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The Sagebrush Ocean, the essential introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin Desert, returns in this richly updated 35th anniversary edition. Winner of the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation, Stephen Trimble’s authoritative voice and evocative photographs illuminate this landscape of sun-struck playas, surprising wetlands, remote canyons, and wind-swept tundra.

Today, the once-vast “sagebrush ocean” is an endangered sea, as environmental changes and human development have diminished it by half. This heartbreaking decline drives Trimble’s updated text, but he blends loss with reverence for what remains—and urgent insight into what’s at stake. Striking color photographs, many newly added, illuminate some of the continent’s most spectacular but little known scenery. For anyone curious about the Great Basin or concerned for its future, this timely edition is indispensable.

A frank, honest, and insightful look into the lives of women over fifty. 
 
The Second Half explores, in photographic portraits and interviews, how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives.  She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women. Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all readers, and are illustrated by Warner’s stunning portraits which tell their own story.

The Selfie Machine offers novel insight into personalized communication practices in the digital age through the medium of the selfie. While the selfie has achieved notoriety due to pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie "disorders," this book examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. In taking India as the starting point of its investigation, The Selfie Machine inverts the "West-then-the-rest" model of understanding global digital media practices. The book considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital practices and trends—ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of politics and protest. In doing so, it not only offers an expanded definition of selfies in digital media culture, but also demonstrates how “global” digital media (including selfies) cannot be understood as a monolith.

Superior Achievement, Illinois State Historical Society, 2013

In The State of Southern Illinois: An Illustrated History, Herbert K. Russell offers fresh interpretations of a number of important aspects of Southern Illinois history. Focusing on the area known as “Egypt,” the region  south of U.S. Route 50 from Salem south to Cairo, he begins his book with the earliest geologic formations and  follows Southern Illinois’s history into the twenty-first century. The volume is richly illustrated with maps and photographs, mostly in color, that highlight the informative and straightforward text.

Perhaps most notable is the author’s use of dozens of heretofore neglected sources to dispel the myth that Southern Illinois is merely an extension of Dixie. He corrects the popular impressions that slavery was introduced by early settlers from the South and that a majority of Southern Illinoisans wished to secede. Furthermore, he presents the first in-depth discussion of twelve pre–Civil War, free black communities located in the region. He also identifies the roles coal mining, labor violence, gangsters, and the media played in  establishing the area’s image. He concludes optimistically, unveiling a twenty-first-century Southern Illinois filled with myriad attractions and opportunities for citizens and tourists alike.

The State of Southern Illinois is the most accurate all-encompassing volume of history on this unique area that often regards itself as a state within a state. It offers an entirely new perspective on race relations, provides insightful information on the cultural divide between north and south in Illinois, and pays tribute to an often neglected and misunderstood region of this multidimensional state, all against a stunning visual backdrop.

A full-color photographic journey around the Great Lakes
 
Locals affectionately call the Great Lakes the “third coast”—though at 4,500 miles, this beloved freshwater shoreline is the nation’s longest, covering more distance than the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts combined.
 
Divided into four galleries by lake and season, David Zurick’s award-winning photographs spotlight the distinct personality of each coastline and the people who call its shores home. We visit windswept Lake Superior in winter, Lake Michigan bursting into spring, Lakes Erie and Ontario under the summer sun, and Lake Huron in the changing palette of autumn, with an additional gallery devoted to the straits and rivers that connect them. An evocative foreword from award-winning nature writer Jerry Dennis sets the stage for this sweeping visual tour.
 
In Zurick’s photographs, lifelong lovers of the Great Lakes will find the familiar shorelines of coastal hometowns, summer refuges, and secret fishing spots—as well as images that reawaken us to the majesty and mystery of North America’s “freshwater seas.”
 

Theatre in Passing explores spaces of performance in contemporary Moscow. Inspired by French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s model of a "second, poetic geography" in which the walker—the everyday practitioner—invents the space observed by the voyeur, this book takes the reader on a tour of spaces of performance in contemporary Moscow. Through text and photography, the city’s "theatrical geography" is uncovered, from the Bolshoi Theater in Theater Square to hidden gems like the recently restored Kuskovo estate.  With additional sections on street theater and other public gatherings, Theatre in Passing is a must-read book for anyone curious about the theatrical architecture and geography of Russia’s capital.

Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2017, photographer William Abranowicz was struck by the weight of historical memory at this hallowed site of one of the civil rights movement's defining episodes: 1965's “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama police officers attacked peaceful marchers. To Abranowicz’s eye, Selma seemed relatively unchanged from its apperance in the photographs Walker Evans made there in the 1930s. That, coupled with an awareness of renewed voter suppression efforts at state and federal levels, inspired Abranowicz to explore the living legacy of the civil and voting rights movement through photographing locations, landscapes, and individuals associated with the struggle, from Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte to the barn where Emmett Till was murdered.

The result is This Far and No Further, a collection of photographs from Abranowicz's journey through the American South. Through symbolism, metaphor, and history, he unearths extraordinary stories of brutality, heroism, sacrifice, and redemption hidden within ordinary American landscapes, underscoring the crucial necessity of defending—and exercising—our right to vote at this tenuous moment for American democracy.

Through interviews and a generous photograph montage stretching over two decades, reveals the commonality and diversity among these people of Indian identity

When DeSoto (in 1540) and later Juan Pardo (in 1567) marched through what was known as the province of Cofitachequi (which covered the southern part of today’s North Carolina and most of South Carolina), the native population was estimated at well over 18,000. Most shared a common Catawba language, enabling this confederation of tribes to practice advanced political and social methods, cooperate and support each other, and meet their common enemy. The footprint of the Cofitachequi is the footprint of this book.

The contemporary Catawba, Midland, Santee, Natchez-Kusso, Varnertown, Waccamaw, Pee Dee, and Lumbee Indians of North and South Carolina, have roots in pre-contact Cofitachequi. Names have changed through the years; tribes split and blended as the forces of nature, the influx of Europeans, and the imposition of federal government authority altered their lives. For a few of these tribes, the system has worked well—or is working well now. For others, the challenge continues to try to work with and within the federal government’s system for tribal recognition—a system governing Indians but not created by them. Through interviews and a generous photograph montage stretching over two decades, Gene Crediford reveals the commonality and diversity among these people of Indian identity; their heritage, culture, frustrations with the system, joys in success of the younger generation, and hope for the future of those who come after them. This book is the story of those who remain.
 

Tierra Santa follows photographer Carolyn Brown into the Americas, from the temple mountains of the Maya and the kivas of the Pueblo Southwest to the candlelit churches of colonial Mexico and Guatemala. Over decades of travel, Brown has photographed wherever people have recognized something holy, whether an ancient plaza open to the sky or a village chapel at the end of a dirt road.

The photographs do more than document. In a bank of flickering candles and a hillside terraced into a pyramid, Brown finds the vitality that many cultures have felt in these places—the sense that earth and sky were already sacred and that human beings have only answered its call. Essays by leading scholars of archaeology, anthropology, and colonial history trace how successive peoples made room for the divine. Brown's own reflections close the book with a pilgrimage through the Sierra Gorda.

Together, the images and essays offer an invitation to look slowly and to notice. Stay with them long enough and these places begin to stir memory and awe, along with a profound sense that the sacred was here long before we arrived and remains, patiently, wherever we're willing to see it.

A history of China’s transition from empire to modern nation, told through photographs by and of Chinese Catholic communities.

Time Exposures explores how historical photographs created by and of Chinese Catholic communities illuminate the vicissitudes of China’s transition from empire to modern nation. Relying on an expansive worldwide network of Catholic photographic archives, this book examines largely unseen and unpublished images related to Catholicism in China. These images, made from the 1870s through the 1990s, were central to visual practices and afterlives that represent, recover, and reenvision diverse Chinese experiences. This volume provides insight into the lives of women and men behind and in front of the camera who were important documentarians of China’s local and national changes over time, shaping ways of seeing and belonging to the country’s many cultural evolutions.

Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world.

