Text by Richard B. Woodward.

This is a popular visual history of the world from the American perspective from the end of the World War II through 1959. This book shows how our image of lifestyle was formed after the war and how the American point of view in 4-color became our life standard.

As America huffed its way to the end of the '70s, a change more profound than any one cultural trope's evolutionary death knell was taking place. Perceptively distilled in a new volume of photographs by longtime National Geographic shooter Nathan Benn, Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990 depicts an America of boisterous legend and vibrant regionalism, teetering on the cusp of the coming Information Age's great cultural flattening. Nathan Benn embraced color photography before it was considered an acceptable medium for serious documentary expression, traveling globally for National Geographic magazine for two decades. In revisiting his archive of almost half a million images, and editing his photographs with a 21st-century perspective, he discovered hundreds of unpublished American pictures that appeared inconsequential to editors of the 1970s and 1980s, but now resonate-in beautiful Kodachrome color-with empathic perspectives on everyday life in forgotten neighborhoods. Kodachrome Memory exemplifies forthright storytelling about everyday people and vernacular spaces. The photographs, organized by geographic and cultural affinities (North East, Heartland, Pittsburgh, and Florida), delight with poetic happenstance, melancholy framing, and wistful abandon. The past, an era heavily eulogized, comes alive again in its deliciously homely demeanor, and glorious Kodachrome hues. Yes, this is your father's America. An essay by scholar Paul M. Farber contextualizes the creation and selection of these images, offering a fresh perspective about color photography on the eve of the digital revolution. "Mr. Benn's [Kodachrome Memory] is a study of regional texture, the fruit of two decades as a photographer for National Geographic. Mr. Benn's unshowy compositions and the rich, clear colors of his Kodachrome slide-film make his images seem both timeless and particular." -The Wall Street Journal "Kodachrome Memory celebrates the significance of American regional diversity as it was 30 or 40 years ago, before the advent of Internet culture and before the country became one vast strip mall stretching from sea to sea. The seemingly inconsequential subjects of Benn's photographs-which are keenly observed and evocative of a time and place-act as metaphors for American culture and values. Although much of Benn's work was done for a magazine and not gallery walls, his use of color throughout holds its own with artists of the period such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore." -Richard Buckley "Even if you've never seen Nathan Benn's photographs from the 1970s, they feel somehow familiar-like the refrain of a half-remembered song. With a uniquely American mix of formality and ease, and a color palette so tart you can almost taste it, Benn makes the past vividly-even painfully-present. So there's nothing nostalgic about his pictures of parades, homecomings, and town meetings, juke joints and barbershops, front porches and back roads, because you are there. Maybe that's why Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990 feels like an instant classic." -Vince Aletti

Hollywood in Kodachrome by David Wills has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Tod Papageorge: Dr. Blankman ́s New York documents a brief but critical moment in the photographer's early career, the two years Papageorge shot in color in New York in the late 1960s. Black-and-white photography was still the "serious" medium, and color reserved for commercial applications; Papageorge--25 years old and newly arrived in New York City--was encouraged by his fellow photographers to seek paying magazine work by developing a body of work in color. In some ways it was a failed experiment: Papageorge mostly approached color in the same way as he approached black and white, except that he also began to intuitively produce still-life pictures with little commercial appeal, spotlighting canned hams in shop windows and political posters. But color offered Papageorge the opportunity to work in a new medium at a time of great social, political and cultural change. "I'd like to think that, in Dr. Blankman ́s New York, you'll find a persuasive account of what it meant for me to be free with a Leica in the streets of my newly adopted home of Manhattan," writes Papageorge, "a record drawn with Kodachrome film and its rich, saturated colors." Tod Papageorge (born 1940) picked up photography for the first time as a student at the University of New Hampshire. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. From 1979 to 2013 Papageorge served as Yale University's Walker Evans Professor of Photography and Director of Graduate Study in Photography.