Photographer's Paradise: Turbulent America 1960%E2%80%931990

This richly evocative collection of photojournalist Laffont's work from the 1960s through the 1980s is a stream-of-consciousness trip through the most heady, disturbing, depressing, and exhilarating moments of those tumultuous American years. The bizarre sleaze of Times Square segues into a burnt-out South Bronx protected from drug dealers by a Puerto Rican gang to intimate portraits of New York transvestites to an Italian-American Manhattan unity rally. The urban claustrophobia of New York and New Jersey prison life transitions to trusties on horses at the Arkansas State Prison overseeing other inmates picking cotton. Naked hippies cavorting at music festivals precedes searing close-up images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy followed by documentation of their funerals. Other photos include those of KKK and swastika-wearing white supremacists; Jimmy Carter's humble home town; a stadium of evangelists; a naked Wiccan ceremony; yoga in Central Park; and the 1987 Wall Street crash. Despite the somewhat naive captions, which expose Laffont's outsider status and may make American readers feel like anthropological specimens, this remarkable compendium provides vivid and moving historical documentation valuable to those who lived those events and those too young to remember. (Sept.)