Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680) was Charles II’s Principal Painter and the outstanding artistic figure of Restoration England. When Lely arrived in England in the early 1640s his ambition was to be a painter of narrative scenes and not to work as a portraitist. However, the ‘subject pictures’ did not find favor with many English patrons and he produced less than thirty. As Lely’s friend Richard Lovelace explained, all they wanted was “their own dull counterfeits” or portraits of their mistresses. Thus, Lely was obliged to turn to portraiture to make a living. Yet, his poetic pictures of figures in idyllic landscapes are among the most beautiful paintings made in 17th-century England and this catalog will be the first in-depth look at this important chapter of this major painter’s career.Lely was born in Westphalia and received his artistic training in Haarlem with Frans Pietersz. De Grebber. He came to England around 1643. Few painters had stayed in London following the move of the Royal Court to Oxford, and Lely was therefore free to establish his reputation in the city. By 1650 he had settled at a house on Covent Garden Plaza (a five-minute walk from Somerset House) where he remained for the rest of his life. His major patrons were the ‘Puritan Earls’, a group of cultivated noblemen including the Duke of Northumberland and the Earls of Pembroke and Salisbury, as well as the circle surrounding the Countess of Dysart at Ham House.Lely never met Van Dyck (who had died in London in 1641), but he had the opportunity to study his paintings and those of the great Venetian 16th-century artists Giorgione and Titian in the houses of these wealthy aristocratic patrons. He began to buy these works himself and by the end of his life had amassed one of Europe’s richest collections of 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings and drawings. It was probably in response to the pictures of Van Dyck and the Venetian Renaissance that he made his most ambitious works, including The Concert (The Courtauld Gallery) and Nymphs by a Fountain (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London). This group of enigmatic paintings are massive in scale and united by strong lighting, idealized landscape settings and a sense of theatricality and sensuality. Unlike many painters, Lely did not rely on classical mythology, but was able to create his own, highly personal dramas. For instance, it is likely that the man playing the viola da gamba in the center of The Concert is the painter himself.The exhibition Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision at The Courtauld Gallery, London, is on view from 11 October 2012 to 13 January 2013.

Families come in all sizes, shapes, and traditions, each a unique variation of a universal human theme. Whether one comes from a heterosexual, single-sex, or one-parent home, stability and love are paramount. Unfortunately, in the United States, the absence of fathers from their children’s lives has become a real problem. In fact, the Brookings Institute has identified absentee fathers as America's most pressing problem—greater than the economy, education, the environment, health care, infrastructure, you name it. Why? Because nearly every social ill finds an umbrella, a home if you will, in the fatherless home. Choosing Fatherhood: America's Second Chance is meant to explore this issue as no previous book has. And it does so through the art of photography, in which Lewis Kostiner makes portraits of dads who are involved in their children's lives. The book is also accompanied by essays written by leading authorities on the subject: Juan Williams of FOX News, David Travis who was Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago for more than thirty-five years, sociologist Shipra Parikh at Loyola University in Chicago, sociologist Derrick M. Bryan at the Morehouse College, and Roland Warren, former director of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing fatherhood in America, who also served on President Obama's task force on fatherless homes. Getting fathers to be more involved in their children’s lives is of paramount importance, if the United States is to regain ground as an international leader. Right now, the statistics look grim: forty years ago only eleven percent of America's children lived in homes without fathers, but today more than a third do. This translates into high poverty rates, high drop-out rates in high school, high rates of incarceration, multiple behavioral problems, and the list goes on. As President Obama has declared, fatherhood does not begin with the ecstasy of conception but with the beauty of childbirth and the responsibilities that come with creating and caring for a human life. Although changes in custody rulings and other policy remedies are possible, behavioral patterns are often outside the reach of policy. Choosing Fatherhood offers a hopeful direction that America does have a second chance at correcting a troubling trend, but time is slipping, and awareness of the problem is an important start. (See the publishers website for further information about events and a slide show from the book: http://gftbooks.com/books_Kostiner.html ) Go here to see an interview with the photographer Lewis Kostiner and Juan Williams who wrote the introduction: http://video.foxnews.com/v/2197946608001/

Since 1983 David Wharton has photographed the twelve states that define the American South, focusing his attention on rural and small-town culture, vernacular architecture and landscape, the role of religion in Southern life, and the relationship between Southerners, their natural surroundings, and the communities they have built. Small Town South is the result of Wharton's travels through a region that extends from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas in the west to Virginia and the Carolinas in the east, from Kentucky and Tennessee in the north to Florida in the south, with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia forming the region's center in between. No other photographer has devoted so much time and attention to recording this distinctive American place. The 115 duotone photographs which serve as the book's core, combined with the author's insightful text, convey an overall sense of what the small Southern town has become and looks like during the early twenty-first century. Wharton organizes his study into thematic portfolios that address themes such as the intersection of tradition and modernity, local commemorations of the past, the omnipresence of the church in town life, the difficulties of making a living in the New World economy, the look of Main Street, the display of public murals and memorials, and the iconographic unfolding of community values. Many have likened Wharton's photographic eye and approach to the work of other photographic masters of the South, including Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, William Christenberry, Shelby Lee Adams, Alex Harris, Rob Amberg, and Martha A. Strawn. And, just as we turn to those artists to help us understand and reckon with Southern history and culture, we now can look to David Wharton as another pioneer photographer of the Southern small town in all its simplicity and complexity. (See the publisher's website for further information: http://gftbooks.com/books_Wharton.html ).

Timeline is among the most creative photographic projects to emerge in the art world in years. Many of us, historically, have turned to the photo album as a way to preserve memories of personal and family events that are worth noting, worth saving: birthdays, trips, ceremonies, the house where we were raised, child's play in the garden outside the kitchen window, our pet animals, family reunions, and even dark times caused by recovery from a serious illness. Each album becomes an archive, if you will, of who we are as a person, as a family. Tom Young has taken this old idea and created an entirely new genre: visual fiction. Here, in each picture, he offers an assemblage of personal life that could very well be yours, and he has intertwined it with the interior and exterior places that can surround us: trees and rocks and windows and showers and fields of grain. The accompanying titles convey not only a direction toward meaning for each image, but also a declaration that each image is a work of art. Here, then, is a narrative of landscape and portraiture that suggests not only the photographer's life, but also, through the power of memory and shared experience, the reader's. When Young was only ten years old, he had a medical procedure that left his eyes fully bandaged for weeks. Without sight, all of his other senses changed. Despite the darkness, he would imagine the world around him and the power of light as it relates to memory. In Timeline, one senses that the artist is seeing his entire world as if a life is being recollected in a split second. One image leads to another, building in nuance and subtly until we come to understand, as if by way of a sixth sense, how the little details of life create a larger retrospective. "If pictures could talk, what a tale they might tell." That thought lurks behind every image of Tom Young's masterful visual story of a life; Is it his? Or yours? (See the publisher's website for further information on exhibits and to view a slide show: http://gftbooks.com/books_YoungTom.html ) See a wonderful video from the team at Photo-Eye about the book: http://vimeo.com/67147795.

There is no more beautiful or alluring coast in the world than the West Coast of North America: a 5,000-mile-long region that extends from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to Canada's British Columbia, south to Washington, Oregon, and California, and then to Baja California in Mexico. No photographer until David Freese has explored the various and wondrous landscapes along the Pacific Ocean in such depth, making this the first book to look comprehensively at what makes the natural beauty of this particular coast so memorable. Behind the scenery, of course, lie the geologic forces that have created the West Coast landscapes that we now admire, explore, and praise. The engaging and informative text by renowned author Simon Winchester grounds us in understanding the deep relationship between geology and scenery. And Naomi Rosenblum, the esteemed photographic historian, writer, curator, and art critic, firmly establishes David Freese's place among the great landscape photographers of the past and present. In every photograph, his unique vision of nature and of place comes shining through. West Coast: Bering to Baja is a major publishing enterprise that will appeal to book-lovers of photography, nature, and those who dream about visiting and touring North America's West Coast. For here we see the vital connection between art and science merge in ways previously unseen for this special region of the world.

