Mark Rice

Take a cruise, a long cruise in a modern ocean liner. Relax and enjoy it. Savour the food, the entertainment, the ports and beaches but find your fellow passengers and the crew a bit irritating? Join Luke on his voyage of discovery.

Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.

In The Manliness of Peanut Butter & Jelly, four young boys battle one another in a culinary competition as stomach-churning as it is heart-warming. Struggling to identify as men, these boys build their confidence in victory and the bonds established with others in a story that unfolds when the school cafeteria serves a dreaded pizza. Ink wash illustrations by Mark Rice highlight standout moments, as the tension in this essay by Travis Blankenship builds.

Covering more than a half century of dramatic social and political change, Ressler’s Photographs is an important document that, through vivid images and an engaging narrative, provides insight and meaning to the complex world we live in today. Global in scope, but with a focus on the Americas, the book begins in the tumultuous 1960s just one year after the Summer of Love (1967), when the author was a young college student who photographed the counterculture, street life on New York City’s gritty Lower East Side, and icons such as Andy Warhol and later Nina Simone, among others. The book then catapults us into a First Nation reserve in Quebec, Canada, as we follow Ressler’s trajectory from novice ethnographic image-maker to mature photographic artist––a career that parallels and comments on the growth of financial empires and consumerism as well as shifting trends in photography itself. Susan Ressler Photographs: 50 Years, No End In Sight is an impressive retrospective that traces over fifty years of artistic development. It includes six major bodies of photographic work introduced in her own words, complemented by two interpretive essays: one by Eve Schillo on Ressler’s California work, and the other an afterword by Mark Rice. Although some of the images appear in Ressler’s previous Daylight monographs (Executive Order and Dreaming California), many are published here for the first time. These include “At Owner’s Risk” (her Canadian First Nation photographs), “From Analog to Digital” (an account of photography’s transition from analog film to digital media), and “Beyond Borders” (work from Europe, Asia, and Israel). The book ends with “American Stories,” including South America and the export of US culture abroad, before Ressler comes home to Taos, New Mexico, where she lives and continues to make photographs today.

Dreaming California spans twelve years of color photographs made in Southern California and is the sequel to Susan Ressler's 2018 monograph Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America (Daylight, 2018). Once again, Ressler is looking at power relationships: the haves and have nots, political unrest, injustice and inequity; not only in the Golden State (California) but the US, and by implication, the world at large.

Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.