In the summer of 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, on assignment
for "Fortune" magazine, went to central Alabama to document the lives of three white
sharecropper families. Agee's editors killed the article, and after a torturous five-year
struggle to do artistic justice to the material, the author finally published it in book form
as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," only to see it sink with barely a ripple. The posthumous
revival of Agee's literary fortunes led to the work's reissue in 1960, its adoption as an unofficial
bible by civil rights workers, and its enshrinement as an American classic. It has
remained in print ever since.
In this, the third volume in The Works of James Agee series, editor Hugh Davis not
only offers a thoroughly annotated edition of the Agee-Evans masterpiece, featuring invaluable
explanatory notes as well as notes comparing the published work to extant copies of the
original manuscript, but also supplements that text with a wealth of additional material: an
insightful critical essay, variant versions of key sections, unused chapters, correspondence
between Agee and others involved in the book's publication (notably Houghton Mifflin editor
Robert Linscott), generous selections from the author's notebooks, and much more. This
volume opens with the original gallery of Evans's thirty-one photographs from the 1941
edition and also includes, as part of the supplementary material, the expanded gallery of
sixty-two photos that appeared in the 1960 edition. Here as well is the text of the rejected
"Fortune" article, "Cotton Tenants," fully annotated for the first time.
Informed by Agee's love of his subjects, his acute observational skills, and his poetic,
passionate, raging voice--not to mention the stark artistry of Evan's black and white photography
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is a book that to this day defies easy classification.
This volume recaptures the aesthetic impact of the original, corrects errors from earlier
editions, and, most important, illuminates the difficult process that spawned its creation.

A photographic essay that explores a wide spectrum of experiences told from the perspective of a diverse group of young people, ages 14-24, identifying as queer (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning), "Speaking OUT: Queer Youth in Focus" presents portraits without judgment or stereotype by eliminating environmental influence with a stark white backdrop. This backdrop acts as a blank canvas, where each subject's personal thoughts are handwritten onto the final photographic print. With more than 65 portraits photographed over a period of 10 years, the book provides rare insight into the passions, confusions, prejudices, joys, and sorrows felt by queer youth and gives a voice to an underserved group of people that are seldom heard and often silenced. The collaboration of image and first-person narrative serves to provide an outlet, show support, create dialogue, and help those who struggle.

In The Whale's Eyelash, curator Timothy Prus compiles a series of 19th-century microscope slides in the form of a fictional play, narrating the origin and demise of humankind.

Lush allegorical ladies, Grecian maids and Victorian maidens, Indians, Japanese, dancers, housewives, courtesans; women dancing, smiling, working, weeping, flirting-an unusually rich sourcebook of feminine poses and activities, costumes, clothing, everyday life, etc. 391 illustrations.

"The Bronx has a terrible beauty, stark and harsh, like the desert. At first glance you imagine nothing can survive. Then you notice life going on all around. People adapt, survive, and even prosper in this urban moonscape of quick pleasures and false hopes. . . . Often I am terrified of the Bronx. Other times it feels like home. My images reflect the feral vitality and hope of these young men. The interplay between good and evil, violence and love, chaos and family, is the theme, but this is not documentation. There is no story line. There is only a feeling."--Stephen Shames

A 1977 assignment for Look magazine took Stephen Shames to the Bronx, where he began photographing a group of boys coming of age in what was at the time one of the toughest and most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. The Bronx boys lived on streets ravaged by poverty, drugs, violence, and gangs in an adolescent "family" they created for protection and companionship. Shames's profound empathy for the boys earned their trust, and over the next two-plus decades, as the crack cocaine epidemic devastated the neighborhood, they allowed him extraordinary access into their lives on the street and in their homes and "crews."

Bronx Boys presents an extended photo essay that chronicles the lives of these kids growing up in the Bronx. Shames captures the brutality of the times--the fights, shootings, arrests, and drug deals--that eventually left many of the young men he photographed dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, who mature, fall in love, and have children of their own. One young man Shames mentored, Martin Dones, provides riveting details of living in the Bronx and getting caught up in violence and drugs before caring adults helped him turn his life around. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that is too easily dismissed as irredeemable, Bronx Boys shows us that hope can survive on even the meanest streets.

A collection of approximately 100 detailed historic photographs from the Francis Frith archive with extended captions and full introduction, this volume should be suitable for tourists, local historians and general readers. It includes a voucher for a free mounted print of any photograph shown in the book.

