Culled from an extensive, yearlong, nationwide search, this book of photographs from people twenty-five years of age and younger provides a unique and revealing look at how a new generation is seeing and interpreting the world.

25 and Under is an illuminating look at the art and sensibility of young American photographers who have documented worlds they know and imagine with surprising diversity and sophistication. The images range from photojournalist essays to computer-manipulated images, from carefully constructed art pieces to snapshots of daily life. The photographers address world issues and personal concerns, serious matters and trivial ones, and do so with humor and wit as well as anguish and anger.

This extraordinary collection of 150 duotones and color photographs allows us to look through the eyes of young people as we enter the twenty-first century, to see their hopes, fears, confusion, and ambitions through the startling and inspiring images they create.

Alice Rose George is a photography editor and consultant to major magazines and collectors. She lives in New York City.

"How do you write about third generation Snopeses who have moved to Memphis and joined an encounter group?" asked Walter Percy in his book Signposts in a Strange Land. A New Life answers this question, combining the stories of eleven of the best new writers of southern fiction with contemporary work from extraordinary southern photographers. These short stories and surprising images portray the South not as we might imagine or remember it, but as it is lived--in condos and malls, on golf courses and interstates, in family rooms and bedrooms, and in the hearts and minds of southern people. This volume brings together recent southern stories by Richard Barusch, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, and Mary Ward Brown, among others, coupled with photographic essays. These revealing pictures and stories cover a broad geographical and emotional territory and give us a revealing portrait of the new look and feel of the contemporary South.