"Raymond Meeks is renowned for his use of photography and the book form to poetically distill the liminal junctures of vision, consciousness and comprehension. In 'ciprian honey cathedral', he brings this scrutiny close to home, delicately probing at the legibility of our material surroundings and the people closest to us. Meeks has long been fascinated by the way we construct the world around us; how we carry our possessions, these accumulated comforts, inheritances, markers of material success; how we adorn homes with trees and shrubs, a mantle clock to count the hours. Stumbling across an abandoned house or unkempt lawn becomes a search for common clues to tiny hidden transgressions. This question of knowledge and understanding is perhaps most drastic in our solipsistic reality. Meeks also photographed his partner, Adrianna Ault, in the early mornings before she awoke, on the threshold at which daily domestic life converges with the deepest state of sleep. This plight of supine trance is a place of reprieve beneath the surface of consciousness, free from the chaos and uncertainty of the sentient world above, and alludes to the veiled threat that, ultimately, we are utterly unknowable to one another."--Publisher's web page for the book.

"Meeks' photographic images, steeped in warm, lush brown tones and bathed in a nineteenth century light, seem to fall into our laps from a distant era, beyond that of our parents and their fading Kodachromes, and back further yet to an era of Civil War tintypes and twice-a-lifetime portraits. At it's core, Sound of Summer Running is a celebration of family relationships; father and daughter, siblings, husband and wife. It is a broad portrait of the joys of Summer and the ease which settles over family life during those times. Baby 'gators float in a gallon size pickle jar, children on bicycles fly by, rotten apples are chucked as far as they can be thrown into the back lot, the family German Shepherd standing on guard over all his charges. The insightful poetry by Forrest Gander, printed and bound separately and laid into the back of the book, captures perfectly those fleeting days and our inevitable desire to somehow freeze them, impossible though that may be."- Darius Himes

12 Hz--the lowest sound threshold of human hearing--suggests imperceptible forces, from plate tectonics to the ocean tides, from cycles of growth and decay in the forest, to the incomprehensibility of geological spans of time. The photographs in Ron Jude's '12 Hz' allude to the ungraspable scale and veiled mechanics of these phenomena, while acknowledging a desire to gain a broader perspective, beyond the human enterprise, in a time of ecological and political crisis. '12 Hz' consists of images of lava tubes and flows, tidal currents, glacial ice and welded tuff formations: pictures describing the raw materials of the planet, those that make organic life possible. The images were made in multiple locations--from the high lava plains, gorges and caves in the state of Oregon, to the glaciers of Iceland and lava flows of Kilauea in Hawaii. Jude's photographs don't attempt to tell us how to live or what we've done wrong, nor do they reduce the landscape to something sentimental, tame and possessable. Rather, they endeavour to describe and reckon with forces in our physical world that operate independently of anthropocentric experience. The photographs in '12 Hz' work in service to a simple premise: that change is constant, whether we are able to perceive it or not. By stepping back to look at the larger system of flux--of which we are only a small part--this book evokes us to find our own pulse, as it were, and assert an appropriately scaled sense of being within the hierarchy of this system.

This expanded edition of Wendy Ewald's now-rare book, first published in 1985, offers a view of the rural south over the past thirty five years. It includes pictures and stories by eight of Ewald's students, now grownups. Their visions, old and new, illuminate the present and the past.

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.