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In her Foreword, Squiers points out that the subjects of these works are not depicted as victims and while these activist photographers were not chiefly concerned with aesthetics, the resulting images are “vital, compelling, subtle, and persuasive.” From Lewis W. Hine’s expose of child labor practices to Donna Ferrato’s shockingly intimate portraits of domestic abuse to Lori Grinker’s narratives of veterans of wars and civil conflicts to David T. Hanson’s Waste Land (where the unseen human bodies echo the often invisible toxins to which they are subjected), the book is replete with examples of groundbreaking documentary and social photography. Each selection of photographs is accompanied by Squiers’s astute commentary on specific aesthetic aspects and the circumstances of production of the work, as well as in-depth social, political, and economic context.