Winner of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize In this book, Alan Trachtenberg reinterprets some of America's most significant photographs, presenting them not as static images but rather as rich cultural texts suffused with meaning and historical content. Reading American Photographs is lavishly illustrated with the work of such luminaries as Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Walker Evans--pictures that document the American experience from 1839 to 1938. In an outstanding analysis, Trachtenberg eloquently articulates how the art of photography has both followed and shaped the course of American history, and how images captured decades ago provocatively illuminate the present.

Dorothea Lange's photographs define how the American Depression is remembered; this evocative biography defines her creative struggles and enduring legacy.

"Academy Award-wining filmmaker Errol Morris investigates the hidden truths behind a series of documentary photographs. In Believing Is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate.

"In this pioneering book, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed nearly 150 photographs--some never before published--from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration ... From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end."--Book jacket

Text by Max Kozloff, Jeffrey Ladd.

This publication is the product of the collaboration of two of the finest creative individuals at work in South Africa today, a photographer and a novelist, on a project that is the city of Johannesburg. 'Johannesburg is a fragmented city. It is not a place of smoothly integrated parts. And it has a name that does not roll easily off the tongue.' So begins David Goldblatt's introduction to TJ, a book of photographs of Johannesburg. Commencing in the 1950s, his masterful lens probes, documents and comments on life over six decades in this incomparable African city. Selected from a massive body of work, this superb distillation presents a unique pictorial history of the city. A new novel by Ivan Vladislavic partners the book of photographs. In Double Negative, a young man in Johannesburg receives an induction into the intricate nature of photography and artistic representation. The novel traces the young man as he heads into his career that takes him overseas and back, developing in the process an ever widening perspective on not only the social and political change in the country but also on questions to do with observation and the observing subject. It brings into sharp focus the history of South Africa's recent past and the difficulty of imaging and re-imagining it.

The climax of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign Published in 1970, Jill Freedman's Old News: Resurrection City documented the culmination of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968, organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of Dr King's assassination. Three thousand people set up camp for six weeks in a makeshift town that was dubbed Resurrection City, and participated in daily protests. Freedman lived in the encampment for its entire six weeks, photographing the residents, their daily lives, their protests and their eventual eviction. This new 50th-anniversary edition of the book reprints most of the pictures from the original publication, with improved printing and a more vivid design. Alongside Freedman's hard-hitting original text, two introductory essays are included, by John Edwin Mason, historian of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, and by Aaron Bryant, Curator of Photography at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The photographs of Jill Freedman (born 1939) are held in the permanent collections of major art institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; the New York Public Library; the Jewish Museum, New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has had solo exhibitions at numerous museums, including the International Center of Photography, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the George Eastman House. Seven monographs of her work have been published: Old News: Resurrection City (Grossman, 1970); Circus Days (Harmony, 1975); Firehouse (Doubleday, 1977); Street Cops (Harper & Row, 1982); A Time That Was: Irish Moments (Friendly Press, 1987); Jill's Dogs (Pomegranate Art Books, 1993); and Ireland Ever (Harry Abrams, 2004). Freedman is represented by Steven Kasher Gallery.