Introduction by Diane Mullin, Christopher Scoates, Helena Reckitt. Text by Diane Mullin, Christopher Scoates, Helena Reckitt, Dick Hebdige. Interview by Stuart Horodner.

Paul Shambroom is a Minneapolis-based photo artist who, over a period of four years, attended hundreds of town council meetings across the United States. Photographing the participants with a large-format panoramic camera, as staged tableaux, his dramatic pictures resemble epic history paintings they describe the humble practice of local government on a grand scale. A celebration of small-town America, these accessible pictures have already been lauded by the critics ("Extraordinary"-the New York Times, "Powerful"-ArtForum, "Marvelous and beautiful"-Art Review) and collected by institutions such as the Whitney and MOMA New York. The minutes of each featured meeting are reproduced in full (runs over 40 pages at the back of the book and printed on Bible paper).

Photographer Shambroom documents the post-Cold War nuclear reality in a series of striking and eerily beautiful images that offer an unprecedented inside look at America's nuclear arsenal. 83 color photos.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours. Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work. Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades? A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, Duchamp’s Last Day is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

While the crisis that took place in photojournalism during the 1960's brought about a significant shift in the practices, discourses and institutional structures of press photography, it also affected the practices of artists, specifically with regard to work devoted to revitalizing the depiction of events. The art world attempted to revitalize the historical genre by undertaking its critical rereading, in the spirit of restoring a tradition diminished by the mass media. The problem may be expressed in these terms: How can history be depicted, bearing in mind that the media (mainly photojournalism and the electronic press) have claimed a monopoly of the genre unto themselves? At issue is the sizeable problem of mass media omnipotence as an obligatory referential universe for historiographical artistic practices. Today, it seems impossible to depict the event in any way other than by accentuating or eschewing the formal attributes, rhetorical artifices, and ideological precepts of the mass media. These approaches to addressing historical moments have been examined in this article both because they epitomize contemporary historical writing and, for the most part, they constitute critical responses to stereotyped depictions of events. Above all, they represent a paradigm shift: the mass media's prerogatives for depicting historical moments has shifted towards the field of art. Contemporary depictions of catastrophe - crimes, sensationalist news items, terrorist attacks, humanitarian disasters, genocides - (common themes in many of the artistic projects represented in the 8th edition of the Mois de la Photo a Montreal} have been especially striking in this respect. For of all contemporary events, catastrophes are the most likely to be spontaneously propelled to the top of the news - roster and the most susceptible to the various inflections of contemporary art photography.

Text by Karen Irvine.

In the tumultuous, ever-shifting terrain of the digital age, this groundbreaking introductory book offers the strength and stability of the fundamental aesthetic and technical building blocks necessary to create visually stimulating and thought-provoking digitally based photographs.

"In 2009, theater artist Aaron Landsman was dragged by a friend to a city council meeting in Portland, Oregon. At first he was bored, but when a citizen dumped trash in front of the council in order to show how the city needed cleaning up, he was rapt. He saw for the first time how our civic bodies often result in a performance of democracy as much as the real thing. He began attending local government meetings across the country, interviewing council members, staffers, activists and other citizens, using an ethnographic method. Out of this initial investigation, Landsman and director Mallory Catlett developed a participatory theater piece called City Council Meeting in five US cities. ... They worked with local partners to create endings in each city about issues on the ground and trained local staffers to take audiences through the experience. Along the way they got some things right, made mistakes and learned ways to approach community engagement across geographic, racial and class lines. Five years later Catlett and Landsman returned to local partners in each city to reflect together on what the impact of the project was, how it could have been better, and what they got right"--

Our fast-changing world seen through the lenses of 140 leading contemporary photographers around the globe. With close to 500 images, many previously unpublished, this landmark publication takes stock of the material and spiritual cultures that make up 'civilization'. Ranging from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from our great collective achievements to our ruinous collective failings, Civilization: The Way We Live Now explores the complexity of contemporary civilization through the rich, nuanced language of photography. Featuring images by some 140 photographers - from Reiner Riedler's families at leisure parks, Raimond Wouda's high schools, Wang Qingsong's Work, Work, Work and Cindy Sherman's Society Portraits, to Lauren Greenfield's displays of ostentatious wealth, Edward Burtynsky's oil fields, Pablo Lopez Luz's views on a sprawling contemporary megalopolis, Thomas Struth's images of high technology, Xing Danwen's electronic wastelands and Taryn Simon's Contraband, Civilization draws together the threads of humankind's ever-changing, frenetic, collective life across the globe. Visually epic, Civilization is presented through eight thematic chapters, each featuring powerful imagery and accompanied by provocative essays, quotes and concise statements by the artists themselves.

Kristine Stiles has played a vital role in establishing trauma studies within the humanities. A formidable force in the art world, Stiles examines the significance of traumatic experiences both in the individual lives and works of artists and in contemporary international cultures since World War II. In Concerning Consequences, she considers some of the most notorious art of the second half of the twentieth century by artists who use their bodies to address destruction and violence. The essays in this book focus primarily on performance art and photography. From war and environmental pollution to racism and sexual assault, Stiles analyzes the consequences of trauma as seen in the works of artists like Marina Abramovic, Pope.L, and Chris Burden. Assembling rich intellectual explorations on everything from Paleolithic paintings to the Bible’s patriarchal legacies to documentary images of nuclear explosions, Concerning Consequences explores how art can provide a distinctive means of understanding trauma and promote individual and collective healing.