The East Coast of North America is a wondrous, intriguing, yet threatened coastline. It zigs and zags for more than 5,500 miles and assumes a multifaceted, jigsaw shape from the Arctic Circle and Greenland across the Canadian Maritimes, then southward into Maine, Cape Cod, New York Harbor, the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, along the Outer Banks to Charleston Harbor and on to Cape Canaveral. It ends at the Dry Tortugas on the western tip of the Florida Keys near the Tropic of Cancer. In this companion book to "West Coast: Bering to Baja", David Freese has once again captured a vast coastal region—one that presently faces a major peril from the rising sea brought about by global climate change and higher temperatures on land and in the ocean. There are wonderful surprises here. The remote regions of Greenland, northern Quebec, Labrador, and Newfoundland offer breathtaking beauty that many people would not normally associate with the East Coast. As seen from the air, there are estuaries, fjords, cities, rivers, bays, wildlife refuges, parks, beaches, and islands that create stunning abstract shapes which also reveal their fragility in the face of the increasing sea-level. Simon Winchester, always the master storyteller, provides the informative and captivating tale about the geological underpinnings and climatic history of the Atlantic seaboard, including an ominous view of what lies ahead. Jenna Butler, an award-winning Canadian author, gives a noteworthy commentary on Freese’s photographs, as she places the images in context with the expansive North American environment and explains the effects and risks of global warming to the populations of Canada and the United States. East Coast: Arctic to Tropic is the perfect complement to West Coast: Bering to Baja, in which Freese explored the creation and dangers associated with the North American portion of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. Together, the books provide a unique photographic and historical record of these two remarkably diverse Atlantic and Pacific Coasts at the very start of a true land-and-sea change brought about by human use of fossil fuels. In "East Coast: Arctic to Tropic", an extraordinary sequence of photographs tells the Atlantic tale and reveals an ocean that lies in wait.

Take Me to the River explores four post-industrial rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean—the Androscoggin (Maine/New Hampshire), Schuylkill (Pennsylvania), James (Virginia), and Savannah (Georgia/South Carolina)—as they emerge from two centuries of use and neglect. With vastly improved water quality in each river since enactment of the 1972 Clean Water Act, public affection has gradually increased as memories of foul smells and fetid water fade. Today, these rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, yet they have become waterways, renewed and rediscovered, that our grandparents never could have envisioned. Take Me to the River comprises four portfolios of ambrotypes of these rivers, from source to sea. Three extensive essays offer different perspectives on ways of seeing and thinking about these places: one by the photographer on the collodion process; a historical view by Alison Nordström, the former Senior Curator of Photography at the George Eastman House, on the importance of Kolster’s work; and an environmental history of Atlantic rivers by the noted historian Matthew Klingle. Kolster’s dramatic yet understated photographs were made in a portable darkroom set up along the banks of the rivers with the wet-plate photographic process, a nineteenth-century method famously used to document the battlefields of the Civil War and the great vistas of the far American West. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate mimic the movements of a river’s current, and the idiosyncratic qualities of the ambrotypes reference the historical coincidence of the dawn of photography and the industrialization of Europe and America. With consensus building about our changing climate and the extent humans are responsible, these four Atlantic rivers challenge us to set aside our usual blinders of seeing the landscape as either pure or despoiled. As the boundaries between the human and the natural are increasingly entangled, these rivers suggest how we might embrace, even cherish, places once degraded and ignored.

