Gustave le Gray
Photo Poche n ° 163
Introduction by Catherine Riboud
A few years younger than Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) could have been only one of the many discoverers of photography and remained in the history of the medium as a gifted chemist who improved the processes of his elders. He developed the negative on dry waxed paper and the negative on collodion glass – discoveries that undoubtedly enabled him to make the most beautiful prints of his time. But if Gustave Le Gray holds such a place in the history of photography today, it is because he was the first to understand that it was not a simple process of reproduction but a full-fledged art. “I wish that photography, instead of falling into the domain of industry and commerce, comes within that of art. This is its only, its real place ”.
Format: 12.5 x 19/144 pages / 13 euros
Leon Levinstein
Photo Poche n ° 164
Introduction by Bob Shamis
Leon Levinstein embodies in more than one line the mutation of American documentary photography of the 1950s and 1960s. Under the influence of Europeans, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, a new generation of photographers abandoned the role of social denunciation of ‘a Lewis Hine or the Photo League and the government propaganda work of the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s. They asserted a more subjective view of the choice of subjects and style, and thus expressed a personal representation of the world.
This is where Leon Levinstein offers a vision that blends document, form and emotion in an unprecedented way.
Format: 12.5 x 19/144 pages / 13 euros
