Photographers who can teach us to love even vacant lots will do so out of the same sense of wholeness that inspired the wilderness photographers of the last twenty-five years (the deepest joy possible in wilderness is, most would agree, the mysterious realization of one’s alliance with it). Beauty, Coleridge wrote, is based in “the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.” In this large sense, beautiful photographs of contemporary America will lead us out into daily life by giving us a new understanding of and tolerance for what previously seemed only anarchic and threatening.