Historian and photographer Michael Carlebach was born in New York City and raised and educated in upstate New York. He is the author of several important books and essays on American photojournalism and documentary photography, including The Origins of Photojournalism in America and American Photojournalism Comes of Age (both by the Smithsonian Institution Press), and Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida (University of Florida Presses). A collection of his photographs of south Florida, Sunny Land: Pictures from Paradise, was published in 2010 by Safe Harbor Books. He and his wife, Margot Ammidown, now live in Asheville, North Carolina.