books

Photographs by Kevin Bubriski
Afterword by Richard B. Woodward

I n the weeks immediately following September 11, Kevin Bubriski made four pilgrimages to the World Trade Center site from his home in Vermont to witness and record the impact of the tragedy. Like so many who had experienced the events from a distance, Bubriski was driven to visit Ground Zero in an attempt to come to terms with the horrifying scenes reported on television and in the papers. At the barricades surrounding the site, Bubriski found people experiencing not only a remarkable sense of community, but also the deepest kind of personal reflection on loss and mortality.

Businessmen, teenage friends, families, young lovers, and visitors from around the world approached the site slowly, and eventually came to a full stop, planting their feet firmly as if to keep themselves from wavering or falling. Each visitor then began a moment of quiet reflection, staring off at the mountainous ruins of twisted steel and debris amidst an omnipresent swirl of acidic smoke. It was at this time that the reality of the devastation set in.

“[Bubriski’s] photographs are among the most shattering to come out of the event, and the quietest. By keeping his focus on the stunned faces of individuals within a crowd, he has captured a series of private moments within a mass demonstration of surging, national grief. Everyone in the city during those confusing days will recognize the look and remember the feeling all too well.”
—Richard B. Woodward

By Keith Dowman
Photographs by Kevin Bubriski

A ward-winning photographer Kevin Bubriski captures in stunning detail the sacred places of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Noted scholar Keith Dowman provides history and commentary on the significance of the sites.

About the Author: Kevin Bubriski has exhibited worldwide; his work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography, all in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris.

Photographs by Kevin Bubriski

A collection of fine art black and white portraits of the Nepali people and landscapes. Each large format print is well reproduced with broad tonal qualities.

“In the nineteenth century, the likes of Samuel Bourne and John Thomson lugged heavy gear halfway around the world to photograph the people and sights of exotic Asia. In modern times, Bubriski’s motivations, methods, and results are virtually the same. Using a large view camera and black-and-white film, he poses the Nepalese with antique formality–always facing the lens directly–and, although greatly sympathetic, he evokes most clearly their exoticism. This backward-looking approach is the troubling aspect of what is in other respects a lovely book. Bubriski is obviously familiar with the country in which he has lived for many years, and he takes us beyond the Himalayan scenes stereotypical of Nepal to remote village life. His meticulous skill and very good eye yield a collection of rich, exquisite photographs, which he disposes into four sections corresponding to the main geographical divisions of Nepal. If they don’t tell us much about change in Nepal, they beautifully describe its ancient, perhaps eternal, aspects.” – Gretchen Garner, from Booklist

By Kevin Bubriski
Photographs by Michael Rockefeller

• 2007 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Third Place Winner, Photography Category
• Winner of 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award Interior Design 1-2 Color, Independent Book Publishers Association

F rom April to August 1961, recent Harvard graduate Michael Clark Rockefeller was a sound recordist and still photographer on a remarkable multidisciplinary expedition to the Dani people of highland New Guinea. In five short months he produced a wonderful body of work, including over 4,000 black-and-white negatives.

In this catalogue, photographer Kevin Bubriski explores Rockefeller’s journey into the culture and community of the Dani and into rapport with the people whose lives he chronicled. The book reveals not only the young photographer’s growing fluency in the language of the camera, but also the development of his personal way of seeing the Dani world around him. Although Rockefeller’s life was cut tragically short on an expedition to the Asmat in the fall of 1961, his photographs are as vivid today as they were the moment they were made.

Featuring over 75 photographs, this beautiful volume is the first publication of a substantial body of Michael Rockefeller’s visual legacy. Rockefeller’s extraordinary photographs reveal both the resilient spirit of the Dani people and the anthropological and aesthetic eye of a young man full of promise. In a Foreword, Robert Gardner provides a personal recollection of Michael Rockefeller’s experience in the New Guinea highlands.

Photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Kevin Bubriski, Adelaide de Menil, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb

I n Human Documents, Robert Gardner introduces the work of photographers with whom he has worked over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls “human documents”: visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, New Guinea, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay “Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet),” in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

With photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Gardner, Adelaide de Menil, Kevin Bubriski, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb.

Photographs by Kevin Bubriski

P hotographer Kevin Bubriski has been visually documenting the country and people of Nepal since his first visit in 1975. Sent as a young Peace Corps volunteer to the northwest Karnali Zone, the country’s remotest and most economically depressed region, he spent three years walking the length and breadth of the Karnali, planning and overseeing construction of gravity flow drinking water pipelines. He also photographed the local villagers, producing an extraordinary series of 35mm and large format black-and-white images. For nearly four decades, Bubriski has maintained his close association with Nepal and its people. Both visual anthropology and cultural history, this remarkable body of photographic work documents Nepal’s evolution from a traditional Himalayan kingdom to a rapidly changing, globalized society. Nepal: 1975–2011 also offers an incisive and comprehensive look at the aesthetic evolution of an important contemporary photographer.

With an introductory essay by Charles Ramble, Director of Studies, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, and President of the International Association for Tibetan Studies.

Photographs by Kevin Bubriski

“I had heard much about the Maoists and the People’s War over the past fourteen years and I knew only the gruesome images of war from both sides of the conflict.

This collection of portraits lets us see individual PLA combatants and know each person’s name, district and age. Each portrait represents just a brief moment in the subject’s life, a moment after the war and after four years of cantonment life. And a moment before any final decisions had been made about the individual or collective destiny of the PLA combatants.

May this collection of photographs help all people of Nepal understand that along with the collective identities of ethnic, economic, geographical and political affiliation are individual lives in the balance.”
—Kevin Bubriski

“Bubriski’s empathetic portraits of these young men and women…allow us to think about the meanings of past; they create a visual, historical record of a time of remarkable transformations in the history of Nepal. Perhaps they will also spark interest in understanding the motivations and lives of this young generation, and new ways of imagining a future for Nepal at a time of profound social and political change.”
—Toby Alice Volkman