Music and violence have been linked since antiquity in ritual, myth, and art. Considered together they raise fundamental questions about creativity, discourse, and music's role in society. The essays in this collection investigate a wealth of issues surrounding music and violence-issues that cross political boundaries, time periods, and media-and provide cross-cultural case studies of musical practices ranging from large-scale events to regionally specific histories. Following the editors' substantive introduction, which lays the groundwork for conceptualizing new ways of thinking about music as it relates to violence, three broad themes are followed: the first set of essays examines how music participates in both overt and covert forms of violence; the second section explores violence and reconciliation; and the third addresses healing, post-memorials, and memory. Music, Politics, and Violence affords space to look at music as an active agent rather than as a passive art, and to explore how music and violence are closely-and often uncomfortably-entwined.CONTRIBUTORS include Nicholas Attfield, Catherine Baker, Christina Baade, J. Martin Daughtry, James Deaville, David A. McDonald, Kevin C. Miller, Jonathan Ritter, Victor A. Vicente, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski.

Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Though observers of Indian classical music have long commented on these gestures, Musicking Bodies is the first extended study of what singers actually do with their hands and voices. Matthew Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to demonstrate the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The gestures that are improvised alongside vocal improvisation embody a special kind of melodic knowledge passed down tacitly through lineages of teachers and students who not only sound similar, but who also engage with music kinesthetically according to similar aesthetic and ethical ideals. Musicking Bodies builds on the insights of phenomenology, Indian and Western music theory, and cultural studies to illuminate not only the performance of gesture, but its implications for the transmission of culture, the conception of melody, and the very nature of the musicking body.

In industry circles, musicians from Kentucky are known to possess an enviable pedigree -- a lineage as prized as the bloodline of any bluegrass-raised Thoroughbred. With native sons and daughters like Naomi and Wynonna Judd, Loretta Lynn, the Everly Brothers, Joan Osborne, and Merle Travis, it's no wonder that the state is most often associated with folk, country, and bluegrass music.But Kentucky's contribution to American music is much broader: It's the rich and resonant cello of Ben Sollee, the velvet crooning of jazz great Helen Humes, and the famed vibraphone of Lionel Hampton. It's exemplified by hip-hop artists like the Nappy Roots and indie folk rockers like the Watson Twins. It goes beyond the hallowed mandolin of Bill Monroe and banjo of the Osborne Brothers to encompass the genres of blues, jazz, rock, gospel, and hip-hop.A Few Honest Words explores how Kentucky's landscape, culture, and traditions have influenced notable contemporary musicians. Featuring intimate interviews with household names (Naomi Judd, Joan Osborne, and Dwight Yoakam), emerging artists, and local musicians, author Jason Howard's rich and detailed profiles reveal the importance of the state and the Appalachian region to the creation and performance of music in America.

Artists live by curiosity and enthusiasm, qualities readily evident as inspiration in dogs.' Robert Adams, Why People Photograph I, Jack Russell is a journey of discovery that will enthrall dog lovers everywhere. When photographer Andy Hughes, a life long admirer and owner of Jack Russells, realised that he had many more pictures of his dogs than he did of his family and friends, he decided to create this joyous enterprise, photographing one dog which lead to another dog until he had traveled the length and breadth of the UK and then ventured to the USA.

Starting at the age of nine, Basil Hyman (b. 1936) has taken hundreds of photographs of everyday life in Britain. In Photographs Found he looks back to the swinging sixties' of his youth with an array of images that capture everything from sports to travel to leisure and beauty contests--as well as previously unpublished informal shots of his friend and relative Brian Epstein, an iconic 60s figure and the Beatles' first manager, widely credited with shaping their early success. '

This lavishly illustrated book includes photographs, postcards, flyers, tickets and brochures, which conjure up the atmosphere of Cuba s past times and places and some of those associated with it. Divided into two parts; the first, a visual Archive, which was the property of a Chicago gangster Grover Dullard, is a vignette of Prohibition and proof of Havana s attractions for the Mob; and the second, an extraordinary collection of printed material from pre-revolutionary Cuba, which paint a picture of its heyday.

