25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, Volume 2
By Sylvia Plachy and Iris Tillman Hill
175 pages; PowerHouse

"What we do," writes Sylvia Plachy in her introduction to 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, Volume 2 (PowerHouse), "is not polite. We search for that secret which, like a pearl in the ocean, is not easily found or given up."

Each emerging artist in this vital new collection is a passionate searcher for the truth within a moment so evanescent it vanishes even as the shutter clicks. So a young man picks up waterlogged family photographs on the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans and trains his camera on these damaged memories. A young woman documents her sisters' evolution from childhood to the precarious border of adulthood. Prefaced by sometimes painfully intimate accounts of what set the photographers to work, these are visionary images of fragile worlds, seen through uncorrupted eyes.