Photography
Unlike most books about the visual arts which can be found in Class N, books about photography are found in Subclass TR and shelved on Bracken Library's 4 West. See below for more details.
How Books are Organized
Ball State University Libraries uses Library of Congress Classification, or LCC, for organizing print books on the shelves. Used in libraries worldwide, this system groups items by topic and assigns each a unique alphanumeric call number. Most books about photography will be in Subclass TR, located on Bracken Library's Fourth Floor West (4 West). Hint: TR is actually in two places on 4 West. See the main section and also find larger artist books a few rows over in Oversize.
Call Numbers for Photography (Subclass TR):
TR9 Dictionaries. Encyclopedias
TR15 History of photography
TR23-25 United States
TR139-140 Biography
TR139 Collective
TR140 Individual, A-Z
TR210-212 Chemistry and chemicals
TR250-265 Cameras
TR287-500 Photographic processing. Darkroom technique
TR365 Daguerreotype
TR590-620 Lighting
TR640-689 Artistic photography, including photobooks
TR642 General works
TR644-646 Works of more than one photographer
TR647 Works of individual photographers, A-Z
TR650-655 Collections
TR656 Abstract photography
TR660 Landscape photography
TR679 Fashion photography
TR680-681 Portraits
TR690 Commercial photography
TR692-780 Scientific and technical applications
TR820 Photojournalism
TR845-899 Cinematography. Motion pictures
Recommended Books
The recommended books below represent a wide sampling of topics in photography and include reference works, histories, biographies, technical studies, and artist books. Perhaps one or more of these topics will inspire your next research project. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Click on the info icon to see a description.
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The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Print and eBook)
by
Compiled by an international team of over 140 contributors, this is the first Oxford Companion to deal with the subject of photography. It appears at a watershed in the medium's history, as digital imaging increasingly dominates the global photography scene. Providing a wide range of technical information, the Companion also presents, in a concise and readily accessible form, the mass of recent scholarship on photography as a social and artistic practice. There are over 800 biographical entries, both on photographers and on others who have influenced photographic culture from the 19th century to the present. The Companion is stunningly illustrated, with many pictures published here for the first time.
Call Number: TR9 .O94 2005 and Oxford Reference OnlinePublication Date: 2005 -
Photography, A Feminist History: Gender Rights and Gender Roles on Both Sides of the Camera
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This feminist retelling of the history of photography puts women in the picture--and, more importantly, behind the camera! In ten thematic, chronological sections, Tate Modern curator Emma Lewis explores the vital role women artists have played in shaping the ever-evolving medium of photography. Lewis has compiled work from more than 200 different women and nonbinary photographers along with short essays on 75 different artists, many informed by her interviews with the subjects.
Call Number: TR15 .L49 2021Publication Date: 2021 -
Photography: An Illustrated History
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Photography: An Illustrated History is a captivating account of how photography evolved from labor-intensive daguerrotypes in the mid-1800s to one of the most popular hobbies and respected art forms in the world today. Brimming with black-and-white and color photographs from throughout its multifaceted history, this volume not only documents technological developments, but also the phenomenal effect the craft has had upon journalism, industry, science, medicine, the military, and beyond. Featuring the accomplishments of pioneers such as Louis Daguerre, George Eastman, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White, and others, Photography: An Illustrated History presents an engaging history of photography through some of the most spectacular images ever captured on film.
Call Number: TR15 .S23 2002Publication Date: 2002 -
Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American identity
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Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography.
Call Number: TR23 .P53 2012Publication Date: 2012 -
Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History
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Whether at UFW picket lines in California's Central Valley or capturing summertime street life in East Harlem, Latinx photographers have documented fights for dignity and justice as well as the daily lives of ordinary people. Their powerful, innovative photographic art touches on family, identity, protest, borders, and other themes, including the experiences of immigration and marginalization common to many of their communities. Yet the work of these artists has largely been excluded from the documented history of photography in the United States. Through individual profiles of more than eighty photographers from the early history of the photographic medium to the present, Elizabeth Ferrer introduces readers to Latinx portraitists, photojournalists, and documentarians and their legacies.
