Drawing from the vast photography collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, American Geography charts a visual history of land use in the United States From the earliest photographic records of human habitation to the latest aerial and digital pictures, from almost uninhabited desert and isolated mountainous territories to suburban sprawl and densely populated cities, this compilation offers an increasingly nuanced perspective on the American landscape. Divided by region, these photographs address ways in which different histories and traditions of land use have given rise to different cultural transitions: from the Midwestern prairies and agricultural traditions of the South, to the riverine systems in the Northeast, and the environmental challenges and riches of the far West. American Geography also looks at the evidence of older habitation from the adobe dwellings and ancient cultures of the Southwest to the Midwestern mounds, many of them prehistoric. SFMOMA's last photography exhibition to consider land use, Crossing the Frontier (1996), examined only the American West. At the time, this focus offered a different way to think about landscape, and a useful way to reconsider pictures of the region. American Geography expands upon the groundwork laid by Crossing the Frontier, providing a complex, thought-provoking survey. Photographers include: Carleton E. Watkins, Barbara Bosworth, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Mitch Epstein, An-My Lê, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen, Victoria Sambunaris, Emmet Gowin, Robert Adams, Terry Evans, Dorothea Lange and Mark Ruwedel, among others.

'Snapshot Chronicles' is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera.

American Origami? is the result of six years of photographic research by Andres Gonzalez. The project closely examines the epidemic of mass shootings in American schools, interweaving first-person interviews, forensic documents, press materials, and original photographs. The book takes its reader through a visual journey of shared grief and atonement to illuminate moments of beauty and pose moral questions embedded in acts of collective healing. Bound in a unique way, the varied elements repeat and fold into each other, creating a parallel world of past and present, and showing the silenced landscape together with the personal artefacts created by those left behind.

The beautiful and seductive images of an overlooked movement, reproduced in their full tonal range. Much has been written about Alfred Stieglitz and his role in establishing photography as an art. Little attention, however, has been paid to the pictorial photographers who followed Stieglitz, among them Imo Jean Cunningham, Edward Weston, Clarence H. White, and a host of others -- those who, in a widespread movement, approached photography in a painterly fashion, creating beautiful images through the use of careful lighting, manipulated tones, soft focus effects, and artistic compositions. In this important volume, Christian A. Peterson finally gives the pictorialists of the first half of the twentieth century their due. He describes the backgrounds of the movement, their methods, the photo clubs they belonged to, and their work, illustrated here with ninety-three stunning reproductions. The movement seemed to die out, Peterson suggests, with the rising popularity of 35mm photography in mid-century, when the care and slow working procedures required by large-format cameras became unpopular. 93 full-color photographs