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The Ultimate Guide to the Jersey Shore
Where to Eat, What to Do, and so Much More
Peter Genovese
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The Jersey Shore, our most treasured asset, the envy of forty-nine other states, comes alive in this new book by the reporter and writer who knows New Jersey—and the Jersey Shore—best. Every conceivable topic—where to eat, where to stay, landmarks and attractions, what to do with the kids—is covered with the kind of inside information you just won’t find on tourism web sites or Facebook. All one hundred-plus Shore towns are included, from Sandy Hook to Cape May. There are hundreds of restaurant listings and recommendations. The book also contains engaging profiles and vignettes of the people and places that give the Shore its special character and charm. A throwback five-and-dime store on Long Beach Island. Banner pilots. Birders. Baby parades. And more. You want lists and rankings? The book is full of them—twenty best Shore towns, twenty-one secret spots down the Shore, twenty essential Jersey Shore experiences, fifty things we bet you didn’t know about the Shore, and so on. The book is the next best thing to being at the Shore; actually, it may be better than being there (think of those epic traffic jams on the Parkway, and all the money you’ll save on tolls, beach fees, and bad boardwalk pizza).
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Ulysses S. Grant
A Photographic History
James Bultema, with a Foreword by Frank J. Willilams
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
The most photographed American of the nineteenth century
 
As Grant battled relentlessly down the Tennessee River and across Tennessee, defending Shiloh, he was followed by an enterprising group of studio photographers hoping to profit from the public’s demand for images of the rising general from the West. They never stopped because Grant never stopped. Thus far, 307 distinct photographs have been found of Ulysses S. Grant, revealing him to be the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. 
 
Readers of Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History travel alongside Grant through the Civil War and his two terms as president, on his unusual two-year journey around the world, and to his final days on Mount McGregor. The sheer volume of exposure shows the toll of duty, war, and command. From every angle, this collection captures Grant’s regard for soldier and family, his disregard of uniform, and his disheveled appearance that reflected his resilience. The reader will look into the eyes of a man who saw the worst and labored for the best. 
 
This curated volume opens the largest collection of Grant photos to the public for the first time. Excerpts from Grant’s personal writings divulge his candid thoughts about the people he posed with and the situations he faced around the time the photographs were taken. An extraordinary addition to Grant scholarship, Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History will be the photographic reference work on Grant for decades to come as the simple man from Ohio continues to astonish the world.
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Unfixed
Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa
Jennifer Bajorek
Duke University Press, 2020
In Unfixed Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Focusing on images created by photographers based in Senegal and Benin, Bajorek draws on formal analyses of images and ethnographic fieldwork with photographers to show how photography not only reflected but also actively contributed to social and political change. The proliferation of photographic imagery—through studio portraiture, bureaucratic ID cards, political reportage and photojournalism, magazines, and more—provided the means for west Africans to express their experiences, shape public and political discourse, and reimagine their world. In delineating how west Africans' embrace of photography was associated with and helped spur the democratization of political participation and the development of labor and liberation movements, Bajorek tells a new history of photography in west Africa—one that theorizes photography's capacity for doing decolonial work.
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Unmapping the City
Perspectives of Flatness
Edited by Alfredo Cramerotti
Intellect Books, 2010

Unmapping the City, the first title in the new Intellect series Critical Photography, features photographs shot between 2004 and 2008 in different cities around the world. The images are linked by their shared attempts to define a two-dimensional approach to a three-dimensional built reality, and to address spatial representation, ritual, and urbanity through art. In representing the cityscape through a flat texture of lines and bold colors, the reader is drawn into a conversation about the interplay between reality and its representation. This volume significantly challenges and expands the critical discourse on photography and text and will be of interest to artists, curators, photographers, architects, and critical theorists.

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Unseeing Empire
Photography, Representation, South Asian America
Bakirathi Mani
Duke University Press, 2020
In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented.
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Unshuttered
Poems
Patricia Smith
Northwestern University Press, 2023

An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century

Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.

Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.

The poet’s unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths doing what she does best—unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.

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Uta Barth
Peripheral Vision
Arpad Kovacs
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
This retrospective of the photographer Uta Barth traces her use of the camera to explore both how and what we see.

Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Uta Barth (b. 1958) has spent her decades-long career exploring the complexities and limits of human and mechanical vision. At first, her photographs appear to be deceptively simple depictions of everyday objects—light filtering through a window, tree branches bereft of leaves, a sparsely appointed domestic interior—but these images, visually spare yet conceptually rigorous, emerge from her investigation of sight, perception, light, and time.

In this richly illustrated monograph, curator Arpad Kovacs and contributors Lucy Gallun and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe chart Barth’s career path and discuss her most significant series, revealing how she has rejected the primacy of a traditional photographic subject and instead called attention to what is on the periphery. The book includes previously unpublished bodies of work made early in her career that add much to our understanding of this important artist. Also included is Barth’s most recent work, ...from dawn to dusk, an ambitious commission marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Getty Center.
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