The new 240-page photography book "American Youth" examines the newest generation of 18 to 24-year-olds in detail, observing young couples and Mormon missionaries, debutante balls and drunken tailgate stupors, war widows and B-boys, street kids and lobstermen. How are they different, and how are they exactly the same as the generations that came before?

On these pages are Christian rock fans, lesbian gangstas and Obama volunteers. There are would-be pop stars waiting for a shot on American Idol, organic farmers living the hippie dream and tattooed Cobra gang members brooding in the Window Rock jail, Navajo Reservation. Another series of photographs asks young New Yorkers to think big: If you had the chance, what question would you ask God?

Just two miles west of Manhattan lies the Meadowlands, a 32-square-mile stretch of sweeping wilderness that evokes morbid fantasies of Mafia hits and buried remains. Development has claimed two-thirds of the region, making way for scores of landfills, motels, and gas stations. The growth of poorly planned communities and the impending construction of Xanadu, a five million-square-foot entertainment and retail complex, threaten to change these lands forever.

"Joshua Lutz takes the New Topographics of Adams, Shore, and Sternfeld into its current era of urban sprawl." —Vince Aletti, The New Yorker

Controversy erupted in March 2005 when, with the blessing of the Bush administration, logging companies began sawing into old growth reserves (sections of the federal forestland set aside for threatened wildlife). Two months later, the administration fanned the flames by repealing the 2001 "Roadless Rule," which protected 58 million acres of pristine "roadless" wildlands on the National Forests across the country. The states of Oregon, Washington, California, and New Mexico filed suit against the Bush administration for violating federal environmental law. The Forest Defenders responded as well. These activists, labeled "radicals" and even "eco-terrorists" by the timber industry, are fighting to save some of the last truly wild places left in America.

"Whether he's in a dingy fluorescent basement or a beautiful sunlit forest, LaMarca always manages to finesse something amazing." —Paul Moakley, Newsweek

Tompkins Square Park is about the resistance and struggle of people in the Lower East Side, literally to exist as the community faced drastic gentrification in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. It focuses on the eponymous park as a symbol and stronghold of the anti-gentrification movement, for the riots proved to be a trigger to further radicalize the community's political movement. Living near the park, photographer Q. Sakamaki witnessed the change from the beginning to the end. With striking black-and-white images, he captures the scene of one of the most political and avant-garde movements in New York.

Crude Reflections chronicles the human and environmental impact of Texaco's oil drilling in the Ecuadoran Amazon, where the pollution is so extensive that medical experts predict that it will lead to thousands of deaths from cancer and contribute to the disappearance of five indigenous rainforest communities if not cleaned up. Photographers Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak have documented the physical and emotional reality of those affected by this toxic contamination, roughly thirty times greater than the more widely reported Exxon Valdez oil spill. Their powerful images are accompanied by moving first-person testimonies from the victims, and the uplifting story of efforts by rainforest communities to seek justice and to prevent further drilling. Bilingual in English and Spanish.

"Crude Reflections tells a harrowing tale through the eyes of two photographers hell bent on saving the heart of the world. Lou and Kayana take no prisoners with this potent book." —Donna Ferrato, author of Living with the Enemy

This collection of haunting photographs was made at a series of Italian hospitals for the criminally insane by Bologna-born photographer Claudio Cricca over the course of five years. The black and white photographs are accompanied by writings from the patients. Bilingual in Italian and English.


“Claudio’s haunting images of the criminally insane depict these human beings as menacing, absurd, tortured, disoriented, stoical, angry; in short, a full range of human emotions and disturbances … The difficulty of the project was to give the essence of these places without portraying faces distorted by mental illness.”

This is a book about war. The theme is life and death. Humans have never experienced an era without war in our history; wars have always loomed over us, as if we are genetically predisposed to conflict. Sakamaki offers insight into global conflicts with photographs from seven deadly settings – Israel & Palestine, Haiti, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Liberia, and Iraq, focusing on the people affected by war, intimately and poetically. Bilingual in English and Japanese.

