In 1972, Gilles Mora and his wife Francoise left France to teach the French language in public schools in Louisiana. At the time, he knew nothing about photography. Fascinated by the Deep South, however, Mora soon started a photographic project on its culture. Greatly influenced by artists such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Eudora Welty, and Clarence John Laughlin; playing music with some of the major figures of the rockabilly scene, including Carl Perkins; and infused with the sensuality of the South, Mora produced a unique body of pictures over more than twenty years. Rarely exhibited or published, the images in Antebellum present a kind of travelogue, a photographic recording of Mora's personal mythologies, which evoke the disappearing world of the Deep South.

American photographer Nicholas Nixon is known for his large-format black-and-white photographs, in which he creates a special connection with the viewers by sharing intimate moments in life. For his most iconic series, The Brown Sisters, he followed four sisters over 46 years. His practice, however, encompasses a much broader spectrum, such as the simple life in the southern states of the US or landscape portraits of the rough industrial areas around Detroit. Beginning with the aspect of intimacy, this monograph provides the first overview of Nixon's oeuvre. It is a journey through the artist's life and work - at once distant and at times intimate and close - and also features new photographs.

Bernard Plossu, born in Vietnam in 1945, is one of today's best-known French photographers. His photos reflect locales he has visited all over the world: Senegal, Turkey, Poland, Mexico, Guatemala, and the American West. The photographs here were taken by Plossu in the late 1970s and are images of New Mexico--where the sun, the dust, the rain, the mud, the wind, the snow, the altitude (7,000 feet), and the smells forge a uniqueness.

"Bernard Plossu has given us a remarkable record of our own Southwest as seen through the eyes of a Frenchman. . . . The viewer knows what Plossu is saying by the immediate impact followed by slow release. There are no clichA(c)s here. His subtle images must be teased from the data he provides. It is our own Southwest but seen in a new light from another point of view. We can learn and enjoy from all three: the images, the photographer, and what they release in us. We also learn that our teacher--and all good photographers teach--is far from conventional."--from the Foreword

Mysterious, introspective, fiercely private, and self-taught, street photographer William Gedney (1932-1989) produced impressive series of images focused on people whose lives were overlooked, hidden, or reduced to stereotypes. He was convinced that photography was a means of expression as efficient as literature, and his images were accompanied by writings, essays, excerpts from books, and aphorisms. Gedney avoided self-promotion, and his underrepresented work was largely unknown during his short lifetime. He died at the age of fifty-six from AIDS. William Gedney: Only the Lonely, 1955-1984 is the first comprehensive retrospective of his photography. It presents images from all of his major series, including eastern Kentucky, where Gedney lived with and photographed the family of laid-off coal miner Willie Cornett; San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury, where he attached himself to a group of disaffected youth, photographing them as they drifted from one vacant apartment to the next during the "Summer of Love"; early photo-reportage of gay pride parades in the eighties; Benares, India, Gedney's first trip abroad, during which he obsessively chronicled the concurrent difficulty and beauty of daily life; and night scenes that, in the absence of people and movement, evoke a profound universal loneliness. The most complete overview of Gedney's work to date, this volume reveals the undeniable beauty of a major American photographer.