Philip Montgomery: American Mirror

“Montgomery’s photographs capture the reality of Americans in crisis, in all our flawed, tragic, ridiculous glory.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty American Mirror is award-winning photographer Philip Montgomery’s dramatic chronicle of the United States at a time of profound change. Through his intimate and powerful reporting and a signature black-and-white style, Montgomery reveals the fault lines in American society, from police violence and the opioid addiction crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and the demonstrations in support of Black lives. Yet in his unflinching images, we also see moments of grace and sacrifice, glimmers of solidarity and tireless advocates for democracy. Like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans before him, Montgomery has made an unforgettable testament of a nation at a crossroads.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 160
Number of images: 71
Publication date: 2021-12-07
Measurements: 9.6 x 12.5 x 0.89 inches
ISBN: 9781597115186

Philip Montgomery (born in California, 1988) has published photography covering American politics, culture, and society in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, Zeit Magazin, TIME, Harper’s, Guardian, Aperture, and Foam Magazine. In 2018, he received a National Magazine Award for his reporting on the opioid epidemic in the US.
Patrick Radden Keefe is author of the New York Times best-selling books Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2019). Winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Arthur Ross Gold Medal from the Council on Foreign Relations, and Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker and creator and host of the podcast Wind of Change.
Jelani Cobb is Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, New York. He is author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (2010) and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (2002) and The Essential Kerner Commission Report: The Landmark Study on Race, Inequality, and Police Violence (2021). He is a staff writer at the New Yorker.