An essay in the representation of politics, these large-format panoramic photographs of town council meetings across the United States are the result of four years of traveling by artist-photographer Paul Shambroom. Photographing civic meetings as staged tableaux, his pictures resemble epic history paintings, describing the humble practice of local government and the character of small town America on a grand scale. The images are accompanied by the minutes of each meeting--40,000 words reproduced on bible paper at the back of the book.

“It is greatly to Shambroom’s credit that he not only endured some excruciatingly tedious gatherings (exemplified in the reproduced minutes) but he manages, by virtue of his picture’s scrupulous neutrality, to capture something of this. He shows how dull, trivial, smug and sometimes self-serving the process of democratic government can be, but also how, as Winston Churchill noted, this imperfect system is the best we have, and must be cherished.” -The Photobook: A History Vol. II, Parr and Badger