In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful "Gay Nineties." It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation. That year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. "Outside the rooms he inhabited," Lesy writes, "the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage." Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents-that "the plain truth of the images . . . wasn't as plain as it seemed," Lesy explains. "Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs." Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes. In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans's intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women-the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. "Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime," Lesy writes. Evans's photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy's telling of Evans's life stories. "Wonder and scrutiny, suffused with desire and dread, produced the portraits he made in his last years," Lesy notes. In the 1970s, Evans became enthralled with the Polaroid SX-70 and its colorful instant images, and he used it to take his last photographs-portraits of people, in extreme close up, and portraits of objects. "Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women-Walker took pleasure in being alive," Lesy writes. "He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits-these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin."

At the turn of the twentieth century, the stereograph was king. Its binocular images revealed the world in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of stereographic views, Michael Lesy presents images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago. Lesy's evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, Looking Backward reveals a history that shadows us today.

This book is about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910. Against these are juxtaposed excerpts from the Badger State Banner, from the Mendota State (asylum) Record Book, and occasionally quotations from the writings of Hamlin Garland and Glenway Wescott.

In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in Snapshots 1971-77 in a dumpster behind a gigantic photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast - duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates - that the people on the processing line couldn't stop them. Week after week, Lesy took home thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if they were archeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he'd formed his own collection of images of American life. He took that collection with him when he returned to Wisconsin to finish his graduate work in American history. His understanding of the snapshots from California as reflections of the troubled state of American society influenced the PhD research he was doing in Wisconsin - research that became the American classic Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). Over the next six years, Lesy added to his collection of California snapshots with hundreds of snapshots that had been left unclaimed and then discarded by a photo processor in Cleveland. While Lesy looked through other people's lives in pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War, the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State Prison uprising filled news headlines - and the general public carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, materialism, lawlessness, unwitting humor. Lesy's collection of snapshots from the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now, fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has changed. In Wisconsin Death Trip Lesy pulled back the curtain of "the good old days" to reveal the stark reality of American life from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in Snapshots 1971-77 serve as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.

Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else. So begins a chapter of this sharp, fearless collection from a master storyteller. Revisiting seventeen Chicago murder cases including that of Belva and Beulah, two murderesses whose trials inspired the musical Chicago Michael Lesy captures an extraordinary moment in American history, bringing to life a city where newspapers scrambled to cover the latest mayhem. Just as Lesy s book Wisconsin Death Trip subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City exposes the tragedy of the Jazz Age and the tortured individuals who may be the progenitors of our modern age."

Self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum was born in 1877 in Durham, North Carolina, as its burgeoning tobacco economy put the frontier-like boomtown on the map. As an itinerant portraitist working primarily in North Carolina and Virginia during the rise of Jim Crow, Mangum welcomed into his temporary studios a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse. After his death in 1922, his glass plate negatives remained stored in his darkroom, a tobacco barn, for fifty years. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last moment-and with it, this surprising and unparalleled document of life at the turn of the twentieth century, a turbulent time in the history of the American South. Hugh Mangum's multiple-image, glass plate negatives reveal the open-door policy of his studio to show us lives marked both by notable affluence and hard work, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality, self-creation, and often joy. Seen and experienced in the present, the portraits hint at unexpected relationships and histories and also confirm how historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives. Mangum's photographs are not only images; they are objects that have survived a history of their own and exist within the larger political and cultural history of the American South, demonstrating the unpredictable alchemy that often characterizes the best art-its ability over time to evolve with and absorb life and meaning beyond the intentions or expectations of the artist.

In this profound and disturbing book, noted photo historian Michael Lesy is in search of a man who left a strange archive of sixty thousand images to the Library of Congress. We learn that he was Angelo Rizzuto, but he called himself "the little Angel". He lived in a single room in a run-down hotel. We learn that every day he left at 2.00pm to photograph New York City obsessively, from above and on the streets. We see the cityscapes he took, compassionate photographs of children and confrontational pictures of angry women. We see his anguished self-portrait taken almost every day. These are the obvious discoveries. What is not obvious is why - what did it all mean? In his thoughtful and erudite essay, Lesy has fashioned nothing less than a psychoanalytic dissection of a tortured soul in an account that is both deeply unsettling and fulfilling at the same time.

"Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else." So begins a chapter of Michael Lesy's disturbingly satisfying account of Chicago in the 1920s, the epicenter of murder in America. A city where daily newspapers fell over each other to cover the latest mayhem. A city where professionals and amateurs alike snuffed one another out, and often for the most banal of reasons, such as wanting a Packard twin-six. Men killing men, men killing women, women killing mencrimes of loot and love. Just as Lesy's first book, Wisconsin Death Trip, subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City gives us the dark side of the Jazz Age. Lesy's sharp, fearless storytelling makes a compelling case that this collection of criminals may be the progenitors of our modern age.