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.

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA. In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American culture. Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography’s history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange’s poster “All races serve the crops in California;” an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston’s Pepper, No. 30; a fireman’s fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s “Wanted” image to Elliot Erwitt’s shot of the Nixon–Kruschchev “Kitchen Debate.” Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of 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 to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture.

Gruesome photographs document the victims of lynchings and the society that allowed mob violence.

Way out on the Colorado Plateau, two lines cross at right angles, forming the borders of four states. You can stand on this spot and be in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all at the same time. This book covers the area roughly 150 miles around that point, a land of fantastic rock formations, ancient dwellings, and diverse cultures. Multiple national parks and monuments have been set aside to preserve the Four Corners' wonders. Nature's rainbow of colors paints these vast landscapes and barren badlands where sandstone rock sculptures grace majestic canyons. Join us in a tour of these remarkable places with 126 brilliant photographs to get a feel for this unforgettable land and its people.

Perhaps no nation has been so thoroughly shaped by its dreams as has America, and perhaps no other dreams have been captured on camera as often and as diversely as America's. The mythic American Dream has been the subject of photographic documentation since the 1840s, when photographers first began traveling to the New World in search of subjects. From an unknown photographer's picture of newborn George B. Billings Rego, scion of an immigrant Portuguese family and the first child ever born at Boston Long Wharf, to Lewis Hine's wrenching image of a young cotton mill worker in Georgia, to Alfred Stieglitz's awesome New York cityscapes, the photographs collected here reveal the multiple facets of 100 of the most decisive years of American development. Between 1840 and 1940, immigrants became homeowners, untouched lands exploded in superhuman industrial growth, tourists replaced pioneers, and the American metropolis grew taller and shinier--and the camera caught it all.