: The Jet as Art

Books: Wirtschaftswunder

Germany after the war

It was no more than eight years after the surrender of the Nazi government when Josef Heinrich Darchinger set out on his photographic journey through the West of a divided Germany. The bombs of World War II had reduced the country’s major cities to deserts of rubble. Yet his pictures show scarcely any signs of the downfall of a civilization. Not that the photographer was manipulating the evidence: he simply recorded what he saw. At the time, a New York travel agency was advertising the last opportunity to go and visit the remaining bomb sites. Darchinger’s pictures, in color and black-and-white, show a country in a fever of reconstruction. The economic boom was so incredible that the whole world spoke of an “economic miracle.” The people who achieved it, in contrast, look down-to-earth, unassuming, conscientious, and diligent. And increasingly, they look like strangers in the world they have created. The photographs portray a country caught between the opposite poles of technological modernism and cultural restoration, between affluence and penury, between German Gemütlichkeit and the constant threat of the Cold War. They show the winners and losers of the “economic miracle,” people from all social classes, at home, at work, in their very limited free time and as consumers. But they also show a country that looks, in retrospect, like a film from the middle of the last century.

This Collector’s Edition is limited to 1,000 copies, each numbered and signed by J. H. Darchinger and containing the signed color photograph Reichstag, Berlin, 1958.

Buy it here: Wirtschaftswunder

Books: Julius Shulman Photographer of Modernism

More photographs uncovered from the Julius Shulman archive. Tashen pays tribute to residential and commercial buildings that had slipped from public view in this three volume set.

A resident of Los Angeles since 1920, Julius Shulman has been documenting modernist architecture in Southern California and across the globe for nearly eight decades. His images of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 (1960) in Los Angeles and Richard J. Neutra’s Kaufmann House (1947) in Palm Springs are among the most recognizable and iconic architectural photographs of the 20th century.

Buy it here: Julius Shulman, Modernism Rediscovered