Don McCullin (born 1935) has photographed dramas of everyday life in his home city of London as well as in the world's most dangerous conflict zones. This publication features 130 works, including social documentary work in England, the Berlin Wall series, award-winning pieces on war and famine, and more.

Latin American Studies Association Visual Culture Section Best Book PrizeLatin American Studies Association Historia Reciente y Memoria Section Best Book PrizeThe role of documentary photography in exposing and protesting the crimes of a dictatorship. After Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Chile in 1973, his government abducted, abused, and executed thousands of his political opponents. The Insubordination of Photography is the first book to analyze how various collectives, organizations, and independent media used photography to expose and protest the crimes of Pinochet's authoritarian regime. Angeles Donoso Macaya discusses the ways human rights groups such as the Vicariate of Solidarity used portraits of missing persons in order to make forced disappearances visible. She also calls attention to forensic photographs that served as incriminating evidence of government killings in the landmark Lonquen case. Donoso Macaya argues that the field of documentary photography in Chile was challenged and shaped by the precariousness of the nation's politics and economics and shows how photojournalists found creative ways to challenge limitations imposed on the freedom of the press. In a culture saturated by disinformation and cover-ups and restricted by repression and censorship, photography became an essential tool to bring the truth to light. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and other archival material, this book reflects on the integral role of images in public memory and issues of reparation and justice. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodriguez Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In this companion volume to John Bisney and J. L. Pickering's extraordinary book of rare photographs from the Mercury and Gemini missions, the authors now present the rest of the Golden Age of US manned space flight with a photographic history of Project Apollo. Beginning in 1967, Moonshots and Snapshots of Project Apollo chronicles the program's twelve missions and its two follow-ons, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The authors draw from rarely seen NASA, industry, and news media images, taking readers to the Moon, on months-long odysseys above Earth, and finally on the first international manned space flight in 1975. The book pairs many previously unpublished images from Pickering's unmatched collection of Cold War-era space photographs with extended captions-identifying many NASA, military, and contract workers and participants for the first time-to provide comprehensive background information about the exciting climax and conclusion of the Space Race.

Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil provides a distinctive contribution to the field of visual culture through a study of still and moving images of Brazil in the first four decades of the twentieth century, when the camera played a key role in making Brazilian peoples and places visible to a variety of audiences. The book explores what is distinctive about the visual representation of Brazil in an era of modernisation, also attending to the significance of the different technical properties of film and photography for the writing of new histories of visual technologies. It offers new insights into the work of key writers, photographers, anthropologists, and filmmakers, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Mario de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker. Unearthing a wealth of materials from archives in the U.S., Britain, and Brazil, the book seeks to contribute to the postcolonial theoretical project of pinpointing locally distinctive histories of visual technologies and practices.

The age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform eating habits worldwide. HUNGRY PLANET profiles 30 families from around the world--including Bosnia, Chad, Egypt, Greenland, Japan, the United States, and France--and offers detailed descriptions of weekly food purchases; photographs of the families at home, at market, and in their communities; and a portrait of each family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries. Featuring photo-essays on international street food, meat markets, fast food, and cookery, this captivating chronicle offers a riveting look at what the world really eats.
The paperback edition of the 2006 James Beard Book of the Year featuring a photojournalistic survey of 30 families from 24 countries and the food they eat during the course of one week. Winner of the 2006 James Beard Award for writings on food, finalist for the 2006 IACP Cookbook Award for food reference/technical, and winner of the 2005 Harry Chapin Media Award. Includes more than 300 photographs plus essays on the politics of food by Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Charles C. Mann, Alfred W. Crosby, Francine R. Kaufman, Corby Kummer, and Carl Safina. The hardcover edition has sold 40,000 copies.Awards
2006 James Beard Cookbook of the YearThe Splendid Table Book of the Year
2005 Harry Chapin Media Award
finalist for the 2006 IACP Cookbook Award
Reviews"The photos are at once charming and astonishing in their honesty."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"A treasure trove of information . . . The photographs alone are worth the price of admission."--Travel Girl"Arresting, beautiful, enlightening and infinitely human, this is a collection of full-page photos of families around the world surrounded by what they eat in a single week -- from Bhutan to San Antonio. Read the illuminating statistics and the essays. This is a book for the family and for the classroom. You won't see the same old "aren't we better than them" attitude, nor will you be shamed. This book reminds us that what we eat is the simplest, yet most profound, thread that ties us together."--Lynne Rossetto Kasper, Host of American Public Media's Public Radio Program, The Splendid Table."the politics of food at its most poignant and provocative. A coffee table book that will certainly make coffee interesting." -Washington Post"While the photos are extraordinary--fine enough for a stand-alone volume--it's the questions these photos ask that make this volume so gripping. This is a beautiful, quietly provocative volume." -Publishers Weekly, starred review"This book of portraits reveals a planet of joyful individuality, dispiriting sameness, and heart-breaking disparity. It's a perfect gift for the budding anti-globalists on your list" -Bon Appetit" A] unique photographic study of global nutrition" -USA Today"Grabs your attention for the startlingly varied stories it tells about how people feed themselves around the world. Its contents are based on detailed research, beautifully photographed, presented with often disturbing clarity." -Associated Press"The world's kitchens open to Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, the intrepid couple who created the series of books called Material World.... As always with this couple's terse, lively travelogues, politics and the world economy are never far from view." -New York Times Book Review "illuminating, thought-provoking, and gloriously colorful" -Saveur magazine"Richly colored and quietly composed photographs....Hungry Planet is not a book about obesity or corporate villains; it's something much grander. Its premise is simple to the point of obvious and powerful to the point of art." -Salon.com"A fascinating nutritional and gustatory tour." -San Jose Mercury News"A grand culinary voyage through our modern world...a lushly illustrated anthropological study." -San Francisco Bay Guardian"The talked-about book of the season...the stories are fascinating." -Detroit Free Press"Unique and engaging" -Delta Airlines Sky magazine