Call Number: TR139 .F47 2020Publication Date: 2020 -
Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective
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Thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, this catalogue complements the first comprehensive retrospective in the United States of Imogen Cunningham's work in over thirty-five years. Celebrated American artist Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) enjoyed a long career as a photographer, creating a large and diverse body of work that underscored her unique vision, versatility, and commitment to the medium. An early feminist and inspiration to future generations, Cunningham intensely engaged with Pictorialism and Modernism; genres of portraiture, landscape, the nude, still life, and street photography; and themes such as flora, dancers and music, hands, and the elderly. Organized chronologically, this volume explores the full range of the artist's life and career. It contains nearly two hundred color images of Cunningham's elegant, poignant, and groundbreaking photographs, both renowned and lesser known
Call Number: TR140.C78 I56 2020Publication Date: 2020 -
The Experimental Darkroom: Contemporary Uses of Traditional Black and White Photographic Materials
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The Experimental Darkroom is a book focused on traditional black and white photographic materials-darkroom chemistry and silver gelatin paper-now used in many non-traditional ways. The book starts with a comprehensive digital negatives chapter. Topics are divided into five sections: cameraless experimentation, camera experimentation, printing experimentation, finished print experimentation, and a section highlighting contemporary photographers who use these approaches today. Each process under discussion is accompanied by photographic examples and a step-by-step method.
Call Number: TR385 .A56 2023Publication Date: 2023 -
How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age
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When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography's "boom years," chronicling the medium's increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography's embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s.
Call Number: TR642 .G72 2021Publication Date: 2021 -
Ansel Adams
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Enjoy the beauty and variety of the American experience through the work of these great artists. With stunning full-color plates, additional black-and-white illustrations, and concise, authoritative text, these unique, beautifully produced studies present the life, work and achievements of America's greatest painters, architects and photographers. Stunning portfolio of 65 full-page reproductions presents the magnificent landscapes, nature studies, still lifes, and portraits of this great American photographer. In addition to this visual delight, text covers Adams's life, work, teaching, directorship of the Sierra Club, more.
Call Number: TR654 .A32 1991 (Oversize)Publication Date: 1991 -
The Photographer in the Garden
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This book explores our unique relationship with nature through the garden. From famous locations such as Versailles to the simplest home vegetable gardens, from worlds imagined by artists to vintage family photos, The Photographer in the Garden traces the garden's rich history in photography and delights readers with spectacular pictures. The book explores gardens from many angles: the symbolism of plants and flowers, how humans cultivate the landscapes that surround them, the change of the seasons, and the gardener at work. An informative essay from curator Jamie M. Allen and picture-commentaries by Sarah Anne McNear broaden our understanding of photography and how it has been used to record the glory of the garden.
Call Number: TR662 .P45 2018Publication Date: 2018 -
The Man Who Stopped Time: The Illuminating Story of Eadweard Muybridge: Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer
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The photographs of Eadweard Muybridge are immediately familiar to us. Less familiar is the dramatic personal story of this seminal and wonderfully eccentric Victorian pioneer, now brought to life for the first time in this engaging and thoroughly entertaining biography. His work is iconic: the first icons of the modern visual age. Men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living. Scarcely a day goes by without their derivate use somewhere in today's media. Skillfully articulating the fascinating history of a now ubiquitous technology, author Brian Clegg combines ingredients from science and biography to create an eminently readable, fast-paced, and surprising story.
Call Number: TR849.M87 C64 2007Publication Date: 2007 -
Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas (eBook)
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This book argues that photography, with its inherent connection to the embodied material world and its ease of transmissibility, operates as an implicitly political medium. It makes the case that the right to see is fundamental to the right to be. Placing photographic praxis at the crux of 21st-century crises of political equity and sociality, the book uncovers the discursive visual movements through which photography enacts reappearances, bringing to visibility erased and elided histories in the Americas.
Call Number: ProQuest Ebook CentralPublication Date: 2022
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via Art Full Text and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.