Until 2008, Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this third installment of Michael Light’s aerial survey of the inhabited West, the photographer hovers intimately over the topography of America’s most fevered residential dream, capturing castles on the cheap–some half-built, some foreclosed, some still waiting to spring from empty cul-de-sacs. Throughout, Light finds beauty and empathy amid a visual vertigo of speculation, overreach and environmental delusion. Janus-faced in design, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of “Lake Las Vegas,” a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities. The other side dissects nearby Black Mountain and the city’s most exclusive–and empty–future community, where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years.

A graphic history of dissent and activism around the world. The best way to learn history is to visualize it! Since 1998 Josh MacPhee has commissioned and produced over one hundred posters by over eighty artists that pay tribute to revolution, racial justice, women’s rights, queer liberation, labor struggles, and creative activism and organizing. Celebrate People’s History! presents these essential moments—acts of resistance and great events in an often hidden history of human and civil rights struggles—as a visual tour through decades and across continents, from the perspective of some of the most interesting and socially engaged artists working today. Includes Cristy Road, Swoon, Nicole Schulman, Christopher Cardinale, Sabrina Jones, Eric Drooker, Klutch, Carrie Moyer, Laura Whitehorn, Dan Berger, Ricardo Levins Morales, Chris Stain, and more.

Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen’s long-awaited first photographic monograph. Social scientist, artist, writer and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies–the “black world”–for the last eight years, publishing, speaking and making astonishing photographs. As an artist, Paglen is interested in the idea of photography as truth-telling, but his pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth’s orbit. In other works Paglen transforms documents such as passports, flight data and aliases of CIA operatives into art objects. Rebecca Solnit contributes a searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape.

Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee explore the ways people interact with the landscapes in which they live. For more than ten years they have traveled the world–from Iceland to Costa Rica, Sri Lanka to New York–uncovering in their photographs a complex weave of human attitudes, both humble and arrogant, in the face of natural elements. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her introduction, “Their images show us a world in metamorphosis, where categories melt and mutate…. This is a world where natural sites become shrines and shrines become works of art that represent the landscape; where stone is carved into both sculptures of bodies and homes for bodies; where water is sometimes holy water and sometimes for irrigating crops.”

In Costa Rica, for example, healing waters are enshrined in frescoed concrete; in a Hawaiian garden, mangoes and oranges are protected against the cold in brown, paper bag jackets; in Iceland, children play in hot springs created by the runoff of a power plant; in Las Vegas, an artificial volcano erupts on cue. Each of Beahan and McPhee’s extraordinary images captures a point of intersection where natural and constructed worlds collide. Their work creates a powerful visual map of the forces of mythology and culture at work in the landscape.

In 1987, Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan began their photographic work together. Through the use of a large-format camera they are able to jointly participate in this unique collaborationóa process discussed with humor and warmth in John McPhee’s afterword, “Laura and Virginia.” They have received support for their photography from numerous sources including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Polaroid Corporation, and the Turner Foundation, Inc.
Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee explore the ways people interact with the landscapes in which they live. For more than ten years they have traveled the world–from Iceland to Costa Rica, Sri Lanka to New York–uncovering in their photographs a complex weave of human attitudes, both humble and arrogant, in the face of natural elements. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her introduction, “Their images show us a world in metamorphosis, where categories melt and mutate…. This is a world where natural sites become shrines and shrines become works of art that represent the landscape; where stone is carved into both sculptures of bodies and homes for bodies; where water is sometimes holy water and sometimes for irrigating crops.”

In Costa Rica, for example, healing waters are enshrined in frescoed concrete; in a Hawaiian garden, mangoes and oranges are protected against the cold in brown, paper bag jackets; in Iceland, children play in hot springs created by the runoff of a power plant; in Las Vegas, an artificial volcano erupts on cue. Each of Beahan and McPhee’s extraordinary images captures a point of intersection where natural and constructed worlds collide. Their work creates a powerful visual map of the forces of mythology and culture at work in the landscape.

In 1987, Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan began their photographic work together. Through the use of a large-format camera they are able to jointly participate in this unique collaborationóa process discussed with humor and warmth in John McPhee’s afterword, “Laura and Virginia.” They have received support for their photography from numerous sources including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Polaroid Corporation, and the Turner Foundation, Inc.

