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Long hailed as a supreme example of American city planning, Monument Avenue is home to some of Richmond, Virginia’s, most prestigious houses and distinguished architecture–and to the unique procession of statues from which the street takes its name. Initially planned in 1890 around a memorial to Robert E. Lee, over the next four decades the avenue evolved into a parade of statues honoring heroes of the Confederacy. In the mid-1990s, however, the dedication of a controversial memorial to African American tennis player Arthur Ashe signaled that Monument Avenue’s meaning had broadened beyond commemorating the Lost Cause.

This book traces the history of Monument Avenue, of its buildings and statuary, and of the people who helped create one of America’s great streets. Enriched by more than three hundred photographs, plans, and drawings, it chronicles the avenue’s development, captures architectural details and city preservation efforts, and places the avenue’s story in local, regional, and national context.

Built to reflect the hopes and attitudes of Richmonders at the turn of the last century, Monument Avenue exists nearly intact today as the centerpiece of a flourishing neighborhood, even as its meaning continues to be redefined.

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The direct action social protest movement of the 1950s and 1960s resulted in sit-ins, marches, and other showdowns with armed police officers and National Guardsmen. Trained in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s methods of nonviolence, young black men and women took to the streets to fight for their civil rights and sparked a social revolution unlike anything the nation had experienced. Thousands of acts of courage were undertaken in the pursuit of freedom – acts that were often photographed, leaving behind a disquieting visual record of this violent and tumultuous period in American history. “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968″ is the most significant exhibition of civil rights photographs presented in an art museum in more than twenty years. These images were taken by many photographers – photojournalists, artists, movement photographers, and amateurs alike – all of whom seem to have had a keen understanding of the significance of their subject.This publication presents a narrative of some of the key moments of the civil rights movement, including the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Birmingham hosings of 1963, and the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965. These are the unforgettable images that helped to change the nation, increasing the momentum of the nonviolent movement by dramatically raising awareness of injustice and the struggle for equality. Julian Cox is curator of photography at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Charles Johnson’s most recent fiction publication is “Dr. King’s Refrigerator” and “Other Bedtime Stories”. He is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor of Writing at the University of Washington. John Lewis is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and was a leader in the American civil rights movement.

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Bodine’s Chesapeake Bay Country is by and about A. Aubrey Bodine, one of the greatest photographers of his age, a Baltimore pictorialist, and a Maryland treasure. Bodine’s photographs chronicled nearly every aspect of Maryland life on the pages of the Baltimore Sun papers from 1924 to 1970. This volume, containing 286 digitally restored pictures, is divided into five distinct areas of Maryland: Baltimore and surrounds, Chesapeake Bay, Eastern Shore, Southern Maryland and Annapolis, and Western Maryland.

Published between 1952 and 1970, Bodine’s first four books, My Maryland, Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater, Face of Maryland, and Face of Virginia, were immensely popular and were produced in multiple printings. This volume follows a similar format to those books. Editor Jennifer Bodine, the photographer’s daughter, has used essays and photo captions from Bodine’s earlier books, where appropriate, to convey Bodine’s language and unique observations. This is his book in his words.

Deciding which pictures to include was a daunting task with so many images from which to choose. Bodine won nearly a thousand awards in national and international competitions. First, photographs were selected from the books he published as these were among his personal favorites and his major award winners. Pictures were also chosen from the Bodine family archive. These photos had particular meaning to Bodine as he had made them part of his personal collection.

The Baltimore Sun graciously gave Jennifer Bodine access to its extensive archive, allowing her to include unique, interesting, and historical photographs from the Sun collection. Finally, the book is rounded out with best-sellers from the AAubreyBodine.com website to show the images that the modern public has found most interesting.

