Books in the Defining Moments in American Photography series

Why do we look at lynching photographs? What is the basis for our curiosity, rage, indignation, or revulsion? This book examines lynching photographs as a way of analyzing photography's historical role in promoting and resisting racial violence. It charts the history of lynching photographs - their meanings, uses, and controversial display.

Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, and his 1945 photography book, "Naked City" - with its tabloid-style images of Manhattan crime, crowds, and boisterous nightlife - changed journalistic practices almost overnight. This book brings different outlooks on photography and modernism to their discussions of Weegee and his book.

Proposes that we reconsider the work of the Farm Security Administration and its most beloved photographers in light of various forms of trauma in the 1930s. This title offers ways to understand this body of work by exploring a more variable idea of documentary photography than what the New Dealers proposed.

Soon after Alexander Gardner's "Photographic Sketch Book" was published, in 1866, it became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers would come to know the war. This study of a pivotal American historical document, approaching it from the perspective of visual studies as well as American literature and history.