Winner of the 2012 Los Angeles Book Festival Photography/Art Book Award, Dan Winters' America: Icons and Ingenuity is the first retrospective of the career of this talented artist. Winters has spent more than two decades creating memorable photographs for such publications as the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Rolling Stone. Best known for his iconic celebrity portraits, Winters has photographed public figures ranging from the Dalai Lama to President Barack Obama, Hollywood celebrities from Leonardo DiCaprio to Helen Mirren, and artistic luminaries from Jeff Koons to William Christenberry. His style of portraiture is instantly recognizable, characterized by impeccable lighting, muted backgrounds, and the contemplative postures of his sitters. Winters' lifelong fascination with science, technology, and human ingenuity finds similar expression in significant groups of photographs: close-up studies of honeybees and airplanes and a magnificent series devoted to the last three launches of NASA's space shuttles. These photographs reveal an aspect of Winters' career that is less familiar than his commercial work but equally compelling. In addition to the popular icons, America includes expressions of Winters' personal vision. This lyrical body of work shows the same keen eye for lighting and composition, but with a decidedly more intimate ambiance: photographs of his wife and son, spare cityscapes, and elegant collages. America: Icons and Ingenuity also includes a biographical essay that traces his development in a varied and productive career that is, itself, a work in progress.

Honorable Mention, Los Angeles Book Festival Book Award, Photography, 2013 Americans have been driven to explore beyond the horizon ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. In the twentieth century, that drive took us to the moon and inspired dreams of setting foot on other planets and voyaging among the stars. The vehicle we built to launch those far journeys was the space shuttle-Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. This fleet of reusable spacecraft was designed to be our taxi to earth orbit, where we would board spaceships heading for strange new worlds. While the shuttle program never accomplished that goal, its 135 missions sent more than 350 people on a courageous journey into the unknown. Last Launch is a stunning photographic tribute to America's space shuttle program. Dan Winters was one of only a handful of photographers to whom NASA gave close-range access to photograph the last launches of Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Positioning automatically controlled cameras at strategic points around the launch pad-some as close as seven hundred feet-he recorded images of take-offs that capture the incredible power and transcendent beauty of the blast that sends the shuttle hurtling into space. Winters also takes us on a visual tour of the shuttle as a marvel of technology-from the crew spaces with their complex instrumentation, to the massive engines that propelled the shuttle, to the enormous vehicle assembly building where the shuttles were prepared for flight.

In The Grey Ghost: New York City Photographs, Dan Winters turns his eye to New York City, collecting nearly 100 black-and-white images he created there in the years after moving to New York from California in 1987 at the age of 25. A highly personal collection, The Grey Ghost reveals an artist finding his voice, discovering "that elusive method that informs the manner in which we perceive and interpret our surroundings." In these photographs--featuring icons of New York City such as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, as well as everyday moments captured on the street--we find Winters presenting us with the seemingly ordinary and commonplace in a way that captivates us and makes us look much more closely. As Winters writes, New York "has acted as a proving ground and a rite of passage for countless photographers," beginning with Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. The majority of the images in The Grey Ghost were created between 1987 and 1990, but the book also includes images created as recently as 2016. For those interested in street photography, New York City, black-and-white imagery, or the earlier work of one of today's most compelling photographers, The Grey Ghost is a must-have addition to your photo book collection.

A man forced to create hope where a vacancy lies, leading people to work together to draw the stars until the real ones arrive ... It's 1982 in NYC when Dr. Todd Jensen finds out he positive for the gay cancer after a routine exam. Having witnessed many of his other friends perish and knowing that his time is limited he sets out on a road trip to Arizona to make amends with his family. With him is his best friend Jan who is fleeing New York for her own reasons and together then begin to live in the present and see the sights of America on their way to Tolleson, AZ where they have no idea what kind of a homecoming they will be subjected too. When they arrive everything has altered from his mentally disabled brother to the parents he remembered who verbally abused him until the day he escaped to the east coast. The town and his true love have landed on harder times but with their new perspective and the start of acceptance and trust, Todd begins to see that this small town may hold the answer to his future what little time he may have left.