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Charles and Ray Eames, perhaps the most famous design partnership of twentieth-century America, did pioneering work in furniture, film, architecture, and exhibition design. Out of respect for Charles’s wishes, no book on them was published during their lifetime. Now Pat Kirkham interprets their work in depth, probing the lives behind the designs and the nature of the collaboration. In researching this major work, Kirkham had full access to the Eames archive and cooperation from the Eameses’ clients and associates. The result is a richly detailed study of these remarkable designers and of their work from 1941 to 1978, including a substantial reevaluation of Ray’s role. There is much here that will be new to readers who may be broadly familiar with the Eameses’ work, particularly in the recounting of their early careers and in the examination of their multimedia presentations, exhibitions, and films.

An unprecedented rape of Mother Nature from the 1880s to the 1940s completely changed the wooded landscape in the northern Great Lakes region of America as well as the society and ecology forevermore. In this time of empire building, logging towns grew like weeds around sawmills and often died when the last tree was cut. The people living there called it “cut and run.” This fascinating book presents true-life photographic images of the loggers and the people they touched. Here we see the lumberjacks and river pigs who began the work, railroad loggers who extended the range and types of logs available, and a close-up look at one town in the wilderness. With hard work written across their faces, these men and women who dedicated their lives to the logging industry earn the respect of today’s readers through the dynamic photographs and poignant stories related here. To build American towns, they toiled to make the lumber available; they succeeded and became legendary.
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In every era, Paris had epitomized beauty and innovation in architectureâ??magnificent Gothic cathedrals, elegant hotels and chateaux of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the broad sweep of Haussmann in the 1870s, and most recently the Grand Projets of Francois Mitterand.
Paris 2000+ focuses on the exceptional projects built in the French capital since 2000. Works by French masters like Jean Nouvel and Christian de Portzamparc and international building firms such as Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Herzog and de Meuron, and UN Studio are featured alongside projects by emerging French practices to create a lively presentation of the best contemporary projects.
Author Sam Lubell has selected thirty buildings to convey the energy and creativity of architects working in Paris and its environs. Among them are the controversial Musee du Quai Branly, the glamorous Louis Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Elysees, the restoration of the historic Publicis Drugstore, also on the Champs-Elysees, a graceful pedestrian bridge across the Seine, a new Metro strop, and an experimental house in the Parc de la Villette.
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A tribute to the barn by the master documentarian of our time.

As an elemental part of our landscape and our history, barns evoke childhood memories for many of us, recollections of a simpler way of life. Regardless of their size or shape, their forms follow their functions. They are honest. They are beautiful. And they are rapidly vanishing. Across the land we see abandoned farms with barns falling down, being torn down, and only occasionally being converted to other uses. As urban sprawl eats up the countryside and food-producing Goliaths put small farmers out of business, the need for old barns has diminished. For most of his life as a photographer, David Plowden has admired and photographed barns. In recent years, as their disappearance accelerated, he made it his mission to document these beautiful structures, before they too are lost. The result is this beautiful book, his hymn to the American barn. 130 duotone photographs
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Best review for Envisioning Information

Since 2002, Sze Tsung Leong has been photographing the dramatic changes that are transforming the cities of China, revealing a process that begins with the destruction of traditional neighborhoods and ends in the mass construction of new urban environments. He travels with a large-format view camera, visiting cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, Pingyao and Xiamen, and the resulting highly detailed images portray the immense scale of the upheaval and of the contradictions created by its uncertain and fluctuating environment. Traditional buildings in the process of being demolished are juxtaposed against the glass walls that are about to replace them; seemingly abandoned buildings on the verge of destruction, or in the midst of construction, reveal clues of habitation; historic areas survive as a result of neglect and isolation rather than intent; and obscured in the midst of expansive, culturally ambivalent spaces, small Chinese script on indistinct signs serves as the only hint that these environments are in China. Collectively, the photographs in History Images capture the erasure and subsequent absence of history, and the moment of anticipation for the new future to unfold; it is an urban reality caught in the tenuous period after the end of one history and at the beginning of another.
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Best review for HISTORY IMAGES