On Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (with Elizabeth Young), University of California Press, 2007 (vol. 1 of Defining Moments in American Photography)

From the book jacket:

Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, published in 1866, became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers, then and in subsequent generations, would come to know the war.  Gardner's classic also became foundational in the history of American photography, combining words and images for the first time in a sophisticated and moving account.  This book interprets the story of the war as told by Gardner, unraveling his choice of words and images and the complicated play between them, and understanding them against the backdrop of the literary and photographic cultures of the American antebellum and Reconstruction eras.

Yun Gee: Poetry, Writings, Art, Memories (ed.), University of Washington Press, 2003

From the book jacket:

This volume presents a selection of paintings, poetry, essays, and ephemeral writings by the Chinese American modernist Yun Gee (1906-1963), together with essays about the artist.  Gee arrived in San Francisco from Guangdong Province at the age of fifteen and within a few years established himself as one of the city's most daring avant-garde painters.  But all of his astonishing efforts with the brush and palette ran up against an intense anti-Chinese sentiment.  He seemed never to escape the high social price of being Chinese--not in San Francisco, Paris, or New York, where he ended his days.  This collection of writings and images represents the eclectic interests and disappointed hopes of a man who was by turns a political revolutionary, cultural radical, social visionary, teacher, inventor, painter, and poet.

As a unique collection of materials documenting the expressions of an Asian American artist of the first half of the 20th century, this book illuminates not only the life and work of the multifaceted Yun Gee, but also the experiences of Chinese immigrants who came of age in America during the Exclusion Era.  Anthony Lee's essays and the materials he has gathered here reveal the utopianism, anger, and anxiety that were the traces of an entire generation's racialized existence.

Diane Arbus: Family Albums (with John Pultz), Yale University Press, 2001

From the book jacket:

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is renowned for her provocative and unsettling portraits of modern Americans.  Her unrelentingly direct photographs of people who live on the edge of society, as well as those images depicting supposedly "average" people in a way that sharply outlines the cracks in their public masks, were controversial at the time of their creation and remain so today.  This compelling book presents a significant body of previously unpublished pictures by Arbus and proposes a radically new way to understand her goals, strategies, and overall work.

The book is based on a study of unknown contact sheets from several of Arbus's portrait sessions, including more than three hundred photographs she took of a New York family one weekend in 1969.  Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz engage with Arbus's claim that she was developing a "family album," and they present other images Arbus shot for Esquire magazine (including pictures of the families of Ricky Nelson, Jayne Mansfield, and Ogden Reid) and discuss her interest in photographing groupings of both traditional and alternative families.  Lee and Pultz take issue with the standard interpretation of Arbus--that her interest in people outside the mainstream was somehow representative of her own emotional and social life.  Instead, they reveal a photographer far more savvy with the camera, more aware of photography as an artistic and commercial practice, and more sensitive to the social and cultural tensions of the 1960s than has been acknowledged before.

Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco, University of California Press, 2001

From the book jacket:

This visually and intellectually exciting book brings the history of San Francisco's Chinatown alive by taking a close look at images of the quarter created during its first hundred years, from 1850-1950.  Picturing Chinatown contains more than 160 photographs and paintings, some well known and many never reproduced before, to illustrate how this famous district has acted on the photographic and painterly imagination.  Bringing together art history and the social and political history of San Francisco, this vividly detailed study unravels the complex cultural encounter that occurred between the women and men living in Chinatown and the artists who walked its streets, observed its commerce, and indulged in its nightlife.

Artistic representations of San Francisco's Chinatown include the work of some of the city's most gifted artists, among them photographers Laura Adams Armer, Arnold Genthe, Dorothea Lange, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins and the painters Edwin Deakin, Yun Gee, Theodore Wores, and the members of the Chinese Revolutionary Artists' Club.  Looking in depth at the work of these artists and many others, Anthony Lee shows how their experiences in the district helped encourage, and even structured, some of their most ambitious experiments with brush and lens.

2002 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in the Field of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum
2003 Cultural Studies Award, Association for Asian American Studies

Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals, University of California Press, 1999

From the book jacket:

During the 1930s San Francisco's most ambitious public murals were painted by artists on the left.  In this fascinating study, Anthony Lee shows how these painters, led by Diego Rivera, sought to transform murals into a vehicle for their rejection of the economic and political status quo and their support of labor and radical ideologies, including Communism.  In addressing these subjects, the mural painters developed a new imagery, based on the activities of the city's laboring population--its efforts to organize, its protests, its strikes.

At the center of the book are three major works by Rivera that chart a progress from mural paintings as private commissions for spaces closed to the public to mural painting as a public act in a public space: Allegory of California, painted in 1930-31 at the Stock Exchange Lunch Club; Making a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, painted only a few months later at the California School of Fine Arts; and Pan American Unity, painted in 1940 for the Golden Gate International Exposition.

Labor itself became a focus of the new murals.  Rivera painted himself at work on a massive representation of a construction worker, giving him form at the very moment when San Francisco's workers were themselves taking shape as an organized force.  And in 1934 Victor Arnautoff and his fellow radical artists Bernard Zakheim, John Langley Howard, and Clifford Wight painted panels in Coit Tower, on Telegraph Hill, that acknowledged the violence of the dockworkers' strike in the streets below and celebrated the resolve of the striking workers.  The mural painters also tried new compositional strategies of congestion, misdirection, and fragmentation--the visual vocabulary of critical realism.  They rejected the familiar decorative function of murals, along with legible narratives and coherent allegories, determined to subvert all of these and to startle viewers at every turn.