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Colin Westerbeck´s criterion in choosing the 100 photographs published here was to seek out underappreciated work by great photographers and great work by underappreciated photographers. These 100 prints have all been drawn from the many thousands in the inventory of Howard Greenberg Gallery. Westerbeck was particularly drawn to Greenberg´s wide-ranging taste in both American and European photography of the twentieth century. The resulting book bears the name A Democracy of Imagery because Westerbeck believes all the works it contains should be considered equal. Each has been selected for its individuality - indeed, its idiosyncrasy - rather than its similarity to or compatibility with other images. In this spirit, works chosen for commentary are discussed individually.

Westerbeck explores the background stories of particular photographs, as opposed to generalizing about the photos as a whole.

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Colin Westerbeck writes frequently on photography for Art in America. From 1986 to 2003, he was a Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1994, he and photographer Joel Meyerowitz published Bystander, A History of Street Photography, which was released in paperback in 2001 and is to be republished in 2016. After moving to Los Angeles in 2003, Westerbeck wrote a weekly column on photography for the Los Angeles Times and taught the history of photography at UCLA and the University of Southern California. From 2008 to 2011, he was the Director of the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside. In 2014, Westerbeck published a monograph on Chuck Close´s photography and co-curated an associated exhibition at the Parrish Museum in 2015.

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