A haunting look at America at the beginning of the century, fro ma cult favorite. A hit from coast to coast when it was published last year in hardcover, Michael Lesy’s breathtaking view of the beginning of the twentieth century is now available in an affordable paperback edition. One of the most fascinating photographic explorations of the American past in years, Dreamland features 200 photographs taken between 1900 and 1910 that capture the extraordinary vigor and high hopes of those years. The photographs were culled from a single postcard company collection by acclaimed photo historian Michael Lesy, whose cult hit Wisconsin Death Trip (1974) has been praised as “an American classic” by National Geographic and “a small masterpiece of the historian’s art” by the Chicago Daily News.

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work―a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore’s unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series.
Texts and image selections by Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Leê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, and Lynne Tillman