Departures and arrivals

Departures and Arrivals compiles world-renowned photographer Charles Harbutt's favorite photographs, selected from throughout his half-century of making pictures. Harbutt (born 1935) has been a prominent member of the American postwar photojournalist tradition ever since his documentation of the Cuban revolution in 1959; he subsequently joined Magnum Photos and has twice been elected its president. Harbutt's pictures have been exhibited and collected by The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1997, his negatives, master prints and archives were acquired for the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Departures and Arrivals is his third monograph. The black-and-white photographs gathered here highlight ordinary moments in extraordinary historical circumstances, as well as less fraught images of city living. As Harbutt writes in his introduction to the volume: "There are pictures of men and boys, women and girls, statues, pensive monkeys, moments that took my breath away, scared me, made me smile." He adds: "History belongs to all of us, not just kings and generals." Departures and Arrivals records Harbutt's half-century career at the forefront of American photography.