Photography

Arizona

This handsome large-format book from 1971, “Arizona,” contains many page-filling photographs of stunning Arizona scenery taken by influential American landscape and nature photographer David Muench.  No doubt that some of the scenes in these photographs (many featured in “Arizona Highways” magazine) have changed or even disappeared in the decades since the book’s publication. Muench specializes in portraying Western landscapes and is still active today.

Photographs of the Southwest

Ansel Adams curated a selection of more than 100 images of his photographs of the Southwest, taken between 1928 and 1975. In 1937, Adams wrote to his friend Alfred Stieglitz of his time in the Southwest: "it is all very beautiful and magical here--a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you." In this book, Adams' iconic black and white photographs encompass both expansive, awe-inspiring landscapes and quiet studies of nature and people. 

Wilson's Cyclopedic Photography

Author Edward Livingston Wilson’s love of photography was matched only by the magnificence of his facial hair. Wilson’s influence stretched far beyond photography as an artistic medium: in 1864, he published the first photographic journal in the United States, Philadelphia Photographer, which he later humbly renamed Wilson’s Photographic Magazine. He created a separate photographic exhibit for the Centennial Exposition of 1876 for which he was also official photographer.

Gardens For a Beautiful America 1895-1935

This book presents, in all their glory, the hand-colored glass slide photographs of Frances Ben­jamin Johnston (1864-1952). It is a beautiful pictorial book, yet scholarly and well researched. Johnston was one of the earliest professional American women photographers. She trained as an artist in Paris, studied photography here at the Smithsonian, and began her career doing portrait and news photography.

Pages