Wanderlust highlights artists as voyagers who leave their studios to make art. This book (and the exhibition it accompanies) is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s need to roam and the work that emerges from this need. Wanderlust presents the work of under-recognized yet pioneering artists alongside their well-known counterparts, and represents works that vary in process, with some artists working as solitary figures implanting themselves physically on the landscape while others perform and create movements in a collaborative manner or in public.

Many of the earlier works use what were at the time nontraditional methods of art making. In Trail Markers (1969), for example, Nancy Holt spent time in the English countryside, where she documented the painted orange trail markers she found dotting the landscape. Vito Acconci explored his body’s “occupancy” of public space through the execution of preconceived actions or activities. In Following Piece (1969), Acconci followed one randomly chosen stranger through the streets of New York. A Line Made by Walking (1967), a black-and-white photograph of Richard Long’s imprint of a straight line in a field, was Long’s first walking art work, made on a journey to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Ana Mendieta’s influential Silueta Works in Mexico (1977) documents performances by the artist during her travel between Iowa and Mexico, in which she imprints her body on the landscape while addressing issues of displacement.

Each of these works recognizes the walk and the journey as much more than just a basic human act. Rebecca Solnit observes that walking replicates thinking, adding “the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.” These works trace the motions of wandering artists’ focused minds.

Artists include Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Nevin Aladag, Francis Alÿs, Janine Antoni, John Baldessari, Kim Beck, Roberley Bell, Blue Republic, Sophie Calle, Rosemarie Castoro, Cardiff/Miller, Zoe Crosher, Fallen Fruit, Mona Hatoum, Nancy Holt, Kenneth Josephson, William Lamson, Richard Long, Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly, Anthony McCall, Ana Mendieta, Teresa Murak, Wangechi Mutu, Efrat Natan, Gabriel Orozco, Carmen Papalia, John Pfahl, Pope.L, Teri Rueb, Michael X. Ryan, Todd Shalom, Mary Ellen Strom, and Guido van der Werve. 

Contributors Rachel Adams, Lucy Ainsworth, Andrew Barron, Pamela Campanaro, Andy Campbell, Hannah Cattarin, Ian Cofre, Jamie DiSarno, Katherine Finerty, Joshua Fischer, Natalie Fleming, Melanie Flood, Jason Foumberg, Allison Glenn, Kate Green, Ross Stanton Jordan, Anna Kaplan, Jamilee Lacy, Jennie Lamensdorf, Toby Lawrence, Jane McFadden, Lynnette Miranda, Conor Moynihan, Liz Munsell, Karen Patterson, Ariel Lauren Pittman, Sean Ripple, Eve Schillo, Holly Shen, Rebecca Solnit, Lexi Lee Sullivan, Whitney Tassie, Charlie Tatum, Zoë Taleporos, Lori Waxman

This book accompanies the 2008 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, always a highly anticipated event in the art world. Inaugurated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Whitney’s biennial exhibitions have received acclaim, stirred controversy, and unfailingly fostered artistic innovation and diversity. The 2008 Biennial features some 85 artists and collectives working in many media and employing a variety of methods and practices.
The book is abundantly illustrated, with the vast majority of its 300 images presented in color. Whitney curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin provide insightful essays, as does a specially commissioned essay by Rebecca Solnit. In one section of the book, a short text accompanies reproductions of each artist’s work; other sections present documentation of the artists’ diverse methods and practices as represented in the Biennial exhibition.
The Whitney Museum of American Art has vigorously supported the development of 20th- and 21st-century American art since its founding, and that commitment is reflected nowhere more clearly than in the sponsorship of the Biennial exhibition, the museum’s signature survey of contemporary art.

Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change offers a unique opportunity to trace the life and complex art of the 19th century photographer. This book places his entire body of work – both artistic and technical – in the context of one of the most transformative periods of American and European history. Published to accompany a retrospective exhibition organized bythe Corcoran Gallery of Art, this catalogue includes essays by Philip Brookman, Marta Braun, Corey Keller, and Rebecca Solnit that investigate a variety of new ways to understand and interpret Muybridge’s art and influences. Born in England, Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830–1904) moved in his early twenties to the United States, where he was soon drawn to the dramatic Western landscape. After a stagecoach accident, during a long convalescence in England, he learned photography. Returning to San Francisco in 1867, he soon earned his reputation photographing both the landscape and urban development of the West. Muybridge is best known for this inventive work and his massive atlas of stop-action motion studies, Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887.