In honor of National Camera Day (6/29), Purdue University Press is taking a look at books framed through the lens of a camera. If you’re a photography enthusiast or just have an empty coffee table in need of a beautiful book, we’ve got a great list of photo books for you. Some books are just better with pictures!
Space:
Featuring more than 600 photos, Photographing America’s First Astronauts: Project Mercury Through the Lens of Bill Taub is the most complete photographic account of Project Mercury ever published.
Featuring over seventy images from the heroic age of space exploration, Through Astronaut Eyes: Photographing Early Human Spaceflight presents the story of how human daring along with technological ingenuity allowed people to see the Earth and stars as they never had before. This book suggests astronaut photography is particularly relevant to American culture based on how easily the images were shared through reproduction and circulation in a very visually oriented society. Space photography’s impact at the crossroads of cultural studies, the history of exploration and technology, and public memory illuminates its continuing importance to American identity.
Indiana, Natural Beauty, Agricultural History:
Photographing Turkey Run: A Guide to Nature Photography was written to be used in conjunction with Daniel P. Shepardson’s A Place Called Turkey Run: A Celebration of Indiana’s Second State Park in Photographs and Words. This guide contains tips and techniques designed to provide a basic understanding of how to photograph nature and improve one’s photography skills.
Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color photographs of Indiana’s champion trees and old-growth forest remnants, Magnificent Trees of Indiana is a celebration of the state’s natural beauty. Seventy-four trees are featured as well as twenty old-growth woods. Each has been photographed to illuminate the grandeur of the natural world.
A Round Indiana: Round Barns in the Hoosier State, Second Edition documents the 265 round barns identified in the history of Indiana. This book contains more than 300 modern and historical photographs alongside nearly 40 line drawings and plans. Rounds barns are architectural phenomena that have graced rural America for over a century. Today the few that survive stand as symbols of another generation’s innovation and ingenuity. To understand the importance of these buildings is to begin to understand the story of farming in America.
Memories of Life on the Farm contains over 900 picturesque images, most never-before-seen, of men, women, and children working on the farm, which remain powerful reminders of life in rural America at the turn of the twentieth century. As old farmhouses and barns fall victim to age, John Calvin Allen photographs are all that remain. A camera in his hands and an eye for photography allowed Allen to create indelible visual histories that continue to tell the story of agriculture and rural life from long ago.
Compiled from original county agent records discovered in Purdue University’s Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center, Enriching the Hoosier Farm Family includes hundreds of rare, never-before-published photographs and anecdotal information about how county extension agents in the early 1900s served and supported farmers and communities day after day, year after year through the early 1900s.
Purdue University:
Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris tells Purdue’s story through rare images, artifacts, and words. Authors culled decades of student papers, from scrapbooks, yearbooks, letters, and newspapers to historical photographs and memorabilia preserved in the Purdue University Libraries Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections. Many of the images and artifacts included have never been published, presenting a unique history of the land-grant university from the student perspective.
You can get 30% off the books in this list and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the code PURDUE30 at checkout.