Women of Courage shares an intimate look at the inspiring women who are forging a new future in Afghanistan and playing a crucial role in the changing landscape of this turbulent nation. First-hand stories and experiences are shared in conversations with a wide array of women-from a beekeeper to a presidential candidate to an Olympic sprinter to a schoolteacher. Mesmerizing photographs accompany unfiltered interviews, giving voice to a culture of women that has been silenced for decades under the oppressive regime of the Taliban.

In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals, Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever; harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.

Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, this collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier’s stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Frank’s The Americans.

He’s a welder and a gear-head, a tattooed wiseguy, and stone-cold TV star. Jesse James works with his hands, making custom motorcycles for big spenders who like their choppers loud and built from the ground on up. James got famous as the host of TV’s Monster Garage and Motorcycle Mania, but it all begins at his West Coast Choppers factory in Long Beach, California, where James and his crew piece together these epic handmade machines, welding and sculpting an array of gleaming pipes and fenders from scratch and polishing every detail right down to the magnum shell casings that decorate West Coast gas caps. The bikes are fast, but building each one is a year-long process, and the waiting list is long.

Jesse James (named for the Old West outlaw and distant cousin) is a one-time juvenile delinquent who became an international pop culture phenomenon, a grease monkey superhero with a blowtorch, and an impossible success story that began in his mother’s garage in 1993. He does it now for both love (of his machines and their aluminum engines) and money: He has a giant $100 bill tattooed across his back, and the words "Pay up, sucker!" written in the palm of one hand. He’s not joking.

"At the height of the Cold War in 1950s Iowa, we did duck and cover air raid drills in school. Crouching under my desk with my hands folded over my head, I remember wondering that if the atomic bomb could melt my flesh right off my bones, how was this battered wooden desk supposed to protect me. Something was seriously awry. Fifty years later I stood on the Jersey shore of the Hudson and saw the World Trade Center disintegrate. I live in a meltdown period, when old norms of politics, religion and even photography are changing. Melting is a transformation, one form dissolves, another emerges."

Jeff Jacobson began photographing while working as a civil rights lawyer in the 1970s, taking pictures of southern jails and the rural south. He joined Magnum in 1978, eventually leaving to help form Archive Pictures in 1981. He published his first book, My Fellow Americans, to wide critical acclaim in 1990. Melting Point is a dreamlike journey through the photographer's own past, masterfully interwoven with recent world events and glimpses of the future. Edited by Joan Liftin and Sylvia Plachy, this beautifully produced monograph is an important addition to the literature available on one of America's most independent and thought-provoking photographers.

A retrospective of the work of Roger Lemoyne published by Les 400 Coups, Détails Obscurs brings together about 52 of his most eloquent images from many of the world's most troubled regions. Although lyrical and touching the black and white images in this book are not necessarily coffee table fare. The subject is modern warfare and Lemoyne, who has documented the turmoil in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Israel and Palestine among others, vividly captures all its horror. In his distinguished tenure as a photojournalist Roger Lemoyne has always tried to show the intimate and human side of the conflict; the everyday lives of people who are not the subject of mainstream news stories, who in their marginalization are nearly invisible and whose lives have been entirely destroyed by these conflicts. In the spirit of the journalist and traveler Lemoyne says, "It comforts me to think that my photographs can contribute to our collective understanding of what transpires in other parts of the world."

Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war. In the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, official truth died months before the bombing of Baghdad began. Unembedded bears witness to the enduring power of independent journalism. In their unflinching look at war-ravaged Iraq, four freelance photojournalists show that life there is brutal yet poignant; that compassion co-exists with anger, hatred and fear. By gaining the confidence of Iraqi civilians and insurgents, these photojournalists have brought back images of life in wartime, from beauty parlors and joyful wedding scenes to the carnage of civilian casualties, the heartbroken faces of grieving parents, and the glassy-eyed shock of parentless children.

This is not the view from a Marine base. These photographers were on the streets of Baghdad when it fell, amid a crowd of civilians under aerial attack, and in the holy Imam Ali shrine with the Mahdi Army during the siege of Najaf. Their images document issues often underrepresented: the insurgency as seen from inside the separate resistance movements, civilians affected by the battles between U.S. and insurgent forces, growing conservatism and fundamentalism and their effects on women, and the devastating effects of ongoing civilian casualties.

Working outside the U.S. military's official "embedding" program, the authors bring us face-to-face with the people of Iraq. They combine photographs and essays with excerpts from two years of personal letters, journal entries, and feature stories to take us across front lines and cultural barriers into the lives of a nation in crisis. Theirs is a path to understanding the cost of war.

At the height of the nonprofit world's social swirl in New York, the city's white-shoe charities scramble to give the gala parties that will tease a few more dollars out of their well-heeled patrons. With many nonprofits depending on their gala's earnings for up to 25 percent of their budget, the events themselves are quite a site to see, sometimes costing one half the ticket price to produce. On any given night, New York's upper crust might bounce between their pick of benefit soirŽes. But the most sought-after events are invitation only, and can cost up to $10,000 per couple-and if you think this is expensive, just wait until you see what people wear! In Acts of Charity, Mark Peterson captures the culture of philanthropy and reveals the true personalities behind these seemingly selfless acts. Peterson accompanied society matriarchs-who don Chanel gowns, elbow-length gloves, and flawless coiffures-as they attended New York City benefit galas that are as elite as they are charitable.

Providing the perfect entrée to high society, Peterson escorts us to the most exclusive evenings, introducing us to the characters who populate these posh parties. Acts of Charity is your invitation into this most exclusive world, and even includes the highlight of the spring social season, the Conservancy Ball for the New York Botanical Garden!

Arriving in mainland China by chance just a day after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, young Chinese-American photographer Mark Leong was compelled to stay and explore with his camera's lens the fascinating contradictions of a rapidly changing but still intensely traditional Chinese society. Living in Beijing and traveling across China for the past fifteen years, he has captured images that astonish with their power and with his unprecedented access to both official and underground Chinese culture. This is a China rarely seen, where school- children learn the tenets of Mao and an addict sifts heroin on a bill bearing the Chairman's benevolent likeness; where nervous stockbrokers carry handguns and teenage rollerbladers hope for fame and financial sponsorship. In more than 150 photographs, with a foreword by noted Chinese poet Yang Lian and an afterword by author Peter Hessler, China Obscura is an intimate and exquisitely detailed portrait of a society accelerating toward an uncertain future, precariously straddled between old and new.

This collection of duotone photographs of contemporary China evokes the timeless spirit of this ancient and rapidly changing culture. The innate and mysterious details that make China unique are captured in fleeting facial expressions and gestures and in fragments of architecture and landscapes. The moving, highly personal view of China that emerges in these images typifies the strength of the human spirit and its ability to overcome adversity.

A Purple Heart is the token honor given to soldiers for their wounds. It makes them heroes. It is the title that Nina Berman has given to her photographs of American soldiers gravely wounded in the Iraq war, who have returned home to face life away from the waving flags and heroic send-offs. The images are accompanied by first-person interviews with the soldiers, who discuss their lives, reasons for enlisting, and experience in Iraq. They provide a glimpse into the myths of warfare as glorious spectacle through the minds of young men desperate to believe in the righteousness of their actions.MO< One soldier explains that he always wanted to be a hero. He thought the military would be fun--he would jump out of planes. He never imagined it could be ugly until he saw Saving Private Ryan. He is now a cripple, doped up all day on pain medications, flat broke, with one kid and another on the way. Another soldier describes how he called a recruiting station after watching an MTV-style commercial for the Army on TV. An immigrant from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury. It's a fair trade in his mind: a leg for an American passport.

Berman's photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorial page writer, and Tim Origer, a Vietnam veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet offensive and returned at age 19, an amputee. Essays by Verlyn Klinkenborg and Tim Origer.