The San Quentin Project collects a largely unseen visual record of daily life inside one of America's oldest and largest prisons, demonstrating how this archive of the state is now being used to teach visual literacy and process the experience of incarceration. In 2011, Nigel Poor-artist, educator, and cocreator of the acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle-began teaching a history of photography class through the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. Neither books nor cameras were allowed into the facility, so an unorthodox course with a range of inventivemapping exercises ensued: students crafted "verbal photographs" of memories for which they had no visual documentation, and annotated iconic images from different artists. After the first semester, Poor says, "one student told me he could now see fascination everywhere in San Quentin." When Poor received access to thousands of negatives in the prison's archive, made by corrections officers of a former era, these images of San Quentin's everyday occurrences soon became launchpads for her students' keen observations. From the banal to the brutal, to distinct moments of respite, the pictures in this archive gave those who were involved in the project the opportunity to share their stories and reflections on incarceration.

On Contested Terrain is published on the occasion of the first comprehensive exhibition of An-My Le's work, organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art. Throughout her career, Le has photographed sites of former battlefields, spaces reserved for training for or reenacting war, and the noncombatant roles of active service members. She is part of a lineage of photographers who have adapted the conventions of landscape photography to address the human traces of history and conflict, but is one of the few who have experienced the sights and sounds associated with growing up in a warzone. The publication includes selections from Viet Nam (1994-98), a series made on Le's return, twenty years after her family was evacuated by the US military and 29 Palms (2003-4), made on the eponymous military base built as a training ground during the Iraq War. It will also include many new and never-before-published images. Texts by curators Dan Leers and Lisa Sutcliffe and an interview between Le and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, address how Le's work complicates the landscapes of conflict that have long informed American identity.