From the Sunshine State: Photographs of Florida

There is nothing beautiful about Webb's Florida, a place of overweight retirees, sun-baked college students, idle migrant workers in squalid housing developments, incarcerated immigrants and children so oblivious to their surroundings that they ignore a huge brushfire raging near their soccer game. In Webb's surreal land of billboards, trailer homes, dreary social clubs, tawdry amusement parks, miniature golf courses and plastic kitsch, human-made ugliness is so pervasive that no one seems to notice anymore. A forlorn pelican or lonesome deer may appear, but except for occasional thunderclouds threatening to rain down from a wrathful sky, nature has everywhere been displaced by crassness and sleaze. Webb (Hot Light/ Half-Made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics) says in a short statement at the end of the book that most people never find the dreams they are looking for in Florida, and he uses his color photographs to prove his point, depicting a nightmarish world that is mindless, eerie and more than a little disturbing. (Aug.)