Photography and the USA

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast and diverse nation in images that have come to define American identity, both within the country and to the world. In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley asks how and why photography has been such a significant force in shaping American culture. Featuring both iconic and lesser-known images, Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, artists and works that are crucial to understanding American photography. Focusing on images that reveal the many different facets of. the United States, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores some of the ambiguities of American history and culture, bringing together images such as a press photograph of an anti-lynching demonstration taken in 1934, Dorothea Lange's All races serve the crops in California', a fireman in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and the Ground Zero photographs of Joel Meyerowitz made in 2001. Organized around ideas of technology, history and documentary, this book not only presents a history of American photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves.

A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction for students of American studies or the visual arts, as well as the general reader fascinated by the role of the image in American history and culture.

Mick Gidley is professor emeritus of American literature and culture at the University of Leeds. He is the author of With One Sky Above Us: Life on an Indian Reservation at the Turn of the Century.