Only Us is a comprehensive, photographic portrait of humanity; a tapestry of mankind. As a species we are incredibly diverse, yet remarkably similar in so many ways. Our ability to adapt is unrivalled; from the four corners of the planet there are few places we have not succeeded in inhabiting. Only Us is a unique look at what essentially makes us human. Intended to expand the appreciation of its audience, drawing upon parallels we all have, transporting the viewer from their living room to far flung lands full of colour, inspiration and natural beauty.

"Seeking the innermost self in her photographs, Kuhn achieves a mood of intimacy by photographing up close models she knows well. Her photographs are a product of lasting relationships built on mutual affection. In a sense, the images are based on the memory of shared experiences." -- Julie Nelson
The people in Mona Kuhn's photographs are nude but not naked. Completely relaxed before the camera, they give the impression that nothing could clothe them better than their own skin. With a unique style, Kuhn's intimate photographs of both young and old are sensual compositions of skin and wrinkles, light and shadow, gestures and gazes. She creates taughtly composed images and balance sharply rendered portraits against blurred backgrounds to lure the eye and provoke the imagination.

Pictures with Purpose, the seventh volume in the Double Exposure series, explores images from the NMAAHC's collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography that includes daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, cyanotypes, stereographs, and other early photographic forms. The volume looks at how early photographs of and by African Americans were circulated and used, and considers their meaning, for the sitter, for the photographer, and for the owner of the photograph. Particularly significant is how African Americans used photography to shape their image within and beyond their communities. Pictures with Purpose features images of unknown African Americans before and after Emancipation--including children, couples, images of young African American soldiers in Civil War-era military uniform, and African American nursemaids with their white charges. Also included are photographs of renowned African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Mary Church Terrell. Photographers include J.P. Ball, Cornelius M. Battey, Matthew Brady, Frances B. Johnston, and Augustus Washington.

100 women bare all in an empowering collection of photographs and interviews about Womanhood. Vagina, vulva, lady garden, pussy, beaver, cunt, fanny... whatever you call it most women have no idea what's 'down there'. Culturally and personally, no body part inspires love and hate, fear and lust, worship and desecration in the same way. From smooth Barbie dolls to internet porn, girls and women grow up with a very narrow view of what they should look like, even though in reality there is an enormous range. Womanhood departs from the 'ideal vagina' and presents the gentle un-airbrushed truth, allowing us to understand and celebrate our diversity. For the first time, 100 brave and beautiful women reveal their bodies and stories on their own terms, talking about how they feel about pleasure, sex, pain, trauma, birth, motherhood, menstruation, menopause, gender, sexuality and simply being a woman.

This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws. The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy's work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject, from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis. Though undergirded by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so problematic, Nancy's book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures, or DNA. The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues, in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary, the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.