WEAK MONUMENT

Author and photographer Robert Dawson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Creative Work Fund grant, a Graham Foundation grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. His books include The Public Library: A Photographic Essay (2014); Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From the California Dream (1999); and A Doubtful River (2000), among others. Mr. Dawson's photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institution). The Library of Congress recently purchased his entire archive of 680 prints, negatives, and field notes from the Public Library Project. He recently retired from San Jose State University, and has been an Instructor of Photography at Stanford University since 1996. Ellen Manchester is an arts administrator, photography curator, and project director. She and Robert Dawson were co-directors of the Water in the West Project, a collaborative venture with eleven photographers that addressed water issues in the American West. She has served as a guest curator for the Oakland Museum, the de Young Museum (San Francisco), The Ansel Adams Center, and numerous nonprofit galleries and art centres.