"There are many historically crucial artworks at the Instanbul Biennial"

Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner | Photo by Cemre Mert

Via Instanbul The Guide

The 12^th Istanbul Biennial came in much secrecy but it was totally worth the anxious wait. In the press opening, curators Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa stated that the reason for the secrecy was to prevent pre-consumption of the artists and their works. This year, it was not only the secrecy that was new but also the decision in limiting the exhibition spaces. The show used to be scattered around the city, taking advantage of its intricate urban structure; however, this time around the curators chose to house the exhibitions in two large warehouses in Tophane, famously known as Antrepo 3 and Antrepo 5.

When: September 17–November 13

The Venue
Having cut down on the exhibition spaces, the curators commissioned the Office of Ryue Nishizawa to design the interior. The unique architecture clearly reflects some aspects of Istanbul. Rooms of different sizes leading one into passageways, shortcuts, and multiple rooms create distinct interior-exterior relationships. The architecture, thus, manages to create the city structure that it borrows from Istanbul, while adding a touch of Gonzales-Torres’s minimal and elegant approach to art.

The Concept
The Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) is the point of departure of the 12^th Istanbul Biennial. Gonzalez-Torres was one of those artists who constantly demonstrated that the personal is political. As in previous years, the twelfth edition of the Biennial delves into the relationship between art and politics. There are both politically outspoken works, and formally innovative and curious art pieces. One of the refreshing aspects of the Biennial is its balanced use of diverse artistic mediums.

The Sections
The venue houses 5 group exhibitions and 50 solo shows. Each of the group exhibitions are marked by gray walls, occupying a room for each subdivision: Untitled (Death by Gun), Untitled (Ross), Untitled (History), Untitled (Passport), and Untitled (Abstraction). Marked by white walls, the solo shows are situated around the group exhibitions. All continents are represented in the show but there is a special focus on Latin America and the Middle East.

The Works
There are many historically crucial artworks at the Biennial. For instance, in the section Untitled (Death by Gun), there is Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner taken in three frames by the American photojournalist Eddie Adams in 1968. As shocking and gruesome as they were, these photographs brought a much-needed discussion around the Vietnam War.

Bullet Hole | Photo by Cemre Mert
 

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, The choice of happiness

 

The choice of happiness © Jacques Henri Lartigue

Via La Lettre de la Photographie

Forma, the Foundation of photography in Milan presents an exhibition of photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, one of photography’s precocious prodigies, a genial enthusiast and a professional of happiness.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue achieved fame during the sixties, on the threshold of his eight decade, when his photographs reached the spaces of the MOMA in New York.

He was born into a wealthy French bourgeois family at the beginning of the twentieth century. From an early age the young Lartigue began to capture the romance of his family life in images, images seen through the eyes of a child, full of wonder and laughter. From then on, this ‘boy’ who spent his long life without ever having to worry about making ends meet, would manage to create images of infinite poetry and rare grace, thanks to his spontaneity and intimacy and a magic that still enchants us today.

Together with his diary, photography was Lartigue’s record of his experience and the things he wished to experience; an attempt to find happiness for himself and his charmed little world, happiness that might last for ever. Thus, every day he would collect amazing images with his camera, waterfalls and fountains, happy friends, beautiful smiling women, fluttering dresses, car races, seaside outings, fragments of carefree joy, wishing, with aching nostalgia, that that day might never end.

From 5 October, the exhibition will be further enriched with select pages from the great photographer’s diary and his albums of large photographs: JH Lartigue. Diary in Images.

 

Jacques Lartigue was born in Courbevoie, in France, on 13 June 1894. At the age of six he took his first photographs using his father’s camera and began writing a diary which he continued to keep throughout his life.

From 1904 he began to photograph his childhood experiences, family games and then the beginnings of aviation and the first automobiles, the “beauties of the Bois de Bouologne” and social and sporting events. As a curious amateur he experimented with all the available photographic techniques. As a tireless collector of the moments of his own life, he took several thousand photographs which he diligently gathered in his large albums. It would appear, however, that this was not his vocation, instead, he wanted painting to be his profession. He met several artists, such as Sacha Guitry, Kees van Dongen, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. As a film enthusiast he photographed the sets of various films by Jacques Feyder, Abel Gance, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini.