America’s Endangered Coasts: Photographs from Texas to Maine is a pioneering and thought-provoking photographic survey of coastal areas of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States that are already threatened by a rising sea. Using a topographic aesthetic that combines straightforward, highly detailed color photographs with GPS locations and elevations above sea level for each site, this book photographically responds to low-lying areas that are frequently over-developed and vulnerable to high tides and storms such as Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy. This book contains 168 color photographs and two essays, one by Liz Wells, a prominent British writer who offers a photo/art perspective of the work, and one by Dr. James E. Hansen, based on his prophetic scientific understandings of the climate-change crisis and some ways to address it. Current scientific projections conclusively show that the future of civilization along the world’s coasts is at stake due to the climate-change crisis. According to the latest conservative projections, Earth’s sea levels will rise by no less than three to four feet within a century and very possibly much more. This amount of sea-rise, compounded by hurricanes and storm surges, will threaten and make unsustainable large portions of the coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico, from Texas to Florida, and the Atlantic seaboard, from Florida to Maine. All coastal areas of the world, in fact, are at risk, since nearly half of the world’ population lives along and near coastal regions. America’s Endangered Coasts promises to make an important contribution to the world of photographic art and to the public’s awareness of climate change and its impact on everyday life. The book serves as both a warning of things to come and a photographic document of lasting historical value, since many areas that Ganis has photographed will be underwater by 2100. It is the first book of its kind to offer such comprehensive geographic coverage of representative areas along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts that are threatened now and in the future by a rising sea. “The coasts we’ve always known are shifting before our eyes. John Ganis’s fine book helps us with the job of paying witness; may it spur us to the job of preventing further damage.” — BILL MCKIBBEN, SCHUMANN DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR IN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE AND AUTHOR OF EARTH AND THE END OF NATURE “John Ganis has long been dedicated to exposing how the United States uses and abuses its lands. His photographs are clear and moving, putting us in places we have never been and encouraging us to see them. America’s Endangered Coasts constitutes another powerful wake-up call from the front lines of climate-change awareness.” — LUCY R. LIPPARD, AUTHOR OF THE LURE OF THE LOCAL AND UNDERMINING: A WILD RIDE THROUGH LAND USE, POLITICS, AND ART IN THE CHANGING WEST

"Backscatter is the reflection of particles, waves, or signals back to the direction from which they came: in underwater photography, back to the lens. The reflection, however, is diffuse, as opposed to clear like a mirror, thus softening images and even making them obscure.For this book, Tom Young has embraced backscatter as both subject and metaphor to render spaces below and above the water's surface—between here and there—in highly original ways. Our senses are awakened as Young creates images that evoke an evolutionary path from sea to land, that speak of a global environment increasingly threatened by human action, and that enlighten our consciousness with an abiding spirit larger than ourselves. In Young's previous book, the masterful Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed, the artist was drawn to the way multiple images can be assembled into a single photographic plate that both alters the intent and enhances the meaning of the individual images. Young has followed that same path in Backscatter, as the edge of one image is shared with the edge of another that simultaneously can fuse them into one voice or let them remain as separate voices, suggesting a deep conversation either way. As the sequence evolves, so, too, does the visual narrative whose assembly of diverse images presents unexpected relationships and an unforgettable storyline. Metaphorically, Backscatter is about looking head on into a void where what lies above and below the water's surface can seem harmonious yet helter-skelter. As John Rohrbach observes in his afterword, this is a “ferocious book” that brings us to a myriad places, each one real and imagined, conveying an overall sense of the human journey through life."

Winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Literature award for photography.The rural American South has no grand cathedrals or other wonder-of-the-world monuments to religious belief. Nor has it ever been the site of religious wars or large-scale religious persecutions we see throughout the world. Nevertheless, as David Wharton reveals in his remarkable new book of photographs, the rural South is a place—a land, a region, a culture, a "way of life"—so heavily invested in religious belief that the spiritual is constantly made manifest in the ordinary. This is how religion becomes pervasive and integral to everyday life in the South for believers and nonbelievers alike.Just as David Wharton did for his pioneering book, Small Town South, he has traveled throughout the entire South since 1999, on hundreds of trips, making thousands upon thousands of photographs about the region's spiritual landscapes—from churches both active and abandoned in all vernacular shapes and sizes to actual church services and outdoor baptisms, from iconographic signs about Jesus and redemption and sin to welcoming gestures about the wonders of revivals and of grace and compassion. Lurking behind every image, however, is a sense of place about this most distinctive American region, in which religious commitment is confined neither to Sundays nor to individual houses of worship. Religion in the rural South is, quite literally, everywhere.It is Wharton's unique gift that his photographs have meaning and memory beyond merely recording the physical appearance of spiritual sites and worship activities. The people and places that appear in The Power of Belief are seen not to be a product of recent changes in religious life seen elsewhere in urban and suburban America but, instead, as an ongoing living tradition that dates back far into the history and culture of the rural South.