In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the immediate aftermath was documented by Japanese photographers. For the most part the images they produced were censored or confiscated, but many were preserved in secret. Some were published widely in Japan during the 1950s, though not in the United States. Later, prints and negatives were gathered by groups such as the Anti-Nuclear Photographers' Movement of Japan, whose collection is now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History. The center's Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Photographs Archive consists of more than eight hundred photographs, over one hundred of which are seen here for the first time in an English-language publication. To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombings, Flash of Light, Wall of Fire features the work of twenty-three Japanese photographers who risked their lives to capture the devastation. Together these images serve as a visual record of nuclear destruction, the horrific effects of radiation exposure, and the mass suffering that ensued. A preface by Briscoe Center Executive Director Don Carleton, an essay by Michael B. Stoff, and an afterword by Japanese journalist Michiko Tanaka explore how the images were collected and preserved as well as how they helped provoke calls for peace and the abolishment of nuclear weapons.

Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War. What is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international workers’ rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s career and the work of his studio in Washington, DC, by situating his photographic production within the era’s discourse on social and political reform. Drawing on previously unknown primary sources and original close readings, Makeda Best reveals how Gardner’s activism in Scotland and photography in the United States shared an ideological foundation. She reads his Photographic Sketch Book of the War as a politically motivated project, rooted in Gardner’s Chartist and Owenite beliefs, and illuminates how its treatment of slavery is primarily concerned with the harm that the institution posed to the United States’ reputation as a model democracy. Best shows how, in his portraiture, Gardner celebrated Northern labor communities and elevated white immigrant workers, despite the industrialization that degraded them. She concludes with a discussion of Gardner’s promotion of an American national infrastructure in which photographers and photography played an integral role. Original and compelling, this reconsideration of Gardner’s work expands the contribution of Civil War photography beyond the immediate narrative of the war to comprehend its relation to the vigorous international debates about democracy, industrialization, and the rights of citizens. Scholars working at the intersection of photography, cultural history, and social reform in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic will find Best’s work invaluable to their own research.

First merging and examination of the subject of photography and in-depth psychological study. Contains 18 profiles of photographers exploring their lives as filters between conflict and the general population and the effect they have on us and themselves in this endeavour. Includes such luminaries as Don McCullin, Tim Page, Ron Haviv - each one the recipient of a major prize or prizes, including the Pulitzer and British Press Awards, among others. Conflict photographers are visual historians, bearing witness to stories that must be told. The images they produce seize attention, and moved by what we see, troubling questions come to mind. Shooting War harnesses these questions and shifts them in a different direction, by asking a new set of questions - some that may not have come to mind when first confronted by the image. What of the person taking the photograph? What might they have experienced? Neuropsychologist Anthony Feinstein attempts to answer this seminal question through analysis of the iconic photographs and interviews of 18 of the world's pre-eminent conflict photographers. He has personally communicated with each of them - or an amanuensis if the photographer is no longer living - to try to give us an understanding of why these talents are drawn to conflict in the first place, how they experience it personally when they are in the middle of it, and how they deal with the aftermath. This is a book of understanding the PTSD that is commonly suffered but has never been analysed for a larger reading public. This is a breakthrough exploration that is destined to open a new line of investigation into photographers and conflict. With an important Foreword by Sir Harold Evans, himself a world-renowned commentator on conflict and photography as well, this book will stir important conversation and interest.

