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A beautifully somber photographic meditation on an ancient Jewish ritualThe Jewish tradition of leaving a stone or pebble at the gravesite of a loved one is an ancient custom of remembering the departed by means of a humble natural object. Minneapolis-based photographer Vince Leo (born 1949) began taking photographs of these "visitation stones" after several people close to him died in quick succession, and he found himself enacting the ritual of grief over and over. Placing a stone is a simple but powerful gesture that connects the living to the dead. Remembered as a Blessing contains 30 of Leo's black-and-white photographs, which honor these stones as the complex objects they are: simultaneously hard, durable pieces of matter and embodiments of ineffable spiritual relationships, often among many generations. Each of Leo's photographs fuses light, focus, viewpoint, reflection and magnification into a moment in which the ordinary and the symbolic coexist. Daniel Mendelsohn, acclaimed author of The Lost, contributes an essay.

Poignant, multilayered portraits of America's future farmersA new book by award-winning Minneapolis-based photographer R.J. Kern (born 1978), The Unchosen Ones features portraits of future farmers in America's heartland. Kern's subjects are Minnesota 4-H members posing with their farm animals. Each one spent a year raising an animal, which they then entered into a 4-H competition. Kern first photographed them in 2016, and none of the children who sat for him succeeded in winning an award, despite the obvious care they had given to their animals. The formal qualities of Kern's lighting and setting endow these young people with a gravitas beyond their years, revealing self-directed dedication in some, and in others, perhaps, the pressures of traditions imposed upon them. These beautiful portraits capture a certain America, a rural world and a time in life when the layered emotions of youth are laid bare. Four years later, in 2020, Kern returned to photograph and interview his young subjects. The new images are poignant when juxtaposed with the originals, tapping into the mindset of America's agricultural youth. The diptychs of the children are punctuated by lush landscapes of the farms where these children have grown up.As he took the second group of photographs, Kern inquired about what his young subjects had carried forward from their previous experience. What were their thoughts, their advice, their dreams and their goals for the future? How do they fit in future agricultural America?

Play as personal and social therapy: portraits of the resilience of childrenIn 2017, award-winning Boston- and San Francisco-based photographer Nancy Farese visited Bangladesh to photograph the Rohingya refugee crisis. While she saw firsthand the most violent tendencies of humankind, she also bore witness to endless displays of perseverance from the youngest members of these communities. On the edge of every frame she saw children at play, adapting to their circumstances to socialize and heal with one another.This photobook documents children's play across 14 countries, including Haiti, Cuba, Burkina Faso, Jordan and the US, in full-color photographs. Farese invites us to consider how this universal activity is threatened by the unrelenting forces of technology, consumerism and even overparenting. Featuring a foreword by New York Times staff photographer James Estrin, Potential Space offers a global view of a mundane activity that powerfully shapes who we are, both as individuals and as a society.

Portraits of women and girls intertwined with the photographer's gaze, in a rare subversion of photography's power relationsThis volume presents award-winning Pennsylvania-based photographer Lydia Panas' (born 1958) much-praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls. In an interesting reversal of roles, the artist's and models' gazes are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection. Critics and curators have praised the work for Panas' artistic and technical mastery, and all have noted and examined the powerfully affecting gaze of her subjects. Panas notes: "While my subjects do in actuality turn their gaze towards me, it's as if at times I turn the camera onto myself, both in the present and back in time." In Sleeping Beauty, her subjects lie down, a metaphor for the position girls and women have been placed in historically. But they look out with self-awareness, in a way that implies a lack of complicity.

A breathtaking panoramic portrayal of the iconic California roadway, in a horizontal format that enhances the drama of the landscapeAmerican photographer Karen Halverson (born 1949) first fell in love with Mulholland Drive while on the very opposite coast from the iconic California roadway--during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, Halverson encountered David Hockney's 20-foot painting Mullholland Drive: The Road to the Studio. A few years later, she moved to Los Angeles and found herself frequently driving along the 52-mile street that Hockney depicted as a colorful path to a fantastical world. Soon Halverson developed her own dynamic relationship with Mulholland Drive, likening the route along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains to "watching a movie full of jump cuts" with its ever-changing scenery. Halverson's panoramic photographs capture the allure of the street that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to Hollywood, a unique juncture between the area's natural landscape and the manmade infrastructure that has come to define Los Angeles. The images speak to the grandness of the environment and its Hollywood legacy, presented horizontally so as to emphasize their sweeping breadth. With a soft, sun-dried quality that is quintessentially Californian, Halverson's photographs capture the magic that pulses through the City of Angels.

