Reveals the career of an influential but underappreciated photojournalist. Photographer Nacho López was Mexico's Eugene Smith, fusing social commitment with searing imagery to dramatize the plight of the helpless, the poor, and the marginalized in the pages of glossy illustrated magazines. Even today, López's photographs forcefully belie the picturesque exoticism that is invariably presented as the essence of Mexico. In Nacho López, Mexican Photographer, John Mraz offers the first full-length study in English of this influential photojournalist and provides a close visual analysis of more than fifty of López's most important photographs. Mraz first sets López's work in the historical and cultural context of the authoritarian presidentialism that characterized Mexican politics in the 1950s, the cult of wealth and celebrity promoted by Mexico's professional photographers, and the government's attempts to modernize and industrialize Mexico at almost any cost. Mraz skillfully explores the implications of López's imagery in this setting: the extent to which his photographs might constitute further victimization of his downtrodden subjects, the relationship between them and the middle-class readers of the magazines for which López worked, and the success with which his photographs challenged Mexico's economic and political structures. Mraz contrasts the photos López took with those that were selected by his editors for publication. He also compares López's images with his theories about documentary photography, and considers López's photographs alongside the work of Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Sebastião Salgado. López's imagery is further analyzed in relation to the Mexican Golden Age cinema inspired by Sergei Eisenstein, the pioneering digital imagery of Pedro Meyer, and the work of Manuel �lvarez Bravo, who Mraz provocatively argues was the first Mexican photographer to take an anti-picturesque stance. The definitive English-language assessment of Nacho López's career, this volume also explores such broader topics as the nature of the photographic essay and the role of the media in effecting social change. "John Mraz writes clearly and passionately. His excellent study will elevate López into the pantheon of photographers who have combined social commitment and artistic expression and creativity." Robert M. Levine "If Manuel Alvarez Bravo is Mexico's version of Edward Weston, then Nacho López is probably the equivalent of W. Eugene Smith--that is to say, a photojournalist of international stature. Documentary photographers are all too often static bystanders, but López was a dynamic dissident. To appreciate his work, you have to be in possession of John Mraz's profound knowledge of Mexican social history. This is one of the most important contributions to the history of photography of the last twenty years." Mike Weaver John Mraz is research professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico.

While James Van Der Zee is widely known and praised for his studio portraits from the Harlem Renaissance era, much of the diversity and expansive reach of his work has been overlooked. From the major role his studio played for decades photographing ordinary people and events in the Harlem community to the inclusion of his photographs in the landmark Harlem on My Mind exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, Van Der Zee was a foundational Black photographer whose work illustrates the shifting ways photography serves as a constitutive force within Black life. In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. Boone argues that Van Der Zee’s work exists at the crossroads of art and the vernacular, challenging the distinction between canonical art photographs and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios. Boone’s account recasts our understanding not only of this celebrated figure but of photography within the arc of quotidian Black life.

A small revolution is remaking the world. The only problem is, we can’t see it. This book uses dazzling images and evocative descriptions to reveal the virtually invisible realities and possibilities of nanoscience. An introduction to the science and technology of small things, No Small Matter explains science on the nanoscale.

Authors Felice C. Frankel and George M. Whitesides offer an overview of recent scientific advances that have given us our ever-shrinking microtechnology—for instance, an information processor connected by wires only 1,000 atoms wide. They describe the new methods used to study nanostructures, suggest ways of understanding their often bizarre behavior, and outline their uses in technology. This book explains the various means of making nanostructures and speculates about their importance for critical developments in information processing, computation, biomedicine, and other areas.

No Small Matter considers both the benefits and the risks of nano/microtechnology—from the potential of quantum computers and single-molecule genomic sequencers to the concerns about self-replicating nanosystems. By making the practical and probable realities of nanoscience as comprehensible and clear as possible, the book provides a unique vision of work at the very boundaries of modern science.