During the 1930s, the world of photography was unsettled, exciting, and boisterous. John Raeburn's A Staggering Revolution recreates the energy of the era by surveying photography's rich variety of innovation, exploring the aesthetic and cultural achievements of its leading figures, and mapping the paths their pictures blazed public's imagination. _x000B_While other studies of thirties photography have concentrated on the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), no previous book has considered it alongside so many of the decade's other important photographic projects. A Staggering Revolution includes individual chapters on Edward Steichen's celebrity portraiture; Berenice Abbott's Changing New York project; the Photo League's ethnography of Harlem; and Edward Weston's western landscapes, made under the auspices of the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer. It also examines Margaret Bourke_White's industrial and documentary pictures, the collective undertakings by California's Group f.64, and the fashion magazine specialists, as well as the activities of the FSA and the Photo League. _x000B_Raeburn's expansive study explains how the democratic atmosphere of thirties photography nourished innovation and encouraged new heights of artistic achievement. It also produced the circumstances that permitted artful photography to become such a thriving public enterprise during the decade. A Staggering Revolution offers an illuminating analysis of the sociology of photography's art world and its galleries and exhibitions, but also demonstrates the importance of the novel venues created by impresarios and others that proved essential to photography's extraordinary dissemination. These new channels, including camera magazines and annuals, volumes of pictures enhanced by text, and omnibus exhibitions in unconventional spaces, greatly expanded photography's cultural visibility. They also made its enthusiastic audience larger and more heterogeneous than ever before - or since.

A postcard craze gripped the nation from 1905 to 1920, as the rise of outdoor photography coincided with a wave of settlement and prosperity in Texas. Hundreds of people took up cameras, and photographers of note chose some of their best work for duplication as photo postcards—sold for a nickel and mailed for a penny to distant friends and relatives.   These postcards, which now enjoy another kind of craze in the collecting world, left what author John Miller Morris calls a "significant visual legacy" of the history and social geography of Texas. For more than a decade, Morris has been finding and studying the photographers and methodically gathering their postcards. In Taming the Land, he shares those finds with readers, introducing each photographer and providing interpretive descriptions of the places, people, or events depicted in the photographs. The stories the cards tell—in the images captured and the messages carried—add an exceptional dimension to our understanding of life in rural Texas a century ago.   Taming the Land presents postcards from twenty-four counties in the booming Texas Panhandle. This is the first book in a set called Plains of Light, which will collect and document turn-of-the-twentieth-century photo postcards from all over West Texas.

Philip Perkis, the accomplished photographer and educator, now presents the second edition of Teaching Photography, Notes Assembled—the slim, unassuming book that has been an unexpected hit in photography circles. This expanded edition features an additional chapter and is co-published by OB Press and RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, both affiliated with Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT offers one of the nation’s oldest and most-respected degree programs in photographic arts and sciences. In Teaching Photography…, Perkis draws from four decades of teaching experience at such institutions as Pratt Institute, and Cooper Union, as well as School of Visual Arts in New York. He has distilled his knowledge into this volume of thoughts on visual perception, successful photo lesson exercises, and practical teaching advice for photography instructors. Perkis expresses his acute observations as a means of provoking discussion and inspiring the younger generation of photography students and educators. Carefully typeset with ample margins and devoid of photographic images, the reader is encouraged to exercise the mind’s capacity to visualize—a vital tool for the art of making photographs.

Just one hundred and ten miles south of the Texas-Louisiana border, beneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, lie two coral reefs, together called the Flower Garden Banks. This coral community, the northernmost reef system in the United States and a national marine sanctuary, is home to hundreds of kinds of fish and other tropical sea life. Manta rays and turtles visit regularly, as do whale sharks and schools of hammerhead sharks. Other wonders include the annual mass coral spawns and a briny depression called Gollum Lake. Nearby are two other reefs. Stetson Bank, its top spotted with hard corals, mollusks, and sponges, is known for its diversity—from black sea hares to golden smooth trunkfish. At Geyer Bank, thousands of butterfly fish dominate a huge population of tropical fish whose density rivals that of the coral reefs in the South Pacific. Protruding from the flat, muddy continental shelf, these and thirty other natural reefs support an exceptional amount and variety of sea life in Texas waters. They sit amid hundreds of oil and gas platforms, which create their own special reef ecosystems. These reefs, equal in their profusion of life and color to the storied reefs of Florida and Hawaii, have not been widely known to Texans outside of a small group of scientists and divers. With extraordinary photographs and a knowledgeable first-person narrative, author Jesse Cancelmo instills an appreciation for the beauty and fragility of one of the state’s least-known natural environments. Texas Coral Reefs will inspire adventurers—both the underwater and armchair varieties—to enjoy these spectacular but little-known sites that lie so close to home.

This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is a paradigm-shifting publication that presents the Civil Rights Movement through the work of nine activist photographers-men and women who chose to document the national struggle against segregation and other forms of race-based disenfranchisement from within the movement. Unlike images produced by photojournalists, who covered breaking news events, these photographers lived within the movement-primarily within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framework-and documented its activities by focusing on the student activists and local people who together made it happen.

The core of the book is a selection of 150 black-and-white photographs, representing the work of photographers Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. Images are grouped around four movement themes and convey SNCC's organizing strategies, resolve in the face of violence, impact on local and national politics, and influence on the nation's consciousness. The photographs and texts of This Light of Ours remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of "ordinary" Americans among whom were the nation's courageous youth, and that the movement's moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives.

Tom Weschler spent more than ten years from the late 1960s through the 1970s in the Bob Seger camp, working as tour manager and photographer during Seger’s hard-gigging, heavy-traveling, reputation-making early days. Weschler’s behind-the-scenes photographs document the frustrations and triumphs of recording, performing, songwriting, and building the Seger empire before the breakthroughs of Live Bullet and Night Moves. Travelin’ Man collects Weschler’s early photos with additional images leading into the present. Weschler and award-winning music journalist Gary Graff annotate the images with Weschler’s recollections of the events and Graff provides additional background on Seger’s career in an introduction, timeline, and cast of characters section. Weschler’s photographs and stories pull back the curtain on seldom-seen aspects of Seger’s career, including time in the studio recording Mongrel, early struggles to get radio airplay, and small shows at schools and shopping malls. Weschler captures Seger’s personality on stage and at home and reveals the colorful personalities of those people he worked and performed with, including Alice Cooper, Bruce Springsteen, Glenn Frey, and KISS. He takes readers inside Seger headquarters in Birmingham, Michigan, and practice space in Rochester, Michigan, introducing them to renowned manager Punch Andrews and the various members of Seger’s bands. Weschler’s photos feature highlights like Seger’s show at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1976, his first gold record in 1977, the first meeting between Seger and Bruce Springsteen in 1978, and Seger’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Travelin’ Man also contains art from eight Seger album covers that Weschler designed, a foreword by John Mellencamp, an afterword by Kid Rock, and a comprehensive discography. Seger fans and readers interested in music and biography will enjoy the one of a kind story in Travelin’ Man.

In a work of sweeping breadth and beauty, Geoff Winningham has created a profusely illustrated, contemplative travel journal that showcases his talent as both a photographer and a writer and reveals his affection and respect for the two countries he calls home. In 2003, photographer Geoff Winningham saw for the first time both the southern coast of Veracruz, with its volcanoes, rain forests, and steep mountains, and the Texas coast near High Island, where the land seems to stretch endlessly, covered by a sea of salt grass. He decided that these two visually striking areas could be the beginning and end points of a photographic study that would also engage the two cultures in which he had lived for twenty years, the U.S. and Mexico. Now, seven years and more than a hundred trips later, Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea: The Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico is the result. In this beautifully illustrated and engagingly written book, Winningham also considers the role that the Gulf of Mexico played in the discovery and exploration of the New World. Winningham's journey begins east of High Island, in Port Arthur, where the images suggest a cautionary tale relating to the oil industry and the land. It ends twelve hundred miles down the coast at the end of an old, stone road in tropical terrain of almost indescribable beauty, overlooking the sea. In between, more than two hundred photographs include natural landscapes (ranging from unspoiled to completely despoiled), roadside architecture and signage, and images of people Winningham met. As he attempts to come to terms with the disturbing changes he witnessed to the coastal environment, the book also contains elements of a poignant, personal lament for what is being lost. Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea: The Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico will delight and enchant readers with its deeply felt personal narrative and the power and beauty of its images.

Compelling case studies of groups in Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, the United States, and Canada using the arts for education, community development, and social movement building. This compelling collection of inspiring case studies from community arts projects in five countries will inform and inspire students, artists, and activists. ¡Viva! is the product of a five-year transnational research project that integrates place, politics, passion, and praxis. Framed by postcolonial theories of decolonization, the pedagogy of the oppressed articulated by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and the burgeoning field of community arts, this collection not only analyzes the dynamic integration of the critical and the creative in social justice movements, it embodies such a praxis. Learn from Central America: Kuna children’s art workshops, a community television station in Nicaragua, a cultural marketplace in Guadalajara, Mexico, community mural production in Chiapas; and from North America: arts education in Los Angeles inner-city schools, theatre probing ancestral memory, community plays with over one hundred participants, and training programs for young artists in Canada. These practices offer critical hope for movements hungry for new ways of knowing and expressing histories, identities, and aspirations, as well as mobilizing communities for social transformation. Beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, the book also includes a DVD with videos that bring the projects to life.