Martin Berger's new book Seeing Through Race is an original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the American Civil Rights struggle. He argues that the very pictures credited with arousing white sympathy, and thereby paving the way for Civil Rights legislation, actually limited the scope of racial reform in the 1960s. He is also the author of Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Both books analyze an eclectic assortment of primary evidence -- from painting, photography, and architecture to film and literature -- to explore the role played by the visual arts in identity formation, and how Americans both resist and embrace dominant norms of identity. Berger is a professor at UC Santa Cruz and holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University.

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