The season’s most gift-worthy books include lush volumes of aerial landscapes, stunning monographs and entertaining anthologies featuring political classics and famous self-portraits. Browse the list and then browse the bookstores; photography books make affordable gifts of art.
“American Politicians: Photographs 1840-1993,” by Susan Kismaric (Museum of Modern Art/Harry N. Abrams, 208 pp., $39.95 hardcover). When the camera met American politics a century and a half ago, the photo opportunity was born. Here is Harry Truman playing the piano for Lauren Bacall, President Theodore Roosevelt running a steam shovel at the construction site of the Panama Canal and President Calvin Coolidge opening the 1924 baseball season with a pitch and a deadpan expression. But this book reaches beyond whimsical situations. Kismaric persuasively argues that the camera transformed American politics: Photography could clearly reveal politicians at their worst but politicians also understood that they could exploit the medium for their own agenda.
“Arias in Silence,” by Gordon Parks (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown and Co., 128 pp., $40 hardcover). Parks combines still-life photography and watercolor painting in his recent “Arias.” Fragmentary images of objects such as a leaf or a shell are lyrically superimposed over abstract watercolors accompanied by Parks’ own poems. Parks, a former Life magazine photographer, is best known for his photo essays on Harlem street gangs and the black power movement. This book makes it clear that he remains an eloquent voice in the medium at age 80.
“Ruth Bernhard: The Eternal Body, A Collection of 50 Nudes,” text by Margaretta Mitchell, foreword by Ruth Bernhard (Chronicle Books, 144 pages, $60 in hardcover, $29.95 in softcover). Bernhard’s nudes combine sculptural grace and poetic choreography. Hair, drapings and the exquisite flow of light and shadow on skin make the work dramatic, luminous and always sensitive. The book gathers the best of the artist’s nudes gleaned from her 50-year career.
“Bystander: A History of Street Photography,” by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown and Co., 430 pp., $60 hardcover). “Bystander” delivers the spontaneous epiphanies of life on the streets that attracted photographers from the start. It was a view of things that no previous art medium could capture. Photographers traveled to exotic cities to take pictures for armchair travelers, photographed life in the gutters of their own towns for the cause of social reform and turned to ordinary street scenes to find extraordinary wonders of life. “Bystander” offers a comprehensive and entertaining tour through such images, including work by Lewis Hine, Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and dozens more. It’s all here, from the lighthearted frivolities photographed in France a century ago by Jacques-Henri Lartigue to the gritty New York crime scenes sensationalized by Weegee.
“The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sidney Irmas Collection,” by Robert A. Sobieszek and Deborah Irmas (Los Angeles Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 240 pp., $49.50 hardcover). Photographers depict themselves, their art and their alter egos in these 140 self-portraits that span the the history of photography. The pictorialists posed as romantic heroes. The modernists fractured, distorted and recompiled the self as images within images. Contemporary photographers such as Jan Saudek, Joel-Peter Witkin and Duane Michals enacted roles associated with their own provocative tableaux.
“Cyclops,” photographs by Albert Watson, introduction by James Truman (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown and Co., 192 pp., $75). Watson makes portraiture sensual, offbeat and confrontational in photographs he has taken for such magazines as Life, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and Italian Vogue. Serpentine rock stars, seductive fashion models and totemic still lifes of historic objects thrust the viewer into Watson’s signature terrain of restless spirits caught in high-voltage vignettes. The book gathers more than 250 black and white portraits, landscapes, reportage and other work from throughout his career.
“Focus: Five Women Photographers,” by Sylvia Wolf (Albert Whitman & Co., 64 pp., $18.95 hardcover). Wolf begins with Julia Margaret Cameron’s epic Victorian portraits and finishes with Lorna Simpson’s scorching social commentaries on racial stereotypes. In between, she presents Margaret Bourke-White’s legendary photojournalism, Flor Garduno’s lyrical fusion of realism and myth in her photographs of Latin America and Sandy Skoglund’s witty, irreverent tableaux of angst in contemporary life. Wolf’s entertaining and easy-to-read essays on each artist mix biography and artistic insights.
“Robert Frank: Moving Out,” by Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman, with essays by W.S. Di Piero, Martin Gasser and John Hanhardt (National Gallery of Art/Scalo/Distributed Art Publishers, $60). “The Americans,” Frank’s somber 1950s documentary, revealed the tattered edges of the American Dream and is considered the seminal work of contemporary photography. It was a tough act to follow and makes this book on Frank an important one for bringing the innovative artist’s career into the present. If there’s a cult hero in photography, it’s Robert Frank.
“Great Chicago Stories: Portraits and Stories,” by Tom Maday and Sam Landers, foreword by John Callaway (TwoPress Publishing Co., 224 pp., $40 in hardcover). Christie Hefner, Jesse Jackson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Helmut Jahn, Koko Taylor, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Irv Kupcinet, Mark Rogovin, Ed Paschke, Jack Brickhouse, Oprah Winfrey and Studs Terkel are among the 60 subjects whose portraits and stories are included in this first-rate record of Chicago.
“Arthur Lazar: Intimate Landscapes,” with essays by John Hay and Nancy Gutrich (Lake Forest College, 96 pp., $60 in hardcover). Lazar teaches at Lake Forest College but his book emphasizes the monumental rock formations and cosmic deserts of the Southwest, where he was born and raised. He also seeks out the quieter grace of forests and grasslands in the Midwest and in England and Scotland. Always, the luminous play of light offers a visionary sense that the natural environment is sacred.
“William Garnett: Aerial Photographs,” introduction by Martha Sandweiss (University of California Press, 167 pp., $45 hardcover). The silent Earth will never seem so silent or so still again after viewing it in the protean abstractions of Garnett’s black and white photographs. Patterns of sand and rock appear organic and nearly moving. The simplest land formations suggest inscrutable mysteries. Enjoy the pictures for their graphic majesty and then try to guess their source before reading the book’s accompanying captions.
“Look at the Land: Aerial Reflections on America,” color photographs by Alex MacLean, text by Bill McKibben (Rizzoli, 176 pp., $50). MacLean’s America also is woven in the spellbinding patterns visible only from the air. His landscapes, though more readily identifiable than Garnett’s, offer stunning optical illusions. Mammoth ice formations on waterways resemble views through a microscope. Fields of crops, forests in fall and irrigation systems create alluring geometries. Overbuilt subdivisions resemble curious quilts.
“Thomas Struth: Strangers & Friends, Photographs 1986-1992,” edited by James Lingwood and Matthew Teitelbaum, essay by Richard Sennett (MIT Press, 108 pp., $39.95 in hardcover). This is the renowned German photographer’s first book published in the United States. At first glance, Struth’s deserted cityscapes and crowded interiors meticulously document urban architecture and modern life. But his stark black and white and color photographs also reveal how the structures we build and replace embody social forces and identity.
“The Perfect City,” photographs by Bob Thall, essay by Peter Hales (Johns Hopkins University Press, 113 pp., $50 in hardcover, $29.95 in paper). Thall views the city through the skeletons of its rising towers and at the steel-banded horizon cut by the elevated train tracks. He has spent 20 years roaming Chicago to photograph its architecture and its distinctive wastelands of parking lots, construction sites and remnants of prairie. But even here, Thall shows a city filled with magical light and the incongruous layering of time zones afforded by decades of construction, demolition and redevelopment.
“Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited,” photographs by Milton Rogovin, foreword by Robert Coles, introduction by Stephen Jay Gould, text by JoAnn Wypijewski (W.W. Norton & Co., 141 pp., $40 hardcover). Rogovin photographed families in one of Buffalo’s working-class neighborhoods over a 30-year period, revisiting them at 10-year intervals. Each set of three family photographs, his triptychs, dramatizes the strength and continuity of family relationships despite the dramatic changes wrought by time. In one triptych, a mother lovingly holds her baby girl. The girl has grown into a young woman by the second portrait and has given her mother a granddaughter to hold by the third. Similar entries and departures of people in and out of the portraits come to reflect universal stories of love and loss.
“Two Eagles/Dos Aguilas: The Natural World of the United States/Mexico Borderlands,” photographs by Tupper Ansel Blake, text by Peter Steinhart (University of California Press, 256 pp., $55 in hardcover). This sumptuous volume of color photographs and environmental writing establishes the beauty and ecological importance of an area once dismissed as a wasteland. Blake and Steinhart spent five years documenting the flora, wildlife and landscape of the region.
