This limited-edition horizontal-format book of photographs was beautifully produced by George F. Thompson and distributed by International Publishers Marketing. It was created by David Wharton (director of documentary studies, Southern studies, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, U. of Mississippi in Oxford). The author suggests viewing the photographs as a long poem in nine stanzas, where each image relates to the next in ways that evoke but may not build a narrative. The print format, where blank facing pages alternate irregularly with single images printed on each page, also helps to create a sense of slow rhythm. Wharton's subject is the American South of small empty towns, closely observed and mostly without commentary. The only text is at the back of the book, where each image is given its caption in a couple of sentences or paragraphs, small nonfiction stories about each place. The black and white images, of storefronts, signs, roads, and frame houses, have a flat clarity; they could be paintings, or photojournalistic moments in which no drama is happening except what is always there. There is an incidental figure, an occasional old truck. His technique is to whisper rather than shout, and the book rewards slow looking. What the photographer draws us in to see has often been exploited for tragedy or kitsch, but Wharton is too wise and too wry; he knows this territory far too well for such easy commentary. Beneath what we thought we knew, he reveals a hieratic landscape. In Cherokee, Alabama, beside a blank brick building and an empty road, an unmarked sign says only, dance. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)