This third volume in Skira’s History of Photography series serves as a major reference in the field of photography. The third volume (1941-1980) of the Skira History of Photography series considers the years signed by the revolution of color that marked the start of a radical change in the very nature of amateur photography. At the same time, through photojournalism, photography became a mirror of society and a tool for attempts to change it. This monograph traces the historical evolution of photography, focusing on artists such as Helen Levitt, Weegee, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Sudek, William Klein, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Shomei Tomatsu, William Eugene Smith, Gerhard Richter, Bernhard and Hilla Becher, Ugo Mulas, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Clark, just to name a few. The essays provide an in-depth discussion of some of the primary themes of the historical period: the evolution of documentary photography between 1950 and 1980, the color revolution, and the relationship between photography and conceptual art.

In Love with Beauty offers an unprecedented chronological overview of the legendary Walter Pfeiffer, spanning four decades of photographic eroticism and wit, classical serenity and ornamental playfulness, artifice and immediacy. Initially a painter, draughtsman and graphic designer, Pfeiffer used photographs as aide-memoirs for large-scale Photorealist pencil drawings, but quickly developed a genuine passion for photography and, inspired by a Warholesque cast of handsome drifters and stylish women, began to evolve a trademark style. His breakthrough as a photographer came with a series of images of a young man in drag that was included in Jean-Christophe Amman's seminal Transformer exhibition of 1974, which year also saw Pfeiffer's first solo photo exhibition, reproduced here for the first time. His eponymous 1981 monograph conveyed a cheeky eroticism and a raw immediacy well suited to the Punk movement, also prefiguring the diaristic photography of the 1990s. For most of the 1980s, Pfeiffer immersed himself in the project that culminated in Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd, a series of close-up portraits of young men. Pfeiffer dedicated himself to drawing for a number of years, returning to photography only in the late 1990s. In Love with Beauty proves that he has remained as youthful and exuberant as ever.

Photographer Zoe Leonard practices a type of cerebral roaming combined with carefully considered observation. For more than 20 years she has crisscrossed nature and culture, cityscapes and museums, always searching for signs that say something about structures, about natural and cultural conditions and the contradictions, parallels and connections between them. Leonard's photographs of anatomical wax figures, fashion shows, trees and fences present figures in sparse black-and-white images that open up visual fields of thought and reveal within them our visible world--the concrete and established structures that make up our reality. Leonard first created an international stir at the Documenta 9 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, when she placed black-and-white photographs of female genitalia in the context of a male-dominated museum. Since then, the political aspects of her work have formed a backdrop for her constant struggle with shape, imagery and the union of symbols and content. This is the first book to showcase Leonard's complete oeuvre.

The twentieth century was--among all else--a century of things. From the handmade object to the mass produced, these things that once served a purpose soon became harbingers of beauty, modernity and innovation. Beyond the material, these objects have stimulated fantasies that convey an image about a time and a place, so that now even an everyday telephone or radio that has long been discontinued can experience a rebirth as a cult object only to be purchased for lofty sums of money at an auction. The Ecstasy of Things illustrates how product photography reflects the world of things as captured in varying lights for designers, manufacturers and advertising agencies. Collected here are nearly 500 photographs--many of which were unearthed from company and agency archives worldwide on behalf of the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Swiss Photography Foundation. This book most impressively demonstrates how the emotional and symbolic content of an object was represented through the changing tastes and aesthetics throughout the twentieth century. At the same time, the collection is a wealth of forms, a colorful compendium of design and a photographic history of the past century as illustrated through our possessions.