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“In book form, Kitchen Table is more intimate…. Unlike the experience of meandering through a museum, stepping back to appreciate the images and nearing the text panels to skim them, the pace of exploration is now in a person’s hands.” –Hilary Moss, New York Times This publication is dedicated solely to the early and canonical body of work by American artist Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953). The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts “the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes. Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, “unrequited love.”

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A grand panorama of race and civil unrest in America’s past and present Carrie Mae Weems has often confronted the uncomfortable truths of racism and race relations over the course of her nearly 40-year career. In The Shape of Things she focuses her unflinching gaze at what she describes as the circuslike quality of contemporary American political life. For this new work, Weems created a seven-part film projected onto a Cyclorama—a panoramic-style cylindrical screen that dates to the 19th century—where she addresses the turmoil of current events in the United States and the “long march forward.” Drawing on news and TV footage from the civil rights era to today, elements of previous films such as The Madding Crowd (2017) and new film projects that bring us into our tumultuous present, the films in The Shape of Things combine documentary directness with poetic rhythm to create an enveloping experience. The films are narrated by Weems, and the layering of her resonant voice with these images articulates the dangerous mounting resistance to the “browning of America.” As Weems shows in these powerful works, America is irreversibly changed and changing. Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, and is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems lives in Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York.

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Play as personal and social therapy: portraits of the resilience of children In 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.

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A multifaceted meditation on a pioneer of American suffrage, through photography, writing and ephemera In 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.

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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.

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Sculptures-as-meditations: Brush rearticulates Monet's magnificent lightwork in palm-sized objectsEarly in life, American painter, sculptor and jeweler Daniel Brush (born 1947) discounted Monet's work wholesalethat is, until the pivotal day he saw an 8-by-10 transparency that a collector and friend was considering acquiring. This encounter sparked an obsession with the light Monet so masterfully captured through oil paint. Thinking about Monet contains 60 of the more than 100 steel sculptures Brush createdall of which are meditations on light. The artist hand-carved the same steel for all of his palm-sized pieces, but each one articulates distinct properties of color and light. Mesmerizing in the intricacy and daring of their fabrication, Brush''s objects bear comparison with the work of historical masters.This small, jewel-like book is covered in printed silk cloth, and all the sculptures are reproduced at their original size. Nicolas Bos, preside

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A beautifully somber photographic meditation on an ancient Jewish ritual The 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.

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A breathtaking panoramic portrayal of the iconic California roadway, in a horizontal format that enhances the drama of the landscape American 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.

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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 Gardee (The Poorly Guarded Girl), a comic portrayal of young love between two peasants.

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Poignant, multilayered portraits of America’s future farmers A 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?

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Fifteen years of Platon's visually arresting and often dangerous documentation of human rights movements, from Cairo to the CongoThe celebrated portraitist Platon has spent much of his career photographing the famous and powerful, but he has also traveled the world documenting human rights activists and their quests for justice. The Defenders presents five photo essays spanning 15 years of work on these struggles in Burma, Egypt, Russia, the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.In Burma, he took portraits of monks, sex workers, former child soldiers and the controversial political leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He was on the ground in Cairo for several weeks early in 2011, when Egyptians took to the streets and demanded the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. In Russia, he photographed and spoke with dissidents who have battled a slew of oppressive governments. Along the border between the US and Mexico, he documented victims of inhumane immi

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On Matsubara's ephemeral multimedia interrogations of memory and time from the past decade Japanese artist Ken Matsubara (born 1949) makes multimedia works that incorporate video, photographs and found objects to investigate the memories that reside deep within our consciousness. His flickering video images projected onto surfaces of objects—shallow bowls filled with liquid, broken mirrors, reflective vitrines—are dreamlike and ephemeral. Memories are often embodied in images, and can contain knowledge from the far-reaching past, extending beyond individual experience and recollection. Though his works are often site-specific, Matsubara often creates variations on a core idea, as in his Repetition–Book series, in which he uses found photographs from various locations and makes new photographs and videos in those same locations. By incorporating the found antique photographs with his own new images, he reveals a dialogue between past and present, poetically capturing moments in the passage of time. This monograph offers an overview of his work from the last decade.

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Portraits of women and girls intertwined with the photographer’s gaze, in a rare subversion of photography’s power relations This 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.

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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.

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