"If Paris were a person, her face would be that of an older women with conflicting lines etched upon it of hope and despair." Until recent years, Paris was the vanguard city of the world. today the hybrid of Paris/Modernity is fading, with competition form cities of the east like Dubai and Shanghai, architectural grandeur and innovation is outplayed in scale and ambition. In these photographs, Jarret Schecter attempts to understand the future by glancing at the past. He stalks time, depicting the fractured pieces that Paris has left behind. Progress, melancholy and the past are most visibly profound in Paris, yet also profound elegance and understanding of the history if its streets. Scheter examines the city's changing, diverse population and its architecture, both young and old, the book functioning as a dialogue between past and present. He photographs people and places that have undergone massive change, or places that are still the same after decades; as such feeling he was really 'stalking' Paris, discovering the grandeur, however faded, and mystery of the city that outlives its younger counterparts.

???????????? Katrina, a natural hurricane, struck New Orleans on August 29th 2005. ???????????? Nobody envisaged the damage and destruction it would wreak on the southern US city, and it became on a much greater scale a manmade disaster of civil engineering and social discrimination. ???????????? Because of government failure, millions viewed political ineptitude, social inequity and an unpaved America where the streets were lined with anything but gold. ???????????? The images in this book show the abandoned and hardest-hit district of the Lower Ninth Ward, now over two years later, and still counting. ???????????? Vacant and dilapidated, the city is a shadow of its former self. However, in these seemingly lifeless shadows, and through the broken windows of empty houses, one can eerily see the ghostly reflections of life and death in the form of PER SONAL OBJECT S. ???????????? These intensely personal items have been abandoned and left, and in most cases, will never be reclaimed. ???????????? This small format book touches on the ephemeral, and surprisingly often beautiful, remnants of belongings that once made up the memories and precious moments of peoples' lives.

In the Ogaden region of southeastern Ethiopia there is a camp of approximately 10,000 souls. Officially Ethiopian but ethnically Somali, they are not classified as refugees but as Internally Displaced Peoples, or IDPs, and thus live without even the marginal assistance that the UN can offer. The number of IDPs worldwide is far greater than is widely known, and far greater than that of officially recognized refugees--IDPs number near the population of Canada. Africa's tragedy lies not just in corruption, poverty, wars, droughts and famine, as if they were not enough. It lies also in the profound inability of Western societies, desperate to help with or without their politicians, to understand tribal and nomadic claims to the land. Jarret Schecter's Displaced in Denan is a record of the camp in Ogaden and the efforts of a small town in Connecticut to help the people there: it ends in hope that individuals can overcome bureaucracy.

Gypsies is a term bandied about like the vampire bat, conjuring images of mystery, danger, repulsion, derision and disgust. Some call them tinkers, travellers, or even outcasts. They are all wrong. Their name is the Roma, a tribe that emanated from India and brought to Europe a culture infinitely alien to the people who lived there. As once the culture of native North American Indians was regarded with hate and superstition, so too have the Romanies in Europe been harried and murdered and rejected as beyond the pale. But they have pursued their traditions with a tenacity unmatched by Western cultures of church or state. Jarret Schecter sought to define those traditions, to encapsulate both the animation of Romany life and the dispossession of their culture in a so-called modern, civilized Europe. After three years he came to concentrate on the gypsy settlement of Hermanovce in Eastern Slovakia. Over four seasons he has given the lie to prejudice and bigotry, but at the same time demonstrating the hunger and despair, the innate joy and camaraderie of the Roma in Hermanovce. It is not a voyage of love or romance, though the subjects themselves suggest it. It is rather the result of a singular dedication to a truth, and the reality of that truth.

Eight out of ten blind people live in the developing world, and the vast majority of this blindness is preventable. These facts constitute A Journey in Sight, a project by photographer Jarret Schecter who was astounded by the conditions he witnessed in Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries. Here Schecter illuminates the link between poverty and blindness--40 million people suffer from preventable blindness that arises from Vitamin A deficiency, unsanitary conditions, minimal health care, and other issues. Presented are touching and heartfelt images of these persons in their habitats. But this isn't merely a journey into the world's less fortunate regions--a percentage of each sale of A Journey in Sight will be donated to Orbis, an organization that provides free or inexpensive eye treatment to people who needlessly suffer from preventable blindness.