An important and strikingly beautiful book about the sacred Hindu practice of threshold drawing!In the Hindu world-view, threshold is a profoundly important concept that represents a passage between one space and place and another, creating a visual bridge between the secular and the sacred. Accordingly, the literal threshold a person crosses when entering and exiting a home or business symbolizes the threshold one crosses between the physical and spiritual realms of existence. Hindus have long believed it is possible to affect a person's well-being by using diagrams to sanctify the "threshold space." The diagrams do so by "trapping" ill will, evil, bad luck, or negative energy within their colorful and elaborate configurations, thereby cleansing those who traverse the space and sending them on their way with renewed spirit, positive energy, and good luck and fortune.The creation of the threshold diagrams is steeped in Indian history and culture going back thousands of years. Practiced by women, it was long considered a vernacular art. But, as this pioneering book reveals, the diagrams represent highly sophisticated mathematical and cosmological underpinnings that have been handed down from one generation of women to the next. As India has modernized and rapidly become more urban, however, more Indian women have acquired more complicated lives, allowing less time to continue the practice of threshold drawing and relying, increasingly, on homogenized pattern books. And so a long-standing and critically important expression of Indian life, religion, and culture is becoming less common to the point the tradition is threatened.Across the Threshold of India reveals, the story of the threshold drawings for the first time, history of how the threshold drawings evolved, what they have meant and represent in Indian and Hindu culture, and how the practice became a high form of vernacular art for religious and everyday life. By combining her unforgettable photographs—most of which are in the permanent collection of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the nation's foremost research center for Indian culture and art—with the most recent scholarship on the history and art of the threshold drawings, Martha A. Strawn has given the world a unique and enduring gift. Her book is a work of visual ecology that perceptively portrays one of India's and the world's longest and least-known religious practices—the art of sanctifying space through the creation of threshold diagrams.By presenting the most recent scholarship on the history and art of the threshold drawings and combining that engaging tale with her wonderful fine-art and documentary photographs, Martha Strawn has given the world a unique and enduring gift: a work of visual ecology that perceptively portrays one of India's and the world's longest and least-known religious practices: the art of sanctifying space through threshold drawings.

Exceptional colour photographs of the mid-twentieth-century motels of Wildwood, New Jersey, USA, the largest concentration of the exuberant architectural style sometimes known as 'doo wop' complete with neon signs and plastic palms. The images in this book are the result of a ten-year project by Mark Havens to capture the essence of these vanishing treasures. A number of the motels were photographed at the end of their last season, just prior to demolition. The images are accompanied by essays from Joseph Giovanni and Jamer Hunt.

For five consecutive years Dublin-based photojournalists Tomasz Bereska and Tomasz Szustek have travelled to Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday to take photographic portraits of some of the 20,000+ pilgrims who climb the ‘Holy Mountain’, focusing on the incredible diversity and different backgrounds of the participants. In Atlantic Tabor they present 60 stunning colour portraits of the pilgrims, plus an additional 60 atmospheric B&W photos that add to the story. To complement the beautiful images, the photographers invited Dr Patrick Claffey, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department for Study of Religions and Theology at Trinity College Dublin to contribute to the project. Dr Claffey provides a brilliant analysis of pilgrimage phenomena in general terms worldwide, as well as more detailed exploration of Croagh Patrick in particular. He explains how pilgrimages were once primarily sacred but increasingly have become secular; he lists many of the holy mountains of the world and their associated pilgrimages; he describes the myths, prehistory and early history associated with Croagh Patrick; he defines the role ‘the Reek’ has played over the centuries in Connaught Catholicism; and he shows in detail the various paths one can take to climb Croagh Patrick and what to expect at the summit.

Nominated for the 2016 IPPY Award in both the Photography and Current Events categories.Memento Mori: Testament to Life is a poignant tribute to the victims of Colombia’s armed conflict that has claimed more than 250,000 people during the last fifty years. The book is presented as four bodies of photographic work in a two-volume, bi-lingual edition: English and Spanish. The first volume includes hauntingly beautiful images of Diettes’s photographic work on display at museums and at memorials in areas where the victims “disappeared,” a moving statement by the artist herself, an essay by Mexican scholar Ileana Diéguez, and an extensive conversation with the artist by Anne Wilkes Tucker, former Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.The second volume showcases the plates from three photographic series: Sudarios (Shrouds), photographs printed on linen of women who have witnessed atrocities committed against their loved ones, Río Abajo (Drifting Away), images of articles of clothing of “the disappeared,” photographed in water and embedded in glass, and Relicarios (Reliquaries), three-dimensional works of polymer containing mementos and personal effects of the victims. At once majestic, accessible, and deeply moving, this book makes a significant contribution not only to documentary art, contemporary Latin American studies, and social anthropology but also to those wanting to understand, at a very basic level, the human cost of terrorism. As Anne Wilkes Tucker writes, Erika Diettes’s unforgettable book speaks “of universal loss from violent death.” And it is through her art that we learn how to grieve from such loss.

Near the homes of photographers John Willis and Tom Young is a paper mill that sits in the otherwise pristine and picturesque climes of western Massachusetts. For Willis and Young, this site is one of both aesthetic and philosophical contradictions: despite its verdant locale, the mill—with its smokestacks and countless bales of discarded paper—brings to mind the dreariness of industrialization and the impermanence of life itself. But the factory is actually one where such litter is reborn as reusable paper. Willis and Young’s quadtone photographs transform this mill and the innumerable mounds of recyclable waste it processes daily into an indelible and evocative landscape. Recycled Realities is not a jeremiad foretelling the consequences of excessive waste, rampant pollution, or unbridled consumption but rather a profound meditation on the hidden connections and meanings that linger beneath the debris and detritus of everyday life. These unforgettable images of discarded paper from the printed world trace the processes of emergence, revelation, and redemption that make the cycle of life possible.

Old houses may not be haunted, but they retain many palpable vestiges of their pasts. And when Margot Anne Kelley and her husband, Rob, moved into an old farmhouse, they inherited that past as well as the property. On their one acre on Maine's mid-coast, they learned much about the history of their home not by visiting the local historical society but by spending time observing the trees, plants, and grasses that had been planted by those who once owned their land. What they discovered is a landscape history that harkens deep into New England's past. In this field guide to other people's trees, we learn about some of those past owners and their trees. Guided by Kelley's evocative text and gorgeous photographs, we come to appreciate the same lessons that she did—that plants carry the past into the present, that we are part of a rich and interconnected world. In sharing her property with us, Kelley gives us a glimpse of her unique part of New England, encouraging us by her own example to imagine the many gifts we, too, inherit with a house and plot of land. Intimate and informative, Kelley's field guide is a joy to read and a gift to all who share her love of nature and of place. Like the plants that define her land in Maine, this book invites readers to recognize that we can be fully grounded in our home place.

Rock Creek Park is Nature's gem in Washington, DC. Twice the size of famed Central Park in New York City, Rock Creek Park is the wild, wooded heart of the nation's capital, offering refuge and a keen sense of place for millions of residents and visitors each year.Rock Creek Valley serves as the spine of the national park. Its history is long and storied, from native Indian tribes who fished the creek, hunted the woods, and quarried the rock outcroppings, to Euro-Americans' claims on the land as mill sites, to deforestation near Fort DeRussyduring the American Civil War, to its ecological preservation and designation as a federal park in 1890, the same year Yosemite in California became a national park.Melanie Choukas-Bradley, a renowned naturalist, writer, and teacher in the DC area, spent a full year in the national park recording her observations. She walked and skied its trails several times a week and in all weather conditions, observing and recording natural events in such engaging prose and insight that we feel right at home when she explores the park's many "environmental moments." As Choukas-Bradley writes: "Rock Creek Park's legendary 'wildness' has inspired not only American Presidents such as John Quincy Adams, who heralded Rock Creek as 'this romantic glen,' and Teddy Roosevelt, who led hikes and rock-scrambles there, but also other devotees such as Edward O. Wilson, the world-renowned scientist who, as a boy, fondly studied in the park's environs."But this is more than a nature book, for Choukas-Bradley makes enlightened connections between the natural cycles of life within the park and her life as both a naturalist and writer and a wife and mother. Woven into her wanderings is an exuberance for the restorative powers of Nature and a yearning for better stewardship of our earthly home. Within these pages, Choukas-Bradley leads us on a personal discovery of the wonders of Rock Creek Park. Enhanced by the beautiful photographs of Susan Austin Roth, we are given the gift of an incredible and unforgettable journey.** Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award" from the Independent Publishers Association **

How does a photographer learn to see? How does he create his own visual language—as unique as a fingerprint and as inimitable as the voice of a great writer?In Iluminaciones, Jack Parsons's seventeenth book, he takes the viewer on a very personal, deeply intuitive journey that reveals how he has honed his photographic vision. The answer is subtle—and remarkable: It is by growing into his own photographs. Here he shares with us ninety-one of his favorite photographs taken over the long arc of his stellar career. These are images that, over time, taught him, as he says, "to see the everyday world with new and better eyes" and that encouraged him "to look deeply instead of glancing and forgetting."The photographs in Iluminaciones were taken all over the world, from the vast expanses of America's desert Southwest to a mosque in Turkey and temples in Laos, Burma, and Japan, of colorful streets in Mexico and Italy to quiet swimming pools in Southern California, from monumental urban landscapes in Eastern Europe to clouds forming over Ireland and Maui. Most of the pictures are of simple, commonplace things and places that we might not give a second glance. Yet Parsons did and in so doing both reveals and celebrates the subtle power and quiet beauty of the everyday. Complemented by the artful commentary of Frederick Turner, Iluminaciones is a stunning visual exploration of the beauty that shines through our world when we take the time to stop and look.** Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award" from the Independent Publishers Association **

Jack Parsons has been investigating the incredible landscapes, amazing light, and diverse cultures of the American Southwest for more than thirty-five years, in turn becoming a master of photographic art. He has been the photographer for fifteen acclaimed books, including the seminal 1993 publication of Santa Fe Style, which helped to chronicle and establish a regional aesthetic for New Mexico's architecture that is now recognized worldwide.In his commitment to capturing and comprehending the land and life of New Mexico, Parsons has made more than 400,000 photographs of every type of landscape and culture in the 'Land of Enchantment,' as New Mexico is called. Dark Beauty features 100 of his rarely seen or published photographs of New Mexico, taken from the time of his arrival in the summer of 1969 right up to the present day.From captivating images of small towns, fiestas, and everyday life, to spectacular views of mountains, rivers, and plains, from enduring glimpses of old adobe houses, Pueblo villages, and religious structures, to refreshingly new views of murals, Main Streets, and iconography, Parsons presents a personal, elegiac narrative of his 'home place.' Seen as a whole, the photographs in Dark Beauty reveal a deep understanding and reverence for New Mexico's complex and rich history, unique multiculturalism, and unparalleled beauty. With Jack Parsons as our guide, we gain a true sense and appreciation of New Mexico's lure as a uniquely American place.From the Preface"I first came to New Mexico in the summer of 1969, driving into Taos in the late afternoon in an old VW convertible. I had gone to school in Boulder, and the West had been deeply imprinted on me. My master's thesis was on D. H. Lawrence, and this had made me wonder what effect this magical land would have on me. It didn't disappoint. Almost immediately, I fell in love with this difficult, demanding, dark, and profound world. All that we take for granted having lived here—the beautiful, slanting afternoon light, the Sangre de Cristos turning a deep red as the sun starts to disappear, sagebrush plains stretching far to the west—all of this greeted me when I first arrived in Taos, and I felt that, after many years, I was finally home." —Jack ParsonsFrom the Introduction"Among the things I admire about the photographs of Jack Parsons is that he is not afraid of the picturesque. He has not retreated from it nor found some arch way around it. Instead, Parsons walks right up to his subjects and points his lens at mountains, sunsets, cloud formations, weathered buildings, and Hispanic art. But he does so in ways that require us to really look at these things and ponder the meanings embedded in those very picturesque aspects of New Mexico that bring visitors out here while they turn many other artists away. It takes an artist to evoke this long and yet unfolding drama, yet in virtually every one of the images contained in these pages it is here for us to discover. But we have to be willing to look past the picturesque." —Frederick Turner

Route 66 was the iconic highway of twentieth-century America, stretching from downtown Chicago to the Mississippi River at East St. Louis and proceeding through the Indian lands of Oklahoma and the Southwest to Los Angeles and the Pacific Coast, connecting Americans physically and culturally. In this engaging, meticulously researched, and fully illustrated study, Arthur Krim explores the fascinating history and complex symbolism behind this most famous American highway—both on the ground and in the mind. Route 66 traces the iconography of US 66 first as an idea, then as a fact, and finally as an enduring symbol found in classic American books and films, songs and television programs, and pop art. While the antecedents of Route 66 are to be found in the prehistoric trade and hunting paths of the Indian peoples, in the Spanish expeditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the wagon trails and railroad routes of the nineteenth century, construction of Route 66 during the twentieth century ushered in the revolutionary era of the modern American highway and of cross-country automobile travel.In his innovative study, Krim discloses how the highway transcended its gravel and concrete physicality to become an enduring metaphor for the American spirit of exploration and discovery, freedom and hope that is historically found by its people heading west. He draws on a wealth of scholarly and visual materials to examine how Route 66 evolved through each passing generation, from Main Street boosters during the road's early development to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath during the Dust Bowl years, from Bobby Troup's unforgettable '(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66' to renditions of the song by Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones during the early rock and roll years, from Jack Kerouac's classic book, On the Road, to the cult film, 'Easy Rider,' and the television drama, 'Route 66,' during the pop culture years, to recent regional and mass-marketing advertising of products that rely on the transcendent Route 66 name.Combining history and geography, metaphor and captivating iconography, Krim reveals how Route 66 compressed disparate socio-economic events, traditional democratic ideals, and emerging cultural ideas into the national memory of Route 66 that prevails today. Route 66, now available in an elegant paperback edition, is a pioneering book not to be missed.** Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award" from the Independent Publishers Association **

Honoring the Doughboys: Following My Grandfather's World War I Diary is a stunning presentation of contemporary photographs taken by the author that are paired with diary entries written by his grandfather, George A. Carlson, who was a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War I. Lowdermilk followed his grandfather's path through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany and returned with these meticulously crafted photographs and his own engaging stories that bring the diary to life for contemporary readers.Lowdermilk's passion for World War I and military history began as a young boy when he listened to his grandfather tell his stories about serving as an infantryman— a "doughboy"—in Europe during the Great War. When his grandfather passed away in 1983, Lowdermilk's mother gave him her father's diary, which included not only lengthy descriptions of the landscapes, towns, and battles he had experienced, but also keen observations and insights about life as a doughboy for Mr. Carlson and his buddies.Lowdermilk became fascinated with the diary, first transcribing it and then plotting his grandfather's course. He immersed himself in the history of World War I and its geography, eventually retracing, more than a dozen years, the path of his grandfather's journey.This image-rich tour of European landscapes, battlefields, and monuments offers the reader an experience that is at once an intimate reliving of Carlson's time as a doughboy, a lively collection of Lowdermilk's travel anecdotes, and a moving expression of gratitude to American veterans of the Great War. The foreword by Helen Patton, granddaughter of General George