Hardcover, cloth bound with dust jacket, design by Ivan Chermaye.

Three quotes from the back of the jacket:

The photographs of Aaron Siskind are an adventure in seeing. At first glance abstract, they almost instantaneously proclaim their reality. Viewing them, we never lose contact with the world about us, and can only marvel that the most commonplace subject matter becomes poetic, and that the fragment becomes an artistic unit. Seen in series,the photographs have a cumulative effect; we are carried along from picture to picture; our vision is sharpened and our imagination stimulated. (Beaumont Newhall, Director George Eastman House)

These beautiful photographs are revelations of how nature devours art, and how an artist, Aaron Siskind, by disciplined intuition, has been able to recognize the forms of art in the digestion of nature, and to preserve them in the timeless moment it takes for a shutter to open and close. His timeless moments are timely; these are forms of the moment. In a hundred years they will be precious documents of the exact metaphysical angle that light reflected off stone, paper, iron, wood, sand, plaster in the critical decade 1945-55. Today they are crystal mirrors held up to our most personal reality. They are black-and-white photographs in which White and Black have meaning (Thomas B. Hess, Executive Editor Art News)

Like man in idle moments, nature, with the help of time and chance, doodles too, scribbling the accidental forms, textures, patterns that result from decay, neglect, the ravages of weather, wear and tear. For Aaron Siskind these have provided an endlessly fascinating world for years, a unique photographic specialty whose infinite variety is here represented in cullings from his vast portfolio of these curious phenomena of waste. Are they merely doodles, or nature's enigmatic notes to those who can read them? One may find representational forms here, some in caricature, and abstractions similar in content, often in treatment, to those of the modern artist. This is a strange collection of pictures, often baffling, always intriguing, a kind of hieroglyphics of modern life. (Jacob Deschin, Photography Editor New York Times)