Through 150 striking color photographs, Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs charts the road to Barack Obama’s nomination as the first African American to lead the presidential ticket of a major party. Announcing his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007, Obama stood on the grounds of the Old State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech against slavery in 1858. During an eighteen-month campaign, from the snows of Iowa to the hunt for Democratic “superdelegates,” this junior senator from Chicago confounded the party establishment and rewrote the playbook on modern presidential campaigning. This amazing collection of photographs captures the public and private moments of his journey, and offers a unique window into one of the great triumphs in American politics.

Black Farmers in America. Photographs by John Francis Ficara, Essay by Juan Williams, University Press of Kentucky, March 2006, 144 pages, 10½ x 11¼, ISBN:978-0-8131-2399-8, cloth, US $49.95.

From the publisher’s site:

John Francis Ficara spent four years photographing black farmers across America, witnessing firsthand the difficulties faced by families who simply want to continue living and working on their land. Black Farmers in America reproduces in duotone over a hundred of Ficara’s exquisite photographs that capture the labor and joy of daily life on the family farm. In these poignant images of financial hardship, survival, and the people’s bond to the soil, Black Farmers in America documents for posterity the struggle of black farmers in America at the end of the twentieth century to preserve their heritage.

In 1920 black Americans made up 14 percent of all the farmers in the nation and worked 16 million acres of land. Today, battling the onslaught of globalization, changing technology, an aging workforce, racist lending policies, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, black farmers account for less than 1 percent of the nation’s farmers and cultivate fewer than 3 million acres of farmland. Inside these statistics is a staggering story of human loss: when each farm closed, those farmers, their spouses, children, grandchildren, and the people they hired, all had to leave a way of life that had existed in their families for generations.

John Francis Ficara is an international award-winning photojournalist and documentary photographer who has worked for Newsweek and several other national and international magazines. Currently a freelance photographer, he lives near Washington, D.C.

Juan Williams is senior correspondent for NPR’s Morning Edition and author of the bestselling book, Eyes on the Prize, and the widely acclaimed biography, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. He has won an Emmy award for TV documentary writing.

Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits. Deborah Willis, USMTH (Smithsonian); 1 edition, July 2007, 176 pages, 12.3 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches, ISBN-10: 1588342425/ ISBN-13: 978-1588342423, hardcover, US $35.

]]> http://81press.net/2008/09/10/let-your-motto-be-resistance-african-american-portraits-2007/feed/ 0 http://81press.net/2008/09/10/african-american-vernacular-photography-2006/ http://81press.net/2008/09/10/african-american-vernacular-photography-2006/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:16:16 +0000 Carla http://81press.net/?p=194 African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection, Steidl/ICP, March 2006, 120 pages, 11 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches, ISBN-10:3865212255; ISBN-13: 978-3865212252, US $25.

From the publisher’s site:

This book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same title on view at the International Center of Photography, presents an extraordinary group of images of African Americans in a variety of genres and poses: formal studio portraits, casual snapshots, images of children, images of uniformed soldiers, wedding portraits, so-called “Southern-views” made for tourist consumption. While some of the sitters are celebrities of the day, the majority are unnamed Americans posing for their photographic portrait. They attest to photography’s ability to both record personal history for private uses and to been seen as a document of history in a wider context.

The collection of about 1600 photographs date from 1860 to 1960 and was given to ICP in 1990 by Daniel Cowin. The images span a range of processes and formats — postcards, stereographs, cartes-de-visite, tintypes, albumen prints, and gelatin silver prints. Together they provide an important window into African American life during the period. The book will reproduce seventy color plates from the collection and includes essays by Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis and an annotated checklist.