Cabinet cards were America's main format for photographic portraiture throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Standardized at 61/2 x 41/4 inches, they were just large enough to reveal extensive detail, leading to the incorporation of elaborate poses, backdrops, and props. Inexpensive and sold by the dozen, they transformed getting one's portrait made from a formal event taken up once or twice in a lifetime into a commonplace practice shared with friends. The cards reinforced middle-class Americans' sense of family. They allowed people to show off their material achievements and comforts, and the best cards projected an informal immediacy that encouraged viewers to feel emotionally connected with those portrayed. The experience even led sitters to act out before the camera. By making photographs an easygoing fact of life, the cards forecast the snapshot and today's ubiquitous photo sharing. Organized by senior curator John Rohrbach, Acting Out is the first ever in-depth examination of the cabinet card phenomena. Full-color plates include over 100 cards at full size, providing a highly entertaining collection of these early versions of the selfie and ultimately demonstrating how cabinet cards made photography modern. Published in association with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Exhibition dates: Amon Carter Museum of American Art: August 15-November 1, 2020 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): August 8-November 7, 2021

"Rather than the proverbial melting pot, Wilson asks us to recognize a West that is at least a place where, against a backdrop of aridity and expansive space, diverse lives can and do coexist." -John Rohrbach Renowned photographer Laura Wilson has captured the majesty, as well as the tragedy, of her home region of Texas and the wider West for more than three decades. A former assistant to Richard Avedon, she has published her work to wide acclaim over the past twenty-five years. As seen in this extraordinary book, Wilson's subjects range from legendary West Texas cattle ranches to impoverished Plains Indian reservations to lavish border-town cotillions. Also featured are compelling portraits of artists who are associated with the region, including Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, and Sam Shepard. The unforgettable images in That Day, most of which are previously unpublished, tell sharply drawn stories of the people and places that have shaped, and continue to shape, the nation's most dynamic and unyielding land. Text from Wilson's journals accompanies the photographs, recalling her personal experiences behind the camera at the moment when a particular image was captured. With her incisive eye, Wilson casts a fresh light on the West-a topic of enduring fascination. Published in association with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University Exhibition Schedule: Amon Carter Museum of American Art (09/05/15-02/14/16)

Capturing the world in color was one of photography's greatest aspirations from the very beginnings of the medium. When color photography became a reality with the introduction of the Autochrome in 1907, prominent photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz were overjoyed. But they quickly came to reject color photography as too aligned with human sight. It took decades for artists to come to understand the creative potential of color, and only in 1976, when John Szarkowski showed William Eggleston's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, did the art world embrace color. By accepting color's flexibility and emotional transcendence, Szarkowski and Eggleston transformed photography, giving the medium equal artistic stature with painting, but also initiating its demise as an independent art.

The catalogue of a major exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which holds one of the premier collections of American photography, Color tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of color's integration into American fine art photography and how its acceptance revolutionized the practice of art. Tracing the development of color photography from the first color photograph in 1851 to digital photography, John Rohrbach describes photographers' initial rejection of color, their decades-long debates over what color brings to photography, and how their gradual acceptance of color released photography from its status as a second-tier art form. He shows how this absorption of color instigated wide acceptance of a fundamentally new definition of photography, one that blends photography's documentary foundations with the creative flexibility of painting. Sylvie Penichon offers a succinct survey of the technological advances that made color in photography a reality and have since marked its multifaceted development. These texts, illuminated by seventy-five full-page plates and more than eighty illustrations, make this book a groundbreaking contribution to photographic studies.

"Backscatter is the reflection of particles, waves, or signals back to the direction from which they came: in underwater photography, back to the lens. The reflection, however, is diffuse, as opposed to clear like a mirror, thus softening images and even making them obscure. For this book, Tom Young has embraced backscatter as both subject and metaphor to render spaces below and above the water's surface-between here and there-in highly original ways. Our senses are awakened as Young creates images that evoke an evolutionary path from sea to land, that speak of a global environment increasingly threatened by human action, and that enlighten our consciousness with an abiding spirit larger than ourselves. In Young's previous book, the masterful Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed, the artist was drawn to the way multiple images can be assembled into a single photographic plate that both alters the intent and enhances the meaning of the individual images. Young has followed that same path in Backscatter, as the edge of one image is shared with the edge of another that simultaneously can fuse them into one voice or let them remain as separate voices, suggesting a deep conversation either way. As the sequence evolves, so, too, does the visual narrative whose assembly of diverse images presents unexpected relationships and an unforgettable storyline. Metaphorically, Backscatter is about looking head on into a void where what lies above and below the water's surface can seem harmonious yet helter-skelter. As John Rohrbach observes in his afterword, this is a "ferocious book" that brings us to a myriad places, each one real and imagined, conveying an overall sense of the human journey through life."