Victor Hume Moody created timeless images of an Arcadian idyll at a time when most artists had turned their backs on the classical tradition. The centuries old heritage of Western art was too inspiring and too valuable for him to simply abandon. Over a working life of nearly 70 years he tirelessly researched and worked to revive traditional painting techniques. At the same time hecreated a unique fusion of classical figure composition and the pastoral English landscape.Since Victor Moody died his work has been widely seen and his reputation has steadily risen. The Harris Museum in Preston held a retrospective exhibition, ‘The Last Classicist’, in 1992 and more recently his work featured in the 2010 exhibition ‘Counterpoint - Modern Realism 1910-1950’ held at the Fine Art Society. The dispersal of works from the Estate of the artist’s daughter, which has made this present catalogue possible, represents a further importantmoment in the rehabiliation of Victor Moody’s reputation. It is hoped that his work will, as a result, continue to become more widely seen and better understood.

In postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks. For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid. Instead they expressed themselves in movement. How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change. Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J. Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world. Artists covered include Martha Graham, José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin.

A controversial essay on one of the treasures of Armenian art, arguing that its illuminations were original and Armenian; with 38 plates.

Through the miracle of photography and the beholding eye of a master photographer such as Myers, we are able to experience the land and life in India's last remaining wild jungles. This is the land of the tiger and elephant and monkey and rhino and a treasure trove of other species. But, as noted writer William deBuys shares in his provocative essay, poaching is a persistent and pervasive problem, and the natural habitat for wild animals is shrinking at an alarming rate due to expanding development and industrialization. Tigers, for example, are now extinct in ninety-three percent of their historical range worldwide, and, without wildlife refuges such as Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Karizanga, and others in India, their numbers would plummet further. Few citizens of the world will ever experience firsthand the jungles and wild places of India, but in Myers's visual discovery they can witness the excitement and energy of coming upon wild game in a moment's notice and experiencing religious shrines and rural life in nearby villages that seem to blend in effortlessly with the adjacent wilderness. Jungle at the Door is that rare glimpse into another world, a world that depends not only on human awareness of what is lost when the jungle is gone, but also the courage and foresight to preserve remaining wild places everywhere, from those in India to our own home ground. (See the publisher's website for further information on the book: http://gftbooks.com/books_MyersJoan.html ).

An iconic feature of the Maine coast (and in a few places inland), lighthouses have served as important navigational aids but also as tourist attractions, art subjects, and advertising symbols. This lavishly illustrated third volume in Historic New England's visual history series explores the lives and legends of lighthouse keepers, shares tales of maritime disasters, examines the architecture of lighthouses, and discusses efforts to preserve lighthouses themselves. It also explains how Maine's lighthouses have inspired myriad forms of representation, from paintings, photographs, and children's stories to tabletop models and all sorts of practical bric-a-brac. The lights were key to the development of the tourist trade in Maine (beyond facilitating safe landings), and they are a ubiquitous symbol on corporate logos, advertisements, souvenirs, and collectibles--from the past to the present. The ten chapters are from a variety of contributors, and each chapter is richly illustrated with photographs and ephemera culled from private and public collections. Dynamically designed with fold-out covers, this book is indeed a treasure-trove of lighthouse information and images. Edited by RICHARD CHEEK, the book features contributions by W. H. BUNTING, maritime historian; THOMAS ANDREW DENENBERG, director of the Shelburne Museum; TIMOTHY HARRISON, editor of Lighthouse Digest magazine; KIRK F. MOHNEY, assistant director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission; DAVID RICHARDS, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library; and EARLE G. SHETTLEWORTH, Jr., director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and Maine State Historian.