Photography Biography

This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography And Life Through The Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx, is all Nikki Sixx. It is a collection of compelling photography and stories that capture the rage, love, optimism, darkness, and determination that shape his work.

Love and death cohabit in The Use of Photography, with alternating chapters by the two authors. First published in France in 2005, the book recounts a passionate love affair between Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January, she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy.

Learn about the development of photography with iMindsJNR audio-learning series for younger minds. Before the photograph was invented, the best way to capture an image was by painting it. You can imagine how long that would take! In 1990, Kodak unveiled the first widely available digital camera. These days, through many advances in technology, we can store hundreds of images on a single camera, ready to print or upload onto a computer whenever we like. But how did we get from paintings to digital photography?

"Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together.

From his early days working out of his dorm room and shooting on film to becoming a Nikon ambassador and official photographer of the historic Dawn Wall ascent, Corey Rich has been capturing iconic shots of adventure superstars for more than two decades. Now Corey tells how he got some of his favorite images of climbers, adventurers, skiers, performance artists, and more. He shares insights into the business of photography, photography tips, outdoor lessons, and what he has learned about human nature along the way.

In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson revives Smith's life and legacy, merging traditional biography with highly untraditional digressions. Traveling across 29 states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson tracks down a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; and Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whom Smith recorded on surreptitious tapes.

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.

Learn about George Eastman and the invention of the Kodak camera.

From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never before traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war.

When photographer Adraint Bereal graduated from the University of Texas, he self-published an impressive volume of portraits, personal statements, and interviews that explored UT's campus culture and offered an intimate look at the lives of Black students matriculating within a majority white space. Bereal's work was inspired by his first photo exhibition at the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin, entitled 1.7, that unearthed the experiences of the 925 Black men that made up just 1.7% of UT's total 52,000 student body.

Abraham Lincoln stood out in a crowd as much for his wit and rollicking humor as for his height. Here is a warm, appealing biography of our Civil War president. Russell Freedman begins with a lively account of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood, his career as a country lawyer, and his courtship and marriage to Mary Todd. Then the author focuses on the presidential years (1861 to 1865), skillfully explaining the many complex issues Lincoln grappled with as he led a deeply divided nation through the Civil War.