How art has addressed and transmuted trauma over the past half-century, from Louise Bourgeois to Glenn LigonTrauma in all its forms--internal and external, individual and collective--has been an enduring theme in 20th- and 21st-century art. The proliferation of violent imagery, particularly since the expansion of mass media during and after World War II, has led to artworks that marshal consciousness of traumatic events and their cultural processing. These developments in art run parallel with the emergence of trauma studies, which confront the repercussions of traumatic events: the Holocaust, global conflict, sexual violence, systemic racism and gender discrimination. Psychic Wounds brings together artists from the mid-20th century to the present who have addressed trauma in their work. The book also contains an anthology of critical writings on trauma by curators, art historians and theorists, among them Robert Storr, Griselda Pollock, Huey Copeland and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Artists include: Gerhard Richter, Kazuo Shiraga, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Glenn Ligon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman and Anicka Yi.

A multifaceted meditation on a pioneer of American suffrage, through photography, writing and ephemeraIn 1916, Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916) embarked on a grueling campaign across the Western US on behalf of the National Women's Party appealing for women's suffrage ahead of the 1916 presidential election. Standing Together, by artist Jeanine Michna-Bales (born 1971), retraces Milholland's journey. The 30-year-old suffragist delivered some 50 speeches to standing-room-only crowds in eight states in 21 days: Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Nevada and California. She battled chronic illness and lack of sleep during her travels and died a month after her last speech in Los Angeles, where her final public words were, "Mr. President, how long must this go on, no liberty?" Through her photographs, combining dramatic landscapes and historical reenactments of important vignettes of Milholland on her journey with archival materials, Michna-Bales captures a glimpse of the monumental effort required to pass the 19th Amendment.

Madagascar presents 30 black-and-white photographs by Spanish photographer Pancho Saula that capture the light and contours of this unique island. Madagascar is one of the most remote and beautiful countries in the world, and one of the very few places that has not yet been transformed by the deracinations of globalization: some areas are still untouched by tourism, and some ethnic groups, such as the Vezo, live in isolation in primitive conditions. Time stops in Madagascar, and nature is rich and intact: the vast majority of the island's abundant flora and fauna exist nowhere else on earth. Ancient baobab trees tower above; enormous sand dunes envelop seaside fishing towns. Superbly printed in this handsomely designed volume, Saula's photographs of the island range from the near-abstract to clear-eyed but sensitive portraiture.

"In the spring of 1865, a seemingly unremarkable dishcloth played a crucial role in ending the Civil War as the South's flag of surrender at Appomattox. A Confederate horseman carried a humble white linen towel into the lines of General George Custer, near the courthouse at Appomattox. The horseman was sent on behalf of General Robert E. Lee, who was requesting a suspension of hostilities while General Ulysses S. Grant proposed terms of surrender. Focusing on this Confederate Flag of Truce, Afro-Caribbean American artist (and professor at Amherst College) Sonya Clark (born 1967) explores the legacy of symbols and challenges the power of propaganda, erasures and omissions through her works. By making the Truce Flag-a cloth that brokered peace and represented the promise of reconciliation-into a monumental alternative to the infamous Confederate Battle Flag and its pervasive divisiveness, Clark instigates a role reversal and aims to correct a historical imbalance"--

In Poorly Watched Girls, New York-based artist Suzanne Bocanegra (born 1957) explores the ways that popular entertainment theatricalizes women in trouble. For the immersive video Valley, she recreated Judy Garland's wardrobe test for Valley of the Dolls (1967). Garland was fired from the film but famously kept the clothing from the test. Here, eight notable women wear replicas of the wardrobe: poet Anne Carson, choreographer Deborah Hay, artist Joan Jonas, singer Alicia Hall Moran, author and actor Tanya Selvaratnam, actor Kate Valk, artist Carrie Mae Weems and ballerina Wendy Whelan. Dialogue of the Carmelites, inspired by Poulenc's 1956 opera based on the true story of a convent of nuns executed during the French Revolution, incorporates music by composer David Lang, performed by Caroline Shaw. In La Fille, Bocanegra uses theatrical sets, costumes and collage to capture the essence of the 18th-century ballet La Fille mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl), a comic portrayal of young love between two peasants.