Through essays, plates, and reproductions, the accompanying catalogue presents the range of photographs and other materials in the Community Service Society records. In the foreword, Maren Stange revisits her foundational study "Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950" in which she wrote extensively about the photographic practices of the Charity Organization Society and addressed the ongoing significance of the collection to the history of photography. Huffa Frobes-Cross provides a review of the extensive literature regarding the limitations of a progressive documentary tradition, including critiques during the 1970s and 1980s by Susan Sontag, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula, among others. This essay historicizes these arguments while taking into consideration the growing field of scholarship that has developed on photography of suffering, violence and poverty. Drew Sawyer's essay focuses on the visual culture of housing reform to highlight the heterogeneous and changing visual strategies of these two organizations at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, the essay deals with abundance of overlooked photographs of architecture in the archive. In doing so, it provides a corrective to scholarship and criticism that has focused on images of people and suffering rather than the built environment.

Patrick Bolton is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a member of the Committee on Global Thought. He is also codirector of the Center for Contracts and Economic Organization at the Columbia Law School. His areas of interest are corporate finance, banking, sovereign debt, political economy, and law and economics. He wrote Contract Theory with Mathias Dewatripont and coedited Credit Markets for the Poor with Howard Rosenthal.

Frederic Samama is founder and head of the steering committee of the SWF Research Initiative at Paris Dauphine University. Formerly, he oversaw Corporate Equity Derivatives within Credit Agricole CIB in New York and Paris. During his tenure there he developed and implemented the first international leveraged employee share purchase program, a technology now used widely among French companies. He has advised the French government on different issues (for instance, employee-investing mechanisms and market regulation) and is well known for hisinnovative work in the area where finance and government policy intersect.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor and member and former chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. He served on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration and has been chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. He is the founder of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and his best-selling book Globalization and Its Discontents has been translated into twenty-eight languages. He is also the coauthor, with Bruce Greenwald, of Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics and the coauthor, with Carl E. Walsh, of the fourth edition of the influential textbook Economics.