In this volume, the Sheldon Museum of Art presents more than one hundred examples from its distinguished photography collection, which contains nearly twenty-five hundred objects. Encompassing the full range of photographic history, Encounters showcases recognized masterpieces, recent acquisitions, and rarely seen treasures by a diverse range of artists, including Berenice Abbott, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Yinka Shonibare, Paul Strand, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Encounters explores photography through the lens of transnationalism, highlighting the artistic, cultural, geographic, scientific, and technological conflicts and concurrences that have shaped the modern photographic image. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the catalog addresses issues such as tourism, souvenir production, and the search for authenticity in the face of increasing industrialization; the transmission of American, European, and Mexican forms of modernism; gender identity and sexuality; the real and perceived tensions between nature and the built environment; and the convergences of art and science, craft and technology. Images are set within their context by the catalog's principal author, Brandon K. Ruud, and are accompanied by lively, thought-provoking essays by a team of scholars that includes Zeynep Çelik, Keith F. Davis, Gregory Nosan, Robert G. O'Meally, Britt Salveson, and the museum's director, Jorge Daniel Veneciano.