Julia Bryan-Wilson.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia

It is serendipitous that Zoe Strauss's first monograph was released the same year as the reissue of Robert Frank's 1958 classic, The Americans. Strauss's America (AMMO Books)--the title is an homage to Frank-includes more than 150 images produced since the artist took up photography eight years ago. And, like Frank's own photographic survey of the United States, it will likely prove indispensable as an account of its historical moment--in this case, the Bush years, documented without recourse to red state/blue state stereotypes.

Strauss began her project as a chronicle of her racially diverse, blue-collar South Philadelphia neighborhood, focusing on portraits, architecture, and urban signage. As this hook demonstrates, she has moved beyond that local record, traveling from Chicago to rural Nevada, from Atlanta to the Pacific Northwest, to produce a body of photographs marked by their compositional clarity and unblinking views of the cruelty, absurdity, and unexpected humor of life in the era of Homeland Security. (In one shot, a patriotic post-9/11 "Let's Roll!" poster hangs next to an ad for treatments for anxiety and depression.) A self-declared "lesbian anarchist," Strauss also manifests a distinctly feminist and queer sensibility, calling to mind women like Berenice Abbott and Helen Levitt who have been central to the tradition of street photography. Strauss's camera presses in at times with an urgent intimacy--for instance, when she captures the tender caress of two men, one with an amputated arm, in Ken and Don, 2007. Anecdotal texts interspersed among the photos, shedding light on Strauss's process and on her encounters outside the frame, heighten this sense of intimacy. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, and untrained as a photographer, Strauss has a keen eye for how class is inscribed on the body--not just in terms of clothing but in dentition, in posture, in affect. She is especially drawn to wounds, both on people and in landscapes: bullet holes, blackened eyes, shot-out windows, a crumpled McDonald's arch (a casualty of Katrina) in Biloxi, Mississippi.

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For all the violence and brutality recorded here, this is not an overwhelmingly depressing book. Rather, it is tough, honest: Strauss registers moments of ebullience and sensitivity that transcend the bleakness of circumstance. In many of her photos, people proudly display their scars--and it is this fierce resilience that is her primary subject. Devastating and empathetic, Strauss's America brings to mind James Baldwin's declaration that "American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it."

JULIA BRYAN-WILSON IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY AND DIRECTOR OF THE DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN VISUAL STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE.