Dixie Square Mall opened in 1966...closed in 1979...and remains standing in 2008. The local shopping mall - not too far from home - a place to shop, eat, work, and socialize. For the people of Harvey, Illinois Dixie Square Mall was this and more. Since it's closing in 1979, Dixie Square has become something else: a crumbling eyesore and a haven for crime and gang activity. Christopher W. Luhar-Trice's photographs from The Dixie Square Project beautifully document this curious artifact of American consumerism. This full-color book includes historical information about Dixie Square, maps, and over 50 color photographs by the artist telling the visual story of America's most famous dead mall, best known for it's appearance in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. For updates and more information please visit the companion website: www.dixiesquareproject.com

"The Girl transports us with resonant authenticity into the head of a yong woman struggleing to survive the depression of the 1930s in St. Paul, Minnesota. On a backdrop of state violence and poverty, and in a life shaped by desperation and gender-based violence, The Girl illustrates the ways working-class women keep each other alive and seed transformational change through self-organized systems of mutual aid."--Back cover.

Abandoned buildings in the West are the subjects of these haunting photographs depicting the daily life and melancholy beauty of what was left behind. The seventy-four color photos are a reminder of the American West as it used to be.

This title examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world.

Originally intended as an examination of the rise and fall of the state hospital system, Matthew Christopher's Abandoned America rapidly grew to encompass derelict factories and industrial sites, schools, churches, power plants, hospitals, prisons, military installations, hotels, resorts, homes, and more.

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the "dictionary" she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. An instant classic, Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

A "deeply moving survey of the great civic structures that Philadelphia erected, then neglected."—Philadelphia Inquirer "An aesthetic masterpiece—most relevant and revealing for our time."—Robert Venturi With the photographs in this book, Vincent Feldman offers Philadelphians a testament of who we were, who we are, and who we are likely to become. Some of his subjects have succumbed to neglect or demolition (the Ridge Avenue Farmers' Market, for example); some have been successfully rehabilitated to new uses (the Victory Building); while others remain in limbo in their ruined states—their futures far from secure. Yet besides recording the current state of the buildings, Feldman's photographs can play an active role in their preservation and renovation. His photos can serve, not only as documentary records, but also as catalysts for the rescue and rehabilitation of some of Philadelphia's most significant and neglected "abandoned" city architecture. "By focusing on buildings that embody the civic aspirations of decades past and by portraying them in such stark terms, Vincent Feldman has created a body of work that is a vivid reminder of the fragile nature of what we have inherited and the need to remain ever diligent in its preservation."—John Andrew Gallery, "On Vincent Feldman's Philadelphia" "[Feldman's] images move us to a deeper feeling and understanding of the city, as they pose important questions about our stewardship and the city's future. It's the story of a city on the edge, and we're glad to be along for this freeze-frame journey of photographic brinksmanship."—Kenneth Finkel, "Looking at the Past" "By inviting you to look carefully at buildings from Philadelphia's past, I hope to promote inquiry about our history and also to inspire thoughtful discussion about what we might do for our future."—Vincent D. Feldman, from his Introduction "[Vincent] Feldman is not the kind of photographer who shoots and runs. An old-school craftsman, he uses a large-format view camera much like the one Mathew Brady hauled around to record the devastation of the Civil War. Feldman then retreats to the darkroom to print his images on paper, rendering them with such precision that bricks and stones appear to leap from the page in three-dimensional relief."—Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer The Wall Street Journal writes that the images of City Abandoned are "a melancholy catalog of such civic failures. In understated compositions that transcend merely local appeal, [Feldman] documents schools, theaters, hotels and churches left to deteriorate even as Philadelphia's downtown has boomed."

A beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence "[Flyn] captures the dread, sadness, and wonder of beholding the results of humanity's destructive impulse, and she arrives at a new appreciation of life, 'all the stranger and more valuable for its resilence.'" --The New Yorker Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ. Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an "island" of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists. Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unexpected environmental significance, where the natural world has reasserted its wild power and promise. And while it doesn't let us off the hook for addressing environmental degradation and climate change, it is a case that hope is far from lost, and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated through ecological processes and, in fact, they already are.

Ancient civilisations in Vietnam, the lost cities of the Amazon, the cities and towns of humankind have fought for space against the overwhelming power of nature. We think we’ve mastered it, but discoveries across the world show abandoned cities, their proud buildings now flooded, overtaken by the forests, nature taking back what once was its own, with the slow, relentlessness of time. But there are modern places too, towns built by corrupt local officials that were never occupied, amusement parks closed due to terrible tragedy, settlements sinking ineluctably into the mud, cities destroyed by radiation, these are the remnants of a generation, an entire society wiped from the earth, leaving only dismembered traces of memory. This exotic, powerful new book evokes the eerie, haunted places that retain small touches of humanity: a car with only one wheel, a battered doll, torn shirts on a washing line, a broken ferris wheel, all of them are shattered dreams that dwell now only in the imagination.

Renunciation as a creative force in the careers of writers, philosophers, and artists is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock’s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of artists and intellectuals to society in productive and unpredictable ways. In a work of remarkable synthesis that includes traditions and genres from antiquity to postmodernity, Posnock discovers connections among disparate figures ranging from Lao Tzu to Dave Chappelle and Bob Dylan. The thread running through these acts of renunciation, he argues, is an aesthetic and ethical resistance to the demand that one’s words and actions be straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Modern art in particular valorizes the nonconceptual and the intuitive, seeking to make silence articulate and incompletion fertile. Renouncers reject not only artistic and scholarly conventions but also the public roles that attend them. Wittgenstein, Rimbaud, and Glenn Gould brazenly flouted professional and popular expectations, demanding that philosophy, poetry, music play by new rules. Emerson and Nietzsche severed all institutional ties, while William James waged a guerrilla campaign from his post at Harvard against what all three considered to be the enemy: the pernicious philosophical insistence on rationality. Posnock also examines renunciations in light of World War II—the veterans J. D. Salinger and George Oppen, and the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—while a fourth cluster includes the mystic Thomas Merton and the abstract painters Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin.