An award-winning photojournalist and social documentarian, Arthur Grace (born 1947) has traveled globally and to every region of America on assignment for major news organizations as well as for his own personal projects since the early 1970s. In "America 101," Grace draws 101 pictures from his rich personal archive to assemble a visual crash course on what defines and represents us as Americans. Organized here into thematic chapters, Grace's book plumbs America's cultural DNA, fusing the style and the physical proximity of a photojournalist with the conceptual distance and healthy skepticism of an artist. As High Museum of Art Curator of Photography, Brett Abbott, states in his introductory essay, "In Grace's America, the ordinary meets the absurd, veneration and irreverence comingle in unexpected and delightfully humorous ways, a lighthearted joie de vivre soothes a violent vein, and the sanctity of the individual competes with our continual drive toward collective direction."

For most people in the West, the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain have faded into caricatures of police state repression and bread lines. With the world seemingly again divided between democracies and authoritarian regimes, it is essential that we understand the reality of life in the Soviet Bloc. American photojournalist Arthur Grace (born 1947) was uniquely placed to provide that context. During the 1970s and 1980s Grace traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain, working primarily for news magazines. One of only a small corps of Western photographers with ongoing access, he was able to delve into the most ordinary corners of people's daily lives, while also covering significant events. Many of the photographs in this remarkable book are effectively psychological portraits that leave the viewer with a sense of the gamut of emotions in that era. Illustrated with over 120 black-and-white images-nearly all previously unpublished-Communism(s) gives an unprecedented glimpse behind the veil of a not-so-distant time filled with harsh realities unseen by nearly all but those that lived through it. Shot in the USSR, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic, here are portraits of factory workers, farmers, churchgoers, vacationers and loitering teens juxtaposed with the GDR's imposing Social Realist-designed apartment blocks, annual May Day Parades, Poland's Solidarity movement (and the subsequent imposition of martial law) and the vastness of Moscow's Red Square.

I had always thought that when I was around 84 and Robin was 80 we could collaborate on a book about the golden years of his career where he could look at my photographs and reminisce about the events and his feelings at the time. Unfortunately, that book was never to be . . . .Photographer Arthur Grace first met Robin Williams in April 1986, at a comedy club in Pittsburgh where Williams was working to polish what would eventually become his award-winning special  Evening at the Met". The two hit it off immediately, and thus blossomed a close friendship that carried them through their increasingly successful careers. Told through a series of stunning photographs of Williams taken by Grace over the course of this decades-long partnership, Robin Williams: A Singular Portrait offers a touching and up-close look at the real Robin Williams the manic and happy, the pensive and weary, the engaged and disengaged, a true portrait of one of America's greatest comics and most beloved actors.For the millions of people around the globe that Robin Williams has touched, these images, more than 150 photographs, a glorious mixture of stunning color and resonating black and white presented in exhibit format, will be something to embrace and cherish, not simply because of their exclusivity, but because of their intimacy and their honesty.