Series in Photo Essays
Books in Photo Essays
A Country for Children
This exceptionally beautiful essay by the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author is one of his most lucid and beautiful literary expressions. Originally written as a prologue to a "state of the nation" analysis recently published by a group of eminent Colombian thinkers, it drafts a virtual navigation chart for the future of Colombia, affirming the country's vast human potential and emphasizing the powers of education and national spirit. Four-color photographs enliven this work.
A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta
A photographic documentary captures the essence of Black life on the Mississippi Delta.
Along The Cowboy Trail
Book by LeRoy, Tammy, Dawson, Robert
Amos Walker's Detroit
Amos Walker's Detroit visits dozens of unforgettable locations from Loren D. Estleman's Amos Walker series. As Estleman says of Detroit in the preface: "It's a hard-boiled town, and the crumbling buildings and rusting railroad tracks of the warehouse district, the palaces across the limits in Grosse Pointe, and the black-hole shadows of the Cass Corridor were made to order for a remaindered knight chasing truth through a maze of threats, deceptions, and inconvenient corpses. City and protagonist are cut from the same coarse cloth. They are the series' two heroes." Amos Walker's Detroit allows Estleman's settings to take center stage as noted photographer Monte Nagler turns his lens to Estleman's various noir locations. Some locations are well-known landmarks, like the Renaissance Center, the Wayne County Building, Belle Isle, and Mexicantown, and some are fictional locales such as Walker's home and office. Even when the locations are familiar, Nagler's lens renders them in fresh and unexpected ways. Excerpts from Estleman's novels describing the locations accompany each image and Estleman's thoughtful introduction contextualizes the images and comments on the role of Detroit as a noir backdrop. The photographs in Amos Walker's Detroit show the city in a new light, demonstrating that Detroit's grit and glamour coexist in unexpected places and make a perfect setting for a mystery. Fans of the Amos Walker series, as well as those interested in photography, architecture, and local culture will appreciate this handsome volume.
Asylum
Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings ). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”
Australian Colors: Images Of The Outback
Startling, wry, lyrical, and beguiling photographs and passionate commentary document the landscape and people of Australia's interior in this panoramic volume. 331 color illustrations.
Baseball As America Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game
Featuring: Jackie Robinson, Philip Roth, Roger Kahn, Michael Chabon, Dave Barry, Tom Brokaw, Penny Marshall, George Plimpton. W.P. Kinsella, Paul Simon, Roger Angell, John Grisham, Jules Tygiel, and many more.
Baseball As America Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game
Featuring: Jackie Robinson, Philip Roth, Roger Kahn, Michael Chabon, Dave Barry, Tom Brokaw, Penny Marshall, George Plimpton. W.P. Kinsella, Paul Simon, Roger Angell, John Grisham, Jules Tygiel, and many more.
Baseball As America Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game
Featuring: Jackie Robinson, Philip Roth, Roger Kahn, Michael Chabon, Dave Barry, Tom Brokaw, Penny Marshall, George Plimpton. W.P. Kinsella, Paul Simon, Roger Angell, John Grisham, Jules Tygiel, and many more.
Cotton Tenants
A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evan's famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune 's editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , and for years the original report was lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune . Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.” Co-Published with The Baffler magazine
Lamentation: 9/11
Ruderg text accompanies photographs of posters for the missing put up around New York City following 9/11. It is a personal reflection on the people of the city and the special bond that gives them strength.
Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands
ACCLAIMED AUTHOR BARBARA KINGSOLVER brings her passion for the wilderness to bear in this striking book. Trained as a biologist, Kingsolver writes authoritatively, and movingly, about the continent's virgin pockets of desert, coast, grassland, forest, and wetland. ONE-OF-A-KIND IMAGES: Specially commissioned infrared photographs, taken and hand-tinted by Belt, create a painterly portrait of wild landscapes that gives this an art book appeal. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPERTISE: Readers look to the Geographic as a leading expert in the geography and ecology of America. America's virgin lands are not always where you'd expect to find them - in national parks or other preserves. They're scattered in often small, sometimes barely known pockets across the continent. These are the remnants that remind us of what wildness once meant - and what will be lost if it disappears. In her moving introduction and in the essays that open each chapter, Kingsolver discusses the ways of wilderness, the threats against it, its natural imperatives and what it needs to survive in the different forms featured in the chapters - as grassland, wetland, dryland, coast, and woodland. Annie Griffiths Belt's evocative colour and hand-tinted photographs capture the essence of these diverse bioregions. The images take you from the tallgrass prairies of Kansas and Nevada to the Arctic tundra of Alaska, from the endangered coral reefs off the Florida Keys to the Pacific-pounded coast of Oregon, from the deserts of the Southwest to the sky-piercing redwoods of California.