The prestigious new volume by Skira devoted to international contemporary photography is focused on some of the greatest American masters of the twentieth-century. This will be the first of two books (with the second coming in 2014) that seek to illustrate the outstanding quality and variety of the works which have marked American photography from the mid-twentieth-century to the present day. This first volume presents a detailed and annotated selection of works executed between the 1940s and 1970s by twenty photographers of undisputed importance — from Edward Weston and Robert Adams to Minor White and Garry Winogrand, from Lee Friedlander down to Stephen Shore — whose pursuits represent benchmarks in the history of contemporary photography. As in the case of other titles in the series, the reproductions of all the works are accompanied by a critical apparatus with texts discussing the area, artists, and research explored.