It was the great exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the publication of an important photo portfolio in Life, which earned Jacques Lartigue, at the age of 69, a place among the great photographers. Adding his father’s name to his own he became Jacques Henri Lartigue, and three years later his first book Album de Famille, and later Instants de ma Vie (designed by Richard Avedon), brought him worldwide recognition and appreciation. Lartigue died in Nice on 12 September 1986.

Emiliana Tedesco
The choice of happiness
From September 23 to November 20, 2011
Fondazione FORMA per la Fotografia
Piazza Tito Lucrezio Caro 1
20136 Milano
02.58118067

Links

http://www.formafoto.it

La Lettre de la Photographie: "Born from a dream and from our assessment that in the current new medias no one was covering photography in its entire extent, our Lettre shares and informs daily on the events in the world of photography.

The web site is deemed free and all the featured contents are free to the viewers, without any previous engagement from them. The web site covers entirely all the current events in the world of photography, with the exception of the technical aspects.

Available in English and French, La lettre is featured in the form of a “newsletter”, a web site and an iPad application to all audiences interested in photography."

-- a highly recommended daily source for photography information.

ERNST HAAS: COLOR CORRECTION

The acclaim for Steidl's new book of Ernst Haas' color photography continues. Today, La Lettre de la Photographie covered the recently published book Color Correction.

THOUGHTS ON AN EXHIBITION

 HISTORY'S BIG PICTURE

This is the final week for the exhibition "History's Big Picture". We always find ourselves discussing our impressions and thoughts and the feedback we received from gallery visitors and collectors as each exhibit concludes. This time, it is different.

We have each been involved in the art world for 30 years. We couldn't begin to count the number of exhibits we have visited - or hosted as galleriests - over that period.

"History's Big Picture" coincided with the start of the 10 year anniversary of our move to Santa Fe, and after more than 55 exhibits here we wanted to present a very special exhibit, one that somehow emphasized the necessity of understanding and appreciating photojournalism.

There have been many exhibits that we wished could have run longer. This will be the first that will be actually difficult to take down. Since the opening on July 2, the exhibit has been seen by many thousands of viewers, timed as it was to coincide with the busy Santa Fe summer season. Visitors from all over the world have experienced a walk through the past 80 years in history: young, old, tours, school groups, veterans, politicians, museum curators, collectors, the "famous", and even a few homeless. We have seen parents quietly explaining the situation behind a photograph to their children, we have seen people softly weeping, and the quiet of the gallery has occasionally been startled by someone gasping "Oh my God!".

The exhibit progresses chronologically, starting in 1930's Germany with photographs of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and the first meeting of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini that have caused several visitors to whirl about and face the front desk and exclaim "This is serious!"

The photographs from Depression-era America have instantly resonated with gallery guests as they compare that time with the current economic condition. Interestingly, the same comparison has just recently been addressed in articles in the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

And from there the exhibition continues, a roller coaster through World War II, the 1950's; the brief hope of John Kennedy and the violent and shocking end of that hope; through the civil rights struggle and another shocking assassination, the shining hope of Robert Kennedy, the devastation of his assassination; the horror of Vietnam, the shock of 9/11, and the complicated consequences of America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The final photograph is by Eric Smith of the casket of an Iraq War soldier on an empty stage prior to his memorial service delivers visitors near the exit and the front desk, and often a conversation ensues. Some need to talk, some need comfort, some have been angry, and some have been inspired to find out more.

This exhibition has affirmed our steadfast belief in the power of a photograph. The exhibit's press release stated "Photographers in this exhibition illustrate the power of photography to inform, persuade, enlighten and enrich the viewer's life." And on the About Us page of our website we state " The way a photograph can capture time, emotions, and feelings makes photography a unique art form". We have witnessed this first hand and in a very powerful confirmation during this exhibit.

We are so grateful for all of the participating photographers, so many of whom we have been privileged to have known know personally. For those who are no longer living with us, we thank their families. For those still working, we honor your commitment and service to humanity.

We are so very thankful to all who have visited the exhibit. There are discussions about the possibility of travelling the exhibit to some museums, so if you missed it stay tuned. It will continue to live on our website in the Archived Showcase section as well.

Thank you.

"If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing."

 

Roger Fenton /Smithsonian/AP
Some believe photographer Roger Fenton placed the cannonballs on the Ukrainian road during the Crimean War himself


Errol Morris Looks For Truth Outside Photographs
 September 17, 2011
Via NPR

Believing Is Seeing

Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

by Errol Morris

Hardcover, 310 pages | purchase

Errol Morris is regarded as one of the world's most important filmmakers and is best known for his documentaries The Thin Blue Line and the Oscar-award winning Fog of War.

But before he was a filmmaker, he was a detective and he's always been interested in uncovering the mysteries of photographs. In his new book, Believing Is Seeing, Morris focuses on the things you can't see in photographs and the importance of what lies outside the frame.

Morris tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz that his obsession with photos began when he was a small boy and his father died.

"I was only 2 years old [and] don't have any memory of him at all. But there were photographs of him all over the house," he says. "I remember looking at these photographs; this is someone that I should know, probably should remember, but there's this mystery."

Photo Manipulation

Trying to recover the context of photographs is a theme in Morris' book. In one example, he takes his critical eye to two photos of the Crimean War taken by Roger Fenton in the 1850s. Both images are shot from the same spot, but one shows markedly more cannonballs on the road than the other. Photography scholars have long considered the photo with more cannonballs as the first instance of a photo manipulation. They say it was done by Fenton to drum up drama about the war for his British readership.

But Morris disagrees. He says no one can be sure if Fenton added or removed the cannonballs from the frame.

"I walked away thinking I really don't know. We all know that staging is that big no-no in photography. I would call it a fantasy that we can create some photographic truth by not moving anything, not touching anything, not interacting with the scene that we're photographing in any way," he says. "If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing."

Staged Dust Bowl

Morris says photographers have been posing photos as long as they've been taking them. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt sent out photographers to capture what life was like during the Dust Bowl. An iconic image taken by Arthur Rothstein of a cow skull on a barren landscape was meant to show the drama of the drought.

"Then they found out he had taken multiple photographs of the cow skull and clearly it had been moved," he says. "Well, people who were opposed to the Roosevelt administration seized on this. They became outraged, they felt manipulated, deceived; [there were] allegations that Rothstein had actually brought the cow skull with him from Washington."

Even though there actually was a drought, Morris says, critics were quickly caught up in the deception.

 

 

Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

Overgrazed Land. Pennington County, South Dakota (1936) is one of several photographs Arthur Rothstein took to document dry, sun-baked earth of the South Dakota Badlands.

"Was he trying to deceive the public? Was he trying to use the photograph for propaganda? If not him, was it the newspaper editors who placed it in their newspapers?" he says. "And it goes into that whole question of what is propaganda. Can any photograph be used for the purposes of propaganda?"

Parallels Between Filmmaking, Photography

Morris says when he first started making films, he was accused of making documentaries the wrong way.

"People would say, 'You're not supposed to use Philip Glass music, you're not supposed to use reenactments.' And my answer then — and it's still my answer over the years — is that style is not what guarantees truth," he says.

Morris says there's no such thing as a true or false photograph, and that doesn't really matter anyway. He says the most important thing is to ask any documentarian — in film, photography or print — to pursue the truth.

Read an excerpt of Believing Is Seeing

Photographing the Great Depression, then and now

Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker and mother of seven children. Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images

Dorothea Lange's stark portraits of poverty-stricken Americans in the 1930s seem terrifyingly contemporary

Jonathan Jones

 Friday 16 September 2011 09.00 EDT

Via the Guardian

Faces from the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath are haunting the 21st century. Wall Street brokers fleeing the trading floor in panic, or putting their cars on sale because they are suddenly broke, appear in old black-and-white photographs beside analyses of the current state of the markets composed by sombre authorities. Not only the collapse of confidence that shattered investors 82 years ago but the long years of misery that followed now seem to call out to us, to warn us, to show us a truth that is urgent and immediate. Can this really be so? Can that nightmare history be repeating itself?

