The authors examine the language of both traditional and radical social work as forms of power. They argue that the will to help and care for people in distress unintentionally results in new types of dependency, control and domination. This book should be of interest to students and practitioners of social work, social policy, sociology, and women's studies.

Linda Connor's world-renowned photographs are global and sublime. For thirty years she has created distinctively glowing, contemplative images of nature and religious sites around the world using a large-format camera and glass-plate negatives. This career-spanning retrospective collects Connor's haunting photos, including her renowned prints from century-old glass-plate astronomical negatives from Lick Observatory, contextualized by an unprecedented three-way conversation between Linda and two modern luminaries, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. Published to coincide with a major touring exhibition, Odyssey is a long overdue celebration of a modern photographic master.

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

'Examines the relationship of art, land and history in the Antarctic. An interdisciplinary study of the science and art of the continent. Observes life at McMurdo Station and Pole, describing scientific research and daily operations'--Provided by publisher.Examines the relationship of art, land, and history in the Antarctic; offers an interdisciplinary study of the science and art of the continent; and describes life at McMurdo Station.

Offering a visual critique of the American myth of upward mobility, a noted photographer offers a series of images focusing on our car-centered, paved-over society, with evocative studies of the devastated inner cities and the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature.

A firsthand account of NASA's training exercises on Haughton Crater in the Canadian High Arctic, one of a few analog environments used for anticipated Mars expeditions, describes how two dozen scientists set up camp there every July to interact with its harsh climate, severe geology, and unfamiliar terrain. Original.

What Barry Lopez did in expanding our vision of the frozen North in Arctic Dreams, William Fox has done in broadening our perceptions of the desert expanses of the West's Great Basin.Roughly a quarter of a million acres of land spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada, the Great Basin is the highest and driest of the American deserts, a vast empty tract on the nineteenth-century maps of our continent. Explorers and cartographers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. And today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that continues to exercise a powerful influence on human desire and imagination.The Void, the Grid, & the Sign guides us to a place so unusual and disorienting that it can overcome rationality and become the locus for our most fanciful and fearsome projections: mythical rivers, mammoth artistic earthworks, alien spaceships, jet-propelled race cars, and weapons of mass annihilation.In The Void, Fox walks us through this landscape, investigating our responses to the Great Basin's appearance -- a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale so large, so empty and undifferentiated by shape and form and color, that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired.The Grid focuses on the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Fremont in his search for the legendary Buenaventura River. Fox invites us on a Great Basin road trip, tracing the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history.The Sign considers the language and the metaphorswe continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a vast palimpsest where the neon-lined boulevards of Las Vegas overlay and interplay with millennia-old petroglyphs and pictographs.Through vivid and arresting prose drawing from the disciplines of natural history, art history, cognitive psychology, western history, archaeology and anthropology, The Void, the Grid, & the Sign traverses the knowns and the unknowns of the Great Basin, offering a tour de force of inquiry and thought.

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Mark Klett has been photographing the American West for nearly twenty-five years. He directed the Rephotographic Survey Project in the late 1970s, which located and rephotographed the sites of images made by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and other photographers surveying the West in the late nineteenth century. Klett has also published several books of his own work.Using his travels in the Nevada desert with Mark Klett and his current rephotographic team as the starting point, William Fox offers here an examination of the history of photography in the American West and of Klett's role in documenting the landscape. Like the story of photography itself, this is a multilayered narrative. Part historical overview, part travel journal, part biographical study of Klett, View Finder explores the evolution of our view of the land from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Fox looks at the legacy left by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Robert Adams. And in focusing on the work of Mark Klett in the last quarter century, William Fox reflects upon the meaning of the landscape at the beginning of the millennium. Because Klett's work has been so closely connected to the great photographic surveys of the 1870s, and because he has been so influential to a new generation of photographers, his is the ideal viewpoint from which to measure our changing approach to the American space. (view table of contents)

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