Holiday Book Guide: Photography - WSJ.com
Despite a murderous year for the publishing industry, artful books of photographs continued to roll off the presses in impressive numbers. Electronic devices simply can't match (so far) the substantial pleasure of looking at—and owning—pictures on a paper page. Here are some highlights.
"We English" by Simon Roberts (Chris Boot, 56 pages, $60). Most of us experience nature along pathways and shorelines trodden for decades, if not centuries. This rueful truth is known in the bones of the English, who have pieced and parceled their half of an island since the Bronze Age. Simon Roberts gently mocks his compatriots as they search for weekend inspiration in these well-groomed landscapes, even as he reminds us why such lovely places were, and still could be, wellsprings for poetry.
"Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans" (Steidl, 506 pages, $75). This mammoth catalog is a tribute to Robert Frank's lacerating classic, "The Americans." Published a half-century ago, the Swiss emigre's deeply emphatic and critical examination of his adopted country has only improved with age. "Looking In" offers dozens of Frank's outtakes, as jagged and tough as the 83 pictures that he included in the original book. If you can afford it, buy the hardcover edition of "Looking In," since the paperback inexplicably deletes many of the smaller images that accompany the superb essays.
"Small Trades" by Irving Penn (Getty Museum, 269 pages, $49.95). The final book overseen by the late andinimitable Mr. Penn collects more than200 portraits of tradesmen and -women taken in 1950-51 in Paris, London and New York. A tip of the cap from one exceptional craftsman to his fellow workers, this salute also eulogizes professions—tinsmith, charwoman, iceman, pickle salesman, organ grinder—that would soon be obsolete.
"Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage"by Elizabeth Siegel (Yale University Press, 200 pages, $45). Photocollage was invented not long after photography. Aristocratic women in Victorian England were notably keen on cutting up photographs of humdrum realism and mixing and matching them to create whimsical fantasies—e.g., photos of children nestled in the blooms of painted flowers or a drawing of a juggler tossing balls decorated with portrait photographs of sober, bearded Englishmen. Ms. Siegel's expert commentary on her selection from family albums of the 1860s and 1870s leads us on a twisty ride down the rabbit hole.
"Faces of the Frontier: Photographic Portraits From the American West 1845-1924" by Frank Goodyear III (University of Oklahoma Press, 181 pages, $45). Myths about the American frontier persist despite the best efforts of historians to disprove them. From the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, Mr. Goodyear has culled a wild bunch of characters— Gen. Winfield Scott ("Old Fuss and Feathers"), Levi Strauss, Calamity Jane, Sam Houston, Geronimo and even Hollywood cowboy Tom Mix—who left their imprint on our image of the West. As photographs often show, most of these men and women looked quite ordinary, which makes their star billing in our imagination all the more interesting to ponder.
"Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks" by Joel Meyerowitz (Aperture, 209 pages, $65). Who knew that the five boroughs had so many parks, encompassing 29,000 acres of greenery? In his systematic tour of what is left of the city's natural landscape—and where it is even being enhanced, thanks to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's campaign to plant a million trees—Mr. Meyerowitz uncovers odd and charming hideaways that most native New Yorkers will not have visited or even heard of. Particularly striking are the images of North Brother Island, acquired by the city's parks department in 2007. The 13-acre island in the East River has clearly been reverting to the wild—vines seem to be pulling a power station down into the ground—since the 1963 closing of Riverside Hospital.
"Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before" by Michael Fried (Yale University Press, 409 pages, $55). The latest art historian to discover that photography offers challenges not found in the other arts, Mr. Fried trains his lucid mind and prose on the work of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth and other contemporary figures. The knotty arguments here call for a reader's undivided attention, but they reward it.
"Sawdust Mountain" by Eirik Johnson (Aperture, 143 pages, $50). A permanent mist hangs over the inhabitants of a region Mr. Johnson calls Sawdust Mountain, and it isn't just the rainy climate. In his moving group portrait of a community of loggers and fishermen in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Johnson, a native son, documents the precariousness of life in this corner of America. At the same time, his photographs capture the defiance of those who have made certain choices—rural solitude instead of an urban economy—and are content (or not) with that bargain.
"The Photographs of Homer Page" by Keith F. Davis (Yale University Press, 144 pages, $50). One of the best-printed books of the year restores to public view one of mid-century America's unjustly forgotten photographers. Page was a humanist in the style of Helen Levitt, with a similar eye for the ballet of the street. This tasty selection of his New York work from 1949-50 whets the appetite for a full retrospective.
"The Contact Sheet" by Steve Crist (Ammo Books, 192 pages, $39.95). Before the digital era, contact sheets preserved a photographer's thought process and were a graveyard for burying mistakes. The strips here reveal how an illustrious group— William Claxton, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Julius Schulman, William Wegman and others—went about their business. We see a full-page reproduction of a well-known photograph, accompanied by the contact sheets—sometimes with more than a dozen images—from the same session. There is, for example, Claxton's famous 1960s image of a model (his wife) wearing what became known as the first topless bikini, as well as 12 other rejected shots—including some showing her wearing a diving mask pushed up over her forehead. It's not always clear why the photographers chose one picture over another, which only adds to the value of this archival material.
"The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith" by Sam Stephenson (Knopf, 268 pages, $40). From 1957 until 1965, Gene Smith ran one of the hippest jazz scenes in New York out of his Sixth Avenue loft. He obsessively photographed and tape-recