Published by St. Ann’s Press in 2001, James Fee brings together several bodies of black-and-white work made during the preceding decade. The monograph is less a study of one place than a concentrated account of Fee’s recurring concerns: the erosion of familiar America, the unstable life of its symbols, and the ways private memory adheres to public landscapes.

Fee’s subjects range widely. New York appears through such landmarks as the Chrysler Building and Brooklyn Bridge, while the deteriorating Penn State penitentiary offers a harsher architecture of confinement and abandonment. Photographs shaped by the mythology of the American road sit alongside nude studies and collaborations with multimedia artist George Herms. Seen together, these series show a photographer moving between document, emblem, and personal association rather than remaining within a single genre.

The book culminates in photographs made on the South Pacific island of Pelelui, published here for the first time. This project originated in images Fee’s father took while stationed there during the Second World War. The resulting work extends the book’s meditation on decline into inherited history: photography becomes both a family trace and a means of approaching a place already known through another person’s pictures.

For collectors, the book’s importance lies in this breadth and conjunction. It places Fee’s urban landmarks, damaged institutions, road imagery, figure studies, artistic collaborations, and wartime family memory within one monographic frame. That structure permits close attention not only to individual photographs but also to the continuities between otherwise distinct series. As an early-twenty-first-century publication surveying Fee’s work of the 1990s, it offers a substantial view of an artist for whom American imagery is never merely iconic; it is weathered by loss, recollection, and historical change.