This week an American paper, the Los Angeles Times, republished one of the most renowned of all depression photographs. Dorothea Lange was working in 1936 for an American government agency called the Resettlement Administration, documenting the journeys of desperate farm labourers in search of work. In Nipomo, California she met Florence Owens Thompson and her children. Lange's picture of the road-weary family has endured because it is an intimate human portrait, that cuts through statistics and abstractions to show us real life in the Depression. The weather-beaten, stoical, dignified face of Thompson, her children burying themselves in her for protection, speaks of poverty that is not destined, or deserved, or inevitable, of people whose suffering is random, cruel and, surely, preventable.

Out of the Great Depression in 1930s America and Europe came a broad acceptance that society needed to do better, that markets could not guarantee universal wealth or even survival by themselves, that governments needed to do two things as a matter or course: manage the economy, and ensure the welfare of citizens. At least the western democracies reached this consensus by 1945, after 16 years of chaos, during which far more dangerous alternatives to capitalism took the world by storm. Lange's photograph was shocking in 1936 because it revealed that extreme poverty now existed on a frightening scale in the United States, the country where wealth was freest, industry most advanced, whose business was business. If capitalism was failing in America, did that mean it was finished?

In 1936, when this picture was taken, many believed Karl Marx right in his prediction that capitalism would be broken by its contradictions. They looked admiringly to Russia or even joined communist parties. Meanwhile, Hitler's Germany blamed the troubles on Jewish financiers and created work through massive public schemes. Liberal, capitalist democracy would only regain strength with the new consensus for welfare and planning that emerged from the second world war.

The face of Florence Owens Thompson in Lange's photograph is hemmed in by shadows of this dark period in history. So why did she make her appearance on the LA Times the other day, on the breakfast tables of film producers and television executives? The article was asking why today's artists have not risen to the challenge of depicting what it claimed is already a new depression – where is our Dorothea Lange? Yet the real question seems to be why we suddenly find images of the 1930s pertinent and recognisable and … contemporary.

The stark images of the 1929 crash and the 1930s depression that currently haunt us are forebodings, night terrors, nervous jitters. They express something essential about the state of the world in 2011: fear.

Nothing is scarier than the thought that we might be repeating the history of the 1930s. There is no more terrifying period in human history. The economic travails of that time tore apart societies. Americans suffered catastrophic poverty, as shown in Lange's photograph. Germans succumbed to the politics of hate, Spain became a battleground, soon Europe would be one. All that is evoked in chilling photographs of the depression era.

This is a moment of sweat and nerves. Over the summer, financial news got eerie. As it happens, the nightmare scenarios have not yet come to pass – some were predicting a collapse of the euro in August. The threat of Washington failing to raise the American debt ceiling was another panic averted at the last moment. But the fears continue.

Fear is a historical force. At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 peasants were driven to violence by a "great fear", a panic that swept the countryside. It was, of course, during the Great Depression that president Franklin D Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the irrationality of fear. He used his inaugural address in 1933 to urge "that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance".

Here is something truly eerie – the thing we have in common with the people of the Great Depression is a mood of deepening fear, "nameless, unreasoning …"

In America in 1933, Roosevelt faced down fear and insisted that rational measures could defy the forces of destruction. Meanwhile, that same year Hitler took power with a politics of pure unreason that feasted on terror.

Today it is avowedly democratic politicians who seem ready to exacerbate terror. Deficits are talked up as ghoulish menaces, social ills blamed on moral decay. In America, government itself, as any kind of rational agent for reform, is widely portrayed as a monster.

When Lange took her photograph, times were terrible. But there were powerful voices of optimism and rationality, from Roosevelt to John Maynard Keynes, and these voices would win through in the end. In 2011 American politics seems headed in the opposite direction to the forward-looking road it took in the 1930s, while everywhere primitive gloom is in the ascendant. In this sense the situation does not resemble the 1930s. It is potentially far worse.


Related: Facing Change: Documenting America

Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011

The art world's moveable feast takes up residence in Istanbul this week, as the opening of the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Sept. 17-Nov. 13, 2011, corresponds with the launch of a new art fair, Art Beat Istanbul, Sept. 14-18, 2011. Also on the schedule are the inauguration of several new galleries. More here from Artnet.

