New Releases – Daylight Books

Book Details: HardcoverISBN-13: 9781954119444112 pages; 45 Photographs7 x 10 inches$50 US*Books will ship June 2025Family Amnesia is a visual tribute and love letter honoring the artist's Chinese American family roots in the U.S. The art book explores her family's multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, her own captured images and archival material.The book project honors the past and current lives of Asian Americans and immigrants in the U.S. by examining the incalculable and traumatic impact that historical events like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act continue to have on the Asian American experience. This is a painful part of our American history. Betty Yu is reclaiming that narrative through her own personal family’s story. The book will feature her grandfather’s role as a founding member of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of NY, her mother’s plight as a garment worker who became a labor organizer, as well as her sister’s legacy as a community activist. Yu knows that her family's story is not unique. It is part of the larger collective Asian-American immigration experience.This book project reminds us that the rise of COVID-related anti-Asian violence is part of a larger history of systemic racism. As the U.S. government and corporate-run media continue to vilify China as a global threat, Family Amnesia recalls the anti-China and anti-Asian paranoia and hysteria that created the policies like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1942 Executive Order that placed Japanese-Americans into internment camps. The book will also draw visually on geo-political history, recalling narratives that mocked China as the "sick man of Asia '' and that demonized Chinese as “Yellow Peril”. Betty Yu is an award-winning filmmaker, socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer and activist born and raised in NYC. Yu integrates documentary film, installation, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. Betty’s films and multimedia work has focused on labor, immigration, gentrification, abolition, racism, militarism, transgender equality among other issues. View Details

Family Amnesia

Betty Yu

Book Details: HardcoverISBN-13: 9781954119451180 pages; 79 Photographs12.6 x 10.5 inches$50 USEssay by Christina Barton*Books will ship June 2025The Afterglow of Industry brings together photographs from a ten-year project in which artist Chris Corson-Scott repeatedly travelled the extent of Aotearoa New Zealand, seeking out unknown, or remote sites which illuminate our dysfunctional present. Following this, several years were spent researching and writing on each of the 79 photographs featured in this book. In these texts, colonial and industrial histories weave in and out of geology, pre- European Māori history, outside forces from the United States and Europe, and contemporary issues like privatisation, asset sales, the New Zealand housing crisis, and the country’s rebranding as a ‘clean & green’ tourist destination.Similar to the collapse of America’s industrial Midwest, New Zealand has also experienced the whiplash of industry vanishing. Here though, this has been complicated by much of this industry first emerging in conjunction with European colonization. Corson-Scott’s work focuses on these tensions, particularly in Te Waipounamu South Island, where the regions of the West Coast and Otago see industrial remnants contrasted with vast and complex landscapes. From these areas come images of freezing works on sacred rivers, contested mining projects, dwellings of 19 th century Chinese miners, gold processing plants still contaminated more than a century later, floods of acid mine drainage, and the demolition of factories which once built the country’s modern infrastructure. Elsewhere, on a remote sandspit is one of history’s largest whale strandings, industrial spaces are repurposed by artists, controversial hydroelectric schemes divert rivers, ancient forest remnants become tourism, and city fringe orchards are bulldozed for development.Chris Corson-Scott is an artist from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. His photography has been exhibited in over 40 museum and private gallery exhibitions in Aotearoa, and his work is held in permanent collections including: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection. His previous publications include Evanescent Monuments (2018), and Dreaming in the Anthropocene (2017), both on Compound Press.Christina Barton is a writer, curator, editor and educator based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the former director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University, Wellington, and was previously a curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. View Details

The Afterglow of Industry

Chris Corson-Scott

Book Details: HardcoverISBN-13: 9781954119376112 pages; 50 Photographs8 x 12 inches$50 US*Books will ship June 2025Mythoscape explores themes of transformation and self-discovery, where the journey through nature mirrors an inward journey through the psyche. It invites viewers to reconnect with the mythic dimension of nature, seeing it not merely as a backdrop but as an active participant in the human story—a space of encounter, danger, and transformation, where every element holds the potential for magic and deeper understanding.Azita Gandjei explores the symbolic relationship between humanity and the primal forces of nature, drawing on the archetypes found in myths and fairytales. She invites viewers on their own journey of self-discovery and transformation. Using visual language informed by shadows, reflections, and surreal compositions, her work is a means to bridge the false dichotomy between us and nature. We are one. Gandjei is represented by Gallery House in Menlo Park, where she is one of the permanent artists, and by Ilkaa’s Gallery & Atelier in Columbus, Ohio. In 2023, her work was selected in the de Young Museum Open, and she has been part of numerous group shows, including at the San Francisco Women Artist Gallery, Center for Photographic Arts and the Twin Pines Gallery. Carol Henry is a fine art photographer, curator and creative project consultant. Based in Kentucky, her photographic work has been exhibited in over 25 galleries and more than 150 exhibitions. Her extensive experience includes being a fine art print specialist for Ansel Adams' archives, and serving as the gallery director at Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California. Henry curated, 100 Years of Female Photographers Views of the Male Subject exhibited at The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, and at the Florida Museum of Photography. As founder of FotoSagá, a women's photography mentor program, and as a charter member of Women in Photography International, she amplifies photography’s ability to build community. View Details

Mythoscape: A Different World

Azita Gandjei

Book Details: HardcoverISBN-13: 9781954119369284 pages; 238 Photographs10.5 x 11.25 inches$60 US*Books will ship June 2025Covering 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.Susan Ressler is a renowned artist, author, and educator who has been making social documentary photographs for more than fifty years. Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library and Archives Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and many other important collections. A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, Ressler is internationally exhibited and published. She has published two previous monographs with Daylight Books: Executive Order (2018) and Dreaming California (2023).Eve Schillo is Associate Curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She has curated many notable and diverse exhibitions featured in LACMA's galleries dedicated to American, Latin American, Southeast Asian, Japanese, modern, and contemporary art, as well as those devoted to photography.Mark Rice is an award-winning author and professor of American Studies at St. John Fisher University near Rochester, New York. He has published several books and contributed essays on photography and visual culture to numerous scholarly journals. Rice contributed the afterword to Susan Ressler’s two previous Daylight monographs, Executive Order (2018) and Dreaming California (2023). View Details

Susan Ressler Photographs

Susan Ressler

Book Details: HardcoverISBN-13: 9781954119390112 pages; 65 Photographs8 x 10 inches$50 US*Books will ship June 2025Unsupervised is an intimate look at the modern family. Kirsten Lewis' curiosity regarding the everyday routine of raising children is what led me to begin spending anywhere between 24 and 72 hours simply documenting a family's unscripted life. With the birth of social media came the ability for anyone to present a highly curated version of themselves and their life, oftentimes under the social pressures to appear "perfect". Lewis has watched this directly affect how parents, especially mothers, share their life with the outside virtual world. Ultimately, this creates a feeling of isolation and loneliness, as parents are completely disconnected from the reality of their life and their tailored life online. This photographic exploration is an attempt to reveal the similarities Lewis has witnessed by photographing my subjects' vulnerability, challenges, joy, hardships and humorous moments of raising a family.Kirsten Lewis is an international photographer, educator and public speaker based in Colorado. Over the last 2 decades she has traveled to over 40 countries to work with organizations, non profits, companies and individuals creating documentary based pictures to aid in fundraising, advertising, awareness and personal family archive builds. View Details

Unsupervised

Kirsten Lewis