Controversy erupted in March 2005 when, with the blessing of the Bush administration, logging companies began sawing into old growth reserves. Two months later, the administration fanned the flames by repealing the 2001 “roadless rule,” which protected 58 million acres of pristine roadless wildlands on the National Forests across the country. The Forest Defenders responded. These activists, labeled “radicals” and even “eco-terrorists” by the timber industry, are fighting to save some of the last truly wild places left in America. For the past five years, Christopher LaMarca has been documenting these much-maligned advocates who are willing to sacrifice their comforts and freedoms to stand up for wildlands. LaMarca's book offers insight into the lives of these extremely dedicated, politically sophisticated, and well-organized environmental activists.

Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white documentary photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, this collection of pictures is a contemporary portrait of rural Iowa, but it suggests what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Produced by a life-long Iowan, Frazier’s photographs provide an insider's perspective that is rich in emotion. His images give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America.

Eric Weeks' photographs are as epigrammatic and open-ended as a good short story: each suggests a moment out of a larger narrative that continues to unfold. The protagonist of all of them is the same beautiful, dark-haired woman, who also happens to be his wife, Stacy. And Stacy takes on many guises: here, a siren in red; there, a prim figure in a cornflower-blue prairie dress, near a weathered farmhouse; and there again, sitting in a car, lost in thought, nails polished and hands folded demurely. Weeks' photographs have a painterly feeling for light and color and his pictures speak about ideas of beauty: the beauty of this woman in these attractive clothes; the beauty of the landscape and the figure relating to that space; and also the beauty of color relationships. His images have a playful, cinematic quality that is distinctly contemporary, and plainly his own.