12th Istanbul Biennial, “Untitled,” 2011

Sept. 17-Nov. 13, 2011

Art and politics is the theme of the 12th Istanbul Biennial, which promises to present artworks that are both formally innovative and politically outspoken. It takes as its point of departure the work of the Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose work was able to “integrate high modernist, minimal and conceptual references with themes of everyday life.” The festival, which is organized by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, embraces Gonzalez-Torres’ idea that the world can be made a better place, and that art can be a catalyst for change.

To paraphrase Gonzalez-Torres, the 12th Istanbul Biennial is “Untitled” because meaning is always changing in time and space. The biennial consists of five group exhibitions and more than 50 solo presentations, all housed in a single venue, Antrepo 3 and 5 exhibition halls. Each of the group shows (“Untitled (Abstraction),” “Untitled (Ross),” “Untitled (Passport),” “Untitled (History)” and “Untitled (Death by Gun)”) departs from a specific work by Gonzalez-Torres. Visitors are encouraged to become active readers, not just silent recipients.

Participating artists, whose names have still not been officially released, include Eddie Adams, with a rare series of three vintage photographs from Street Execution of a Viet Cong Officer, Saigon, 1968, on loan from Monroe Gallery of Photography. The photographs are featured in the "Untitled (Death by Gun)" exhibition.

Related: The New York Times: A Simplified and Secretive Istanbul Biennial

               The Guardian has compliled a list of 10 of the best modern art galleries in Istanbul and  a slide show: Vintage Istanbul - in pictures.

10th Aids Impact Conference in Santa Fe

We were very honored to host a champagne reception last night for the 400 researchers, delegates and guests from 60 countries attending the 10th AIDS Impact conference.

The conference was the first among a number of AIDS conferences to return to U.S. soil after a close to 20-year boycott over immigration restrictions for persons living with HIV that were recently lifted.

Where's Today's Dorothea Lange?

Hard times have spawned great art — but not these hard times, it seems.

September 12, 2011

By Jaime O'Neill

Economists and politicians told us that the recession was over, though some of them now worry about it taking a double dip. For those of us living farther from the ledger sheets and closer to the reality of what's happening in our towns and on our streets, this has been and remains a depression. It's hard to make the word stick, however, because we haven't developed the iconography yet. We don't have bread lines, dance marathons, guys selling apples on street corners or men jumping from high buildings because they've been wiped out in the stock market.

The pain and suffering has only been superficially covered by the news media, but it has surely not been addressed by our artists. In the 1930s, John Steinbeck chronicled the Depression as it played out in the lives of the Joads, his fictional Okies. He invented those memorable characters to vivify all the abstractions of the policymakers and to give literary voice to the suffering so many nonfictional Americans were experiencing.

There were a raft of other artists who also were telling the tale, making people see, hear and feel the pain as only the arts can do. There was Dorothea Lange taking photos and Woody Guthrie writing songs. Hollywood was doing its part too, and not only with a movie version of Steinbeck's novel. Unlike current audiences, moviegoers in the '30s were persistently reminded by what was on the screen of what awaited them when they resumed their lives outside the theater. Even "King Kong," generally conceded to be pioneering escapist fare, begins with Fay Wray in a bread line.

In our own times, when Iraq and Afghanistan war vets are suffering double-digit rates of unemployment, you can't find much mention of those veterans and their struggles in our movies. But, in 1932, "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" gave cinematic life to the kind of men who would march on Washington as part of the Bonus Army, a legion of out-of-work World War I vets who squatted in the nation's capital to bring attention to their plight — an appeal that was ultimately met not with aid but with violence.

Even musicals like "Gold Diggers of 1933" (which gave us the song "We're in the Money") is structured around the story of war heroes who were shamed by the need to seek inadequate public assistance. There also were more overtly political films in 1933, movies like "Wild Boys of the Road," a gritty portrayal of unemployed young men jumping freights to find work.

A few recent indie films have provided glimpses of what the Joads might look like in this new century — "Winter's Bone" comes most forcefully to mind — but mostly the moviemakers are far removed, in their own lives and in their products, from what the majority of Americans are living through now.

Musical artists too are looking the other way. What hit song of the last three years gives voice to our times in the way "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" gave voice to the 1930s? Where are the songs that evoke images of vacancies in the shopping malls, people driven from their foreclosed homes and couples whose marriages are shattered by the frustrations of their hardships?

