The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography
287 pages; Ruder Finn

Like love, catastrophe can unite hearts—as the New Orleans Museum of Art discovered when it reached out to willing friends, local and national, to help produce its most powerfully ambitious photo exhibition since Hurricane Katrina. The museum's magnificent book, The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography , shows the healing, motivating power of connection at every stage of life, through intensely moving images by artists as diverse as Tina Barney and Sebastião Salgado, Dorothea Lange and Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander and Sally Mann. Some photos, like Elinor Carucci's family portrait, Mother and I (1996), are exquisitely tender; others, images of war and illness and need, may be hard to bear. "I believe that there is no person in the world that must be protected from pictures," writes guest curator Cynthia Goodman, who fervently hopes these works inspire us to respond to those near and dear or far and unfamiliar, with all the humanity we can muster.

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