For more than twenty years, Maria Paula Acuna has claimed to see the Virgin Mary, once a month, at a place called Our Lady of the Rock in the Mojave Desert of California. Hundreds of men, women, and children follow her into the desert to watch her see what they cannot. While she sees and speaks with the Virgin, onlookers search the skies for signs from heaven, snapping photographs of the sun and sky. Not all of them are convinced that Maria Paula can see the Virgin, yet at each vision event they watch for subtle clues to Mary's presence, such as the unexpected scent of roses or a cloud in the shape of an angel. The visionary depends on her audience to witness and authenticate her visions, while observers rely on Maria Paula and the Virgin to create a sacred space and moment where they, too, can experience firsthand one of the oldest and most fundamental promises of Christianity: direct contact with the divine. Together, visionary and witnesses negotiate and enact their monthly liturgy of revelations. Our Lady of the Rock, which features text by Lisa M. Bitel and more than sixty photographs by Matt Gainer, shows readers what happens in the Mojave Desert each month and tells us how two thousand years of Christian revelatory tradition prepared Maria Paula and her followers to meet in the desert. Based on six years of observation and interviews, chapters analyze the rituals, iconographies, and physical environment of Our Lady of the Rock. Bitel and Gainer also provide vivid portraits of the pilgrims-who they are, where they come from, and how they practice the traditional Christian discernment of spirits and visions. Our Lady of the Rock follows three pilgrims as they return home with relics and proofs of visions where, out of Maria Paula's sight, they too have learned to see the Virgin. The book also documents the public response from the Catholic Church and popular news media to Maria Paula and other contemporary visionaries. Throughout, Our Lady of the Rock locates Maria Paula and her followers in the context of recent demographic and cultural shifts in the American Southwest, the astonishing increase in reported apparitions and miracles from around the world, the latest developments in communications and visual technologies, and the never-ending debate among academics, faith leaders, scientists, and citizen observers about sight, perception, reason, and belief.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 is among the world's most visually documented revolutions. Coinciding with the birth of filmmaking and the increased mobility offered by the reflex camera, it received extraordinary coverage by photographers and cineastes-commercial and amateur, national and international. Many images of the Revolution remain iconic to this day-Francisco Villa galloping toward the camera; Villa lolling in the presidential chair next to Emiliano Zapata; and Zapata standing stolidly in charro raiment with a carbine in one hand and the other hand on a sword, to mention only a few. But the identities of those who created the thousands of extant images of the Mexican Revolution, and what their purposes were, remain a huge puzzle because photographers constantly plagiarized each other's images. In this pathfinding book, acclaimed photography historian John Mraz carries out a monumental analysis of photographs produced during the Mexican Revolution, focusing primarily on those made by Mexicans, in order to discover who took the images and why, to what ends, with what intentions, and for whom. He explores how photographers expressed their commitments visually, what aesthetic strategies they employed, and which identifications and identities they forged. Mraz demonstrates that, contrary to the myth that Agustin Victor Casasola was "the photographer of the Revolution," there were many who covered the long civil war, including women. He shows that specific photographers can even be linked to the contending forces and reveals a pattern of commitment that has been little commented upon in previous studies (and completely unexplored in the photography of other revolutions).

Art as Witness is a cluster of barbed writings and biting images from the underbelly of turbulent India and its neighboring countries. Relying on the sustained work of eminent photographers and artists on rights issues in and around South Asia, and on writings by courageous activists, lawyers, journalists, and social scientists, the book focuses on the terror unleashed by armies, states, and courts of law, and tells the stories of brave survivors. Here, text and image are strained to their limits to convey the hopes and anguish of prisoners, death-row victims, murder-victim families, families of missing people, populations living under martial law, and displaced communities, in a world where democratic rights and freedoms are shrinking every day. Based on Amnesty International India's 'Art for Activism' project, this book hopes to strengthen global campaigns for a world without fear and torture, a world without death penalty, or disappearances and custodial violence. It hopes to reach out to a wider and more diverse readership/viewership through its parallel narrative of images as visual testimonies, and spillover references to the popular worlds of cinema, music, slogan, and performance.