Winner of the 2024 Roberto Reis Book Award
Winner of the LASA Environment Section Best Book of 2023
Winner of the LASA Amazonian Studies Section Best Book of 2024 
Co-Winner of the LASA Book Award for the Visual Culture Studies 2024

A richly illustrated examination of photography as a technology for documenting, creating, and understanding the processes of modernization in turn-of-the-century Brazil and the Amazon

Photography at the turn of the twentieth century was not only a product of modernity but also an increasingly available medium to chronicle the processes of modernization. Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America situates photography’s role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multimedia assemblages, Carolina Sá Carvalho explores how this visual evidence of violence was framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated. As she explains, this photographic creation and circulation generated a pedagogy of the gaze with which increasingly connected urban audiences were taught what and how to see: viewers learned to interpret the traces of violence captured in these images within the larger context of modernization.

Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Moreover, Sá Carvalho locates historically specific practices of seeing within the geopolitical peripheries of capitalism. What emerges is a consideration of photography as a technology through which modern aspirations, moral inclinations, imagined futures, and lost pasts were represented, critiqued, and mourned.

Explore the scientific crescendo of the Manhattan Project through newly contextualized and never-before-seen photographs from Los Alamos National Laboratory’s legacy collections—some just declassified.
 
Twenty-one days before the world learned of the atomic bomb through its wartime use against Japan, a team of scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer detonated the first nuclear device on a remote stretch of New Mexico desert, in an operation codenamed Trinity. Both a military proof test and an elaborate, well-documented scientific experiment, the Trinity shot on July 16, 1945, brought under the control of humankind a new fire: the energy of the atom.
 
In this expertly curated journey through the beginning of the atomic age, hundreds of carefully restored photographs, still frames, and once-secret documents bring new and vivid focus to a watershed moment in science and history. Written for all to understand, Trinity weaves steadily through subplots and surprises set against the evolving, looming backdrop of a world at war. It shadows the humans and hardware at work in the rugged landscape of the test operation; dissects a fiery mushroom cloud unfurling frame by frame, frozen in time; and follows soldiers, scientists, and two atomic bombs across the Pacific Ocean to Tinian Island, onto the strike planes Enola Gay and Bockscar, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two Japanese cities devastated on August 6 and 9, 1945.
 
Inviting readers into the clandestine spaces where a new era began—behind the cameras, the bunker doors, the gates and guard posts—Trinity strives, grieves, celebrates, and ponders. It artfully captures that extraordinary summer when scientists invented urgently in the waning months of the “before”—and the tension between violence and progress, hope and fear, that persists into the after.

Situated in the South Texas borderlands some fifty miles west of Corpus Christi, San Diego was a thriving town already a hundred years old at the turn of the twentieth century. With a population that was 90 percent Mexican or Mexican American and 10 percent Anglo, the bicultural community was the seat of Duval County and a prosperous town of lumberyards, banks, mercantile stores, and cotton gins, which also supplied the needs of area ranchers and farmers. Though Anglos dominated its economic and political life, San Diego was culturally Mexican, and Mexican Americans as well as Anglos built successful businesses and made fortunes.

This collection of nearly one hundred photographs from the estate of amateur photographer William Hoffman captures the cosmopolitan town of San Diego at a vibrant moment in its history between 1898 and 1909. Grouped into the categories women and their jobs, local homes, men and their businesses, children at school and church, families and friends, and entertainment about town, the photos offer an immediate visual understanding of the cultural and economic life of the community, enhanced by detailed captions that identify the subjects and circumstances of the photos. An introductory historical chapter constitutes the first published history of Duval County, which was one of the most important areas of South Texas in the early twentieth century.

Unveiling the avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design
 

The concept Typophoto, the synthesis of photography and typography, was coined by renowned Bauhaus artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Jessica D. Brier examines how Typophoto was embraced by early graphic designers—a group who ultimately reinvented photography as a tool of modern consumerism.

Typophoto embodied designers’ belief in photography as an efficient form of visual communication, merging the material and the visual by abstracting both typographic and photographic form and transmuting photography into graphic material through the halftone process. Uniquely situating 1920s advertising discourse alongside avant-garde theory and significant interwar photographic concepts, Brier positions Typophoto as an analytical framework for considering how photography—as process, image, material, and metaphor—was effectively reconceived through the professionalization of graphic design in Europe and the United States. This was particularly true in Germany, where the capitalist ethos driving the country’s economic recovery bolstered the belief that graphics could create ideal reader-consumers.

Tracing Typophoto from its inception through New Typography’s experiments with the medium, Brier demonstrates how photography was used as a tool for manipulating perception as it became a visual language of modern life.