A long time ago, during an early peace march through San Francisco, I remember a young guy in an apartment a couple of floors above the street putting a speaker in his window and blasting Bob Dylan singing "The Times They Are A-Changin' " to the protesters marching by. The feeling of support and solidarity that music contributed on that day was palpable, and it came at a time when public sentiment had not yet turned against the Vietnam War.

Years later, in a none-too-brave new world, I attended a Dylan concert in the months following 9/11. The "senators and congressmen" Dylan had once referenced in his old song were then talking about taking us to war in Iraq. I hoped on that night that the protege of Woody Guthrie would say a word or two about the times we were living in. But he said nothing, having long since decided he didn't want to be an oracle, didn't want to speak except through his songs. For many fans, it would have been balm to us had Dylan used even the slimmest portion of his art to provide the sense of solace he'd given so many dissenters long ago.

A few months after seeing Dylan, I saw Jerry Seinfeld. It was a few weeks after the shoe bomber had attempted to blow up an airplane. No one goes to see Seinfeld for political commentary, but he made a joke about the shoe bomber, and it was therapeutic, allowing us to laugh at the boogeyman. It was art employed in the interest of sanity. It's been said that humor is our shield against insanity. So far, we've mostly been crazy this century, and there hasn't been much shielding us from it. The comedians, such as Jon Stewart, Will Durst and Bill Maher, have filled the vacuum the other arts have abandoned.

As much as anything, the arts define the times, sketching a portrait of a moment in the life of the nation and the world, marking a period in ways it comes to be viewed by people who live through it and by people who come after. But the tale of our times is mostly being told by our unwillingness to tell it.

Jaime O'Neill is a writer in Northern California.

Suggested - Be sure to visit Facing Change: Documenting America 

Facing Change: Documenting America is a non-profit collective of dedicated photojournalists and writers coming together to explore America and to build a forum to chart its future. Mobilizing to document the critical issues facing America, FCDA teams will create a visual resource that raises social awareness and expands public debate.    

COVER PHOTO BY MARK SHAW FOR NEW KENNEDY BOOK

Jacqueline Kennedy in April of 1961 © 2000 Mark Shaw

Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy
By Caroline Kennedy

400 pages, 8 CDs, 85 photos

$60.00 US

In 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy recorded seven historic interviews about her life with John F. Kennedy. Now, for the first time, they can be heard and read in this deluxe, illustrated book and 8-CD set.

From Hyperion Books:

Shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, with a nation deep in mourning and the world looking on in stunned disbelief, Jacqueline Kennedy found the strength to set aside her own personal grief for the sake of posterity and begin the task of documenting and preserving her husband’s legacy. In January of 1964, she and Robert F. Kennedy approved a planned oral-history project that would capture their first-hand accounts of the late President as well as the recollections of those closest to him throughout his extraordinary political career. For the rest of her life, the famously private Jacqueline Kennedy steadfastly refused to discuss her memories of those years, but beginning that March, she fulfilled her obligation to future generations of Americans by sitting down with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and recording an astonishingly detailed and unvarnished account of her experiences and impressions as the wife and confidante of John F. Kennedy. The tapes of those sessions were then sealed and later deposited in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum upon its completion, in accordance with Mrs. Kennedy’s wishes.

The resulting eight and a half hours of material comprises a unique and compelling record of a tumultuous era, providing fresh insights on the many significant people and events that shaped JFK’s presidency but also shedding new light on the man behind the momentous decisions. Here are JFK’s unscripted opinions on a host of revealing subjects, including his thoughts and feelings about his brothers Robert and Ted, and his take on world leaders past and present, giving us perhaps the most informed, genuine, and immediate portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy we shall ever have. Mrs. Kennedy’s urbane perspective, her candor, and her flashes of wit also give us our clearest glimpse into the active mind of a remarkable First Lady.

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s Inauguration, Caroline Kennedy and the Kennedy family are now releasing these beautifully restored recordings on CDs with accompanying transcripts. Introduced and annotated by renowned presidential historian Michael Beschloss, these interviews will add an exciting new dimension to our understanding and appreciation of President Kennedy and his time and make the past come alive through the words and voice of an eloquent eyewitness to history.

Click here for an exclusive look at Kennedy trivia and photos

Related: New York Times Slideshow: "She Said That?"