In the early twentieth century, the Boston-based United Fruit Company controlled the production, distribution, and marketing of bananas, the most widely consumed fresh fruit in North America. So great was the company’s power that it challenged the sovereignty of the Latin American and Caribbean countries in which it operated, giving rise to the notion of company-dominated “banana republics.” In A Camera in the Garden of Eden, Kevin Coleman argues that the “banana republic” was an imperial constellation of images and practices that was checked and contested by ordinary Central Americans. Drawing on a trove of images from four enormous visual archives and a wealth of internal company memos, literary works, immigration records, and declassified US government telegrams, Coleman explores how banana plantation workers, women, and peasants used photography to forge new ways of being while also visually asserting their rights as citizens. He tells a dramatic story of the founding of the Honduran town of El Progreso, where the United Fruit Company had one of its main divisional offices, the rise of the company now known as Chiquita, and a sixty-nine day strike in which banana workers declared their independence from neocolonial domination. In telling this story, Coleman develops a new set of conceptual tools and methods for using images to open up fresh understandings of the past, offering a model that is applicable far beyond this pathfinding study.

"When Tod Papageorge began this work, the newspapers saw Central Park chiefly as a site of danger and outrage, and they were doubtless partly right. But the park shown here seems no more dangerous than life itself, and no less filled with beauty, charming incident, excess, jokes in questionable taste, unintended consequence, and pathos, truly described. One might say that no artist has done so much for this piece of land since Frederick Law Olmstead." --John Szarkowski, The Museum of Modern Art, New York After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, Tod Papageorge began to photograph intensively in Central Park, employing medium-format cameras rather than the 35mm Leicas that he had used since moving to New York in 1965. These pictures, gathered in Passing Through Eden, convey the passion that--as Rosalind Krauss once described it in Papageorge's work--embraces "the sensuous richness of physical reality, that fullness which Baudelaire called intimacy when he meant eroticism." From picture to picture, Papageorge constructs a world that resembles our own, but that also invokes that of the Bible: Passing Through Eden is sequenced to parallel, in its opening pages, the first chapters of Genesis--from the Creation through the (metaphorical) generations that follow on from Cain--before giving over to a virtuosic run of pictures that, as he expresses it in his illuminating afterword to the book, picks up "the threads that tie the Bible to Chaucer, Shakespeare and "Page Six" of the New York Post." This ambitious body of work--incorporating pictures produced over the course of 25 years--displays not only Papageorge's remarkable ability to make photographs that read like condensed narratives, but also his skill at weaving them into sequences that echo profound cultural narratives. It challenges the reader to succumb (or not) to the pleasures of the "fullness" of each individual photograph, while ignoring (or not) the tug of a tale demanding to be told. Like Eden itself, this book sets our desire for beauty against that of knowledge, even as it reminds us of some of the ways that we read, and come to know, books.

A provocative exploration of photography's relationship to capitalism, from leading theorists of visual culture. Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays in Capitalism and the Camera investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism's violence--and if so, how? Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource extraction and capital accumulation, from 1492 to the postcolonial; the camera's potential to make visible critical understandings of capitalist production and society, especially economies of class and desire; and propose ways that the camera and the image can be used to build cultural and political counterpublics from which a democratic struggle against capitalism might emerge. With essays by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Siobhan Angus, Kajri Jain, Walter Benn Michaels, T. J. Clark, John Paul Ricco, Blake Stimson, Chris Stolarski, Tong Lam, and Jacob Emery.

"Cannibal-land: Adventures with a camera in the New Hebrides" by Martin Johnson is a thrilling book that has recently celebrated its 100th anniversary since its original publication. Detailing the author's travel adventures, the book gives an interesting insight into parts of the globe that many readers at the time it was released would never have a chance to visit for themselves.

"This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book's focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. It highlights the need to rethink notions of 'the closet' and 'coming out' and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as 'isolated' and in need of 'outreach'"--Provided by publisher.

Writer Annemette Fogh stumbled across the abandoned Garden of Eden on the Venetian island of La Giudecca by accident. Intrigued by its locked wrought iron gate, and curious about this lost paradise, she set about discovering its magical past. The nine-

Latin American Studies Association Visual Culture Section Best Book Prize  Latin American Studies Association Historia Reciente y Memoria Section Best Book Prize  The role of documentary photography in exposing and protesting the crimes of a dictatorship After Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Chile in 1973, his government abducted, abused, and executed thousands of his political opponents. The Insubordination of Photography is the first book to analyze how various collectives, organizations, and independent media used photography to expose and protest the crimes of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime.  Ángeles Donoso Macaya discusses the ways human rights groups such as the Vicariate of Solidarity used portraits of missing persons in order to make forced disappearances visible. She also calls attention to forensic photographs that served as incriminating evidence of government killings in the landmark Lonquén case. Donoso Macaya argues that the field of documentary photography in Chile was challenged and shaped by the precariousness of the nation’s politics and economics and shows how photojournalists found creative ways to challenge limitations imposed on the freedom of the press.  In a culture saturated by disinformation and cover-ups and restricted by repression and censorship, photography became an essential tool to bring the truth to light. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and other archival material, this book reflects on the integral role of images in public memory and issues of reparation and justice.  A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.