Lisa Hostetler has compiled ‘Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940 – 1959′, a remarkable profile of American photography and the American psyche itself in the late War and post-war period. One of the most important eras in America history, America’s military industrial complex brought its full weight to bear, turning the United States into the world’s most powerful, most influential country by 1945.

Though the post-war-Boom marked an era of unprecedented luxury and prosperity, there was a second face to the era, as marked by the remarkable shift in photography of the era, as documented by Hostetler. Compiling works by period photographers such as Robert Frank, Saul Leiter and William Klein, Hostetler gives us an effective look into America as it was in the mid-20th Century.

The companion book to a recently closed exhibition of the same name at the Milwaukee Art Museum also curated by Lisa Hostetler, Street Seen is published by DelMonico books and available now.