1. When the Cobbling Began examines photography and working-class immigrant life in a nineteenth-century New England factory town. It considers a variety of once very common photographs, the carte-de-visite and stereoview, an example of which is below (click on the image to see more). There are three key features to the story: the Chinese shoemakers whose portraits and photographs are the central protagonists, the often ingenious methods these workers used to survive the challenges of early industrial life, and the development and role of photography in providing a new vision of the Chinese, the organizing working classes, and the early factory and its environs.

 

2. Diego Rivera is an introduction to the great 20c Mexican painter. Rivera's efforts to mix public murals, socialist thought, and the popular arts made his paintings almost unique in the history of modern art. The ink drawing of Rivera below was made in the mid-1930s, when the painter gave safe haven in Mexico City to the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, an invitation that, like many controversial acts in his life, gave ample material for the caricaturists. Diego Rivera will appear in Phaidon Press' new Art and Ideas series.