Stoumen, Lou. Can't Argue With Sunrise: A Paper Movie by Lou Stoumen.

Hand Press/Celestial Arts, 1975. First edition, first printing. Wraps with custom-made, 4-mil polyester jacket.  Like new, has not been fully opened. 191 pages with black and white photographs and autobiographical text on facing pages. Louis Clyde Stoumen, known as Lou Stoumen (1917–1991), was an American photographer, film director and producer. He won two Academy Awards; the first in 1957 for Best Documentary Short Subject, and the second in 1963 for Best Documentary Feature.  He worked as a freelance photographer and photojournalist in New York. After his death in 1991, the Stoumen Estate gifted the entire archive of Stoumen's work, including copyright, to the Museum of Photographic Arts.  Summary:

Can’t Argue With Sunrise: A Paper Movie by Lou Stoumen is a visual narrative that blends photography, design, and cinematic thinking into a book-length sequence of images. Rather than following a traditional written storyline, the work unfolds through photographs arranged to suggest motion, rhythm, and emotional progression—what Stoumen calls a “paper movie.”

The images depict everyday moments, landscapes, and human gestures, often quiet and fleeting, inviting readers to experience time passing as they would in a film. Through careful sequencing, repetition, and contrast, Stoumen creates connections between images that evoke memory, contemplation, and the poetry of ordinary life. The absence of explanatory text encourages viewers to construct their own meanings and narratives.

Overall, the book explores the relationship between still photography and cinema, demonstrating how photographs can suggest movement and story when thoughtfully arranged. Can’t Argue With Sunrise stands as an experimental and meditative work that emphasizes visual storytelling and the emotional power of images over explicit explanation.

Louis Clyde "Lou" Stoumen (1917–1991) was an American photographer, filmmaker, and educator renowned for his humanistic documentary photography and Academy Award-winning documentary films. Born in Springtown, Pennsylvania, Stoumen earned a degree from Lehigh University before moving to New York, where he briefly studied under Sid Grossman at the Photo League and edited its journal, Photo Notes. During World War II, he served as a combat photographer and correspondent for the U.S. Army's Yank magazine, documenting the China-Burma-India theater.Moving to Los Angeles after the war, Stoumen developed a distinct street-photography style characterized by candid empathy and keen visual storytelling, creating celebrated long-term series such as his multi-decade documentation of Times Square. Parallel to his photographic career, he transitioned into filmmaking—winning two Academy Awards for his documentary films The True Story of the Civil War (1956) and Black Fox: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (1962)—and served as a professor of film at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1966 to 1988. Stoumen authored several photographic books, including Ordinary Miracles (1981) and Times Square: 45 Years of Photographs (1985), and bequeath his full archival estate to the Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) in San Diego, which established the annual Lou Stoumen Prize in his honor.