A century after it began, we still struggle with the terrible reality of the First World War, often through republished photographs of its horrors: the muddy trenches, the devastated battlefields, the maimed survivors. Due to the crude film cameras used at the time, the look of the Great War has traditionally been grainy, blurred, and monochrome--until now. The First World War presents a startlingly different perspective, one based on rare glass plate photographs, that reveals the war with previously unseen, even uncanny, clarity.

Scanned from the original plates, with scratches...

Arthur Danto has described Lynn Saville as New York's answer to Eugene Atget, because she -prowls her city at the other end of the day, picking up pieces of the past in the present, just before it is swallowed by shadows.- For her new monograph, Dark City, Saville focused on vacant spaces--shuttered storefronts, back alleys, blank billboards, empty lots--with the occasional ghostly figure hurrying through the frame. Working at twilight and dawn with a medium-format camera (setting up her tripod quickly so as not to attract police attention), Saville captured busy city streets...

In White Sands, Geoff Dyer (-one of the funniest writers alive- --Chicago Tribune) finds himself on the road again, crisscrossing the globe from French Polynesia to northernmost Norway. Throughout his adventures--with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his -greatest experience from the outside world-; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles--Dyer interweaves fiction and nonfiction to craft an often hilarious,...