Research Guide UCF Daytona: Photography

Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia O'Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbott's sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbott's fascinating life has long remained a mystery--until now.In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris--photographing, in Sylvia Beach's words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years.In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city's metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery--then Manhattan's skid row--Abbott shot back, "I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer...I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott's accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race-era science photography and her tenure as The New School's first photography teacher.With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott's place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.

The first comprehensive biography of Weegee--photographer, "psychic," ultimate New Yorker--from Christopher Bonanos, author ofInstant: The Story of Polaroid. Arthur Fellig's ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he renamed himself "Weegee," claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. InFlash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied. From self-taught immigrant kid to newshound to art-world darling to latter-day caricature--moving from the dangerous streets of New York City to the celebrity culture of Los Angeles and then to Europe for a quixotic late phase of experimental photography and filmmaking--Weegee lived a life just as worthy of documentation as the scenes he captured. WithFlash, we have an unprecedented and ultimately moving view of the man now regarded as an innovator and a pioneer, an artist as well as a newsman, whose photographs are among most powerful images of urban existence ever made.

Garry Winogrand--along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander--was one of the most important photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as one of the world's foremost street photographers. Award-winning writer Geoff Dyer has admired Winogrand's work for many years. Modeled on John Szarkowski's classic book Atget, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is a masterfully curated selection of one hundred photographs from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photography, with each image accompanied by an original essay. Dyer takes the viewer/reader on a wildly original journey through both iconic and unseen images from the archive, including eighteen previously unpublished color photographs. The book encompasses most of Winogrand's themes and subjects and remains broadly faithful to the chronological and geographical facts of his life, but Dyer's responses to the photographs are unorthodox, eye-opening, and often hilarious. This inimitable combination of photographer and writer, images and text, itself offers what Dyer claims for Winogrand's photography--an education in seeing.

What you see is very different from what you think you see... There's a lot going on behind the scenes when you like a photograph. Maybe something is tricking your brain into believing a static image is alive with motion. But how? Or maybe you're being drawn in by a rich, high-contrast subject. But what's so great about really black blacks and really white whites? And if the composition is subverting your expectations, where did those expectations come from in the first place? To answer these questions, international award-winning cinematographer Brian Dilg blends photographic fundamentals like exposure, focus, and composition with the latest developments in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, in a thrilling exploration of how a photo works, how your brain perceives it, and why you like the result.