This volume, a companion to the exhibition of the same name, explores the reinvention of documentary photography in the 1930s, focusing on the work of three iconic figures: Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White.

This in-depth and generously illustrated look at six postwar photographers, along with a selection of their predecessors and contemporaries, captures a unique and pivotal moment in American photographic history. World War II and its aftermath ushered in a new era of artistic expression. Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism are often considered responses to war's shocking realities. Creative photographers responded to the same situation with images that broke the rules of conventional photographic technique. Street Seen, a companion volume to an exhibition, highlights six photographers who were prominent during and immediately following the war. Lisette Model s unflinching look at the urban environment; Louis Faurer s portraits of eccentrics in Times Square; Ted Croner s haunting night images; Saul Leiter s evocative glimpses of daily life; William Klein s graphic, confrontational style; and Robert Frank s documentation of American ideals gone awry these and other beautifully reproduced photographs communicate the emotional resonance of everyday life in postwar America. An essay by Lisa Hostetler explores the aesthetic revolution that took place after the war and reveals the principles of spontaneity and subjective interpretation that guided these photographers as they sought to make sense of new realities. A timeline, brief biographies, and bibliography are also included in this valuable compilation of the mid-century s most influential photography.

Looks at how documentary photographers have contested the idea of the American dream, and discusses the work of Francis Benjamin Johnston, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, William Klein, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank

"American Exposures sheds light on photographs, from Arthur Mole's propagandistic 'living photographs' of American icons and symbols to the exploration of contemporary subcultural communities by the Korean-born photographer and performance artist Nikki Lee, and asserts that the depiction of community is a central component to photography. Louis Kaplan deploys a number of critical concepts and theories developed by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community, as well as other philosophers, and applies them to the field of photography studies. With an original approach to photography from Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition to Pedro Meyer and the rise of the digital image, Kaplan points to a new way to think about the intimate relationship among photography, American life, and the artistic imagination." -- Back cover.

"This book is a valuable record of conversations with fifteen celebrated and distinguished photographers representing the spectrum of "schools", movements, and styles currently in the medium. The interviews establish a vivid and intimate portrait of each subject, focusing on the history of the artist's career, the relationship between his vocational photography, and his personal imagery, the genesis of particular works, and specific technical processes, and are invaluable to an understanding of American photography today."--Page 4 de la couverture.

After the end of World War II, the American road trip began appearing prominently in literature, music, movies, and photography. Many photographers embarked on trips across the U.S. in order to create work, including Robert Frank, whose seminal 1955 road trip resulted in The Americans. However, he was preceded by Edward Weston, who traveled across the country taking pictures to illustrate Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose 1947 trip through the American South and into the West was published in the early 1950s in Harper's Bazaar; and Ed Ruscha, whose road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma later became Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Hundreds of photographers have continued the tradition of the photographic road trip on down to the present, from Stephen Shore to Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. The Open Road considers the photographic road trip as a genre in and of itself, and presents the story of photographers for whom the American road is muse. The book features David Campany's introduction to the genre and eighteen chapters presented chronologically, each exploring one American road trip in depth through a portfolio of images and informative texts, highlighting some of the most important bodies of work made on the road from The Americans to present day.

From 1971 to 1978 the author, a Dane, hitchiked across more than 100,000 miles of America. This volume, written at the journey's end, contains some 700 of the photographs he took, and describes his odyssey.