Since 1983 David Wharton has photographed the twelve states that define the American South, focusing his attention on rural and small-town culture, vernacular architecture and landscape, the role of religion in Southern life, and the relationship between Southerners, their natural surroundings, and the communities they have built. Small Town South is the result of Wharton's travels through a region that extends from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas in the west to Virginia and the Carolinas in the east, from Kentucky and Tennessee in the north to Florida in the south, with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia forming the region's center in between. No other photographer has devoted so much time and attention to recording this distinctive American place. The 115 duotone photographs which serve as the book's core, combined with the author's insightful text, convey an overall sense of what the small Southern town has become and looks like during the early twenty-first century. Wharton organizes his study into thematic portfolios that address themes such as the intersection of tradition and modernity, local commemorations of the past, the omnipresence of the church in town life, the difficulties of making a living in the New World economy, the look of Main Street, the display of public murals and memorials, and the iconographic unfolding of community values. Many have likened Wharton's photographic eye and approach to the work of other photographic masters of the South, including Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, William Christenberry, Shelby Lee Adams, Alex Harris, Rob Amberg, and Martha A. Strawn. And, just as we turn to those artists to help us understand and reckon with Southern history and culture, we now can look to David Wharton as another pioneer photographer of the Southern small town in all its simplicity and complexity. (See the publisher's website for further information: http://gftbooks.com/books_Wharton.html ).

Timeline is among the most creative photographic projects to emerge in the art world in years. Many of us, historically, have turned to the photo album as a way to preserve memories of personal and family events that are worth noting, worth saving: birthdays, trips, ceremonies, the house where we were raised, child's play in the garden outside the kitchen window, our pet animals, family reunions, and even dark times caused by recovery from a serious illness. Each album becomes an archive, if you will, of who we are as a person, as a family. Tom Young has taken this old idea and created an entirely new genre: visual fiction. Here, in each picture, he offers an assemblage of personal life that could very well be yours, and he has intertwined it with the interior and exterior places that can surround us: trees and rocks and windows and showers and fields of grain. The accompanying titles convey not only a direction toward meaning for each image, but also a declaration that each image is a work of art. Here, then, is a narrative of landscape and portraiture that suggests not only the photographer's life, but also, through the power of memory and shared experience, the reader's. When Young was only ten years old, he had a medical procedure that left his eyes fully bandaged for weeks. Without sight, all of his other senses changed. Despite the darkness, he would imagine the world around him and the power of light as it relates to memory. In Timeline, one senses that the artist is seeing his entire world as if a life is being recollected in a split second. One image leads to another, building in nuance and subtly until we come to understand, as if by way of a sixth sense, how the little details of life create a larger retrospective. "If pictures could talk, what a tale they might tell." That thought lurks behind every image of Tom Young's masterful visual story of a life; Is it his? Or yours? (See the publisher's website for further information on exhibits and to view a slide show: http://gftbooks.com/books_YoungTom.html ) See a wonderful video from the team at Photo-Eye about the book: http://vimeo.com/67147795.

There is no more beautiful or alluring coast in the world than the West Coast of North America: a 5,000-mile-long region that extends from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to Canada's British Columbia, south to Washington, Oregon, and California, and then to Baja California in Mexico. No photographer until David Freese has explored the various and wondrous landscapes along the Pacific Ocean in such depth, making this the first book to look comprehensively at what makes the natural beauty of this particular coast so memorable. Behind the scenery, of course, lie the geologic forces that have created the West Coast landscapes that we now admire, explore, and praise. The engaging and informative text by renowned author Simon Winchester grounds us in understanding the deep relationship between geology and scenery. And Naomi Rosenblum, the esteemed photographic historian, writer, curator, and art critic, firmly establishes David Freese's place among the great landscape photographers of the past and present. In every photograph, his unique vision of nature and of place comes shining through. West Coast: Bering to Baja is a major publishing enterprise that will appeal to book-lovers of photography, nature, and those who dream about visiting and touring North America's West Coast. For here we see the vital connection between art and science merge in ways previously unseen for this special region of the world.

Through the miracle of photography and the beholding eye of a master photographer such as Myers, we are able to experience the land and life in India's last remaining wild jungles. This is the land of the tiger and elephant and monkey and rhino and a treasure trove of other species. But, as noted writer William deBuys shares in his provocative essay, poaching is a persistent and pervasive problem, and the natural habitat for wild animals is shrinking at an alarming rate due to expanding development and industrialization. Tigers, for example, are now extinct in ninety-three percent of their historical range worldwide, and, without wildlife refuges such as Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Karizanga, and others in India, their numbers would plummet further. Few citizens of the world will ever experience firsthand the jungles and wild places of India, but in Myers's visual discovery they can witness the excitement and energy of coming upon wild game in a moment's notice and experiencing religious shrines and rural life in nearby villages that seem to blend in effortlessly with the adjacent wilderness. Jungle at the Door is that rare glimpse into another world, a world that depends not only on human awareness of what is lost when the jungle is gone, but also the courage and foresight to preserve remaining wild places everywhere, from those in India to our own home ground. (See the publisher's website for further information on the book: http://gftbooks.com/books_MyersJoan.html ).