Dawson's most recent book The Public Library: A Photographic Essay, was published by Princeton Architectural Press (2014). This was a culmination of an eighteen-year photographic survey of the essential role of public libraries throughout the United States. The book includes a forward by Bill Moyers and an afterword by Ann Patchett. It contains fifteen essays by writers such as Amy Tan, Anne Lamott, Charles Simic, Barbara Kingsolver, Philip Levine, etc. In 2015, the Library of Congress purchased the entire Public Library project archive for their permanent collection.
Mr. Dawson's photographs have been widely exhibited and are in the permanent collections of many institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institution) Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Center For Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Mr. Dawson has also received numerous honors and awards, including: a Fulbright Global Scholar award by the U.S. Department of State; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an Artists Grant from the Graham Foundation; an Artists Grant from the Creative Work Fund; a Visual Artists Fellowship from the National Endowment For the Arts; a Ruttenberg Fellowship from The Friends of Photography; a Photographer's Work Grant from the Maine Photographic Workshops; a James D. Phelan Award through the San Francisco Foundation, and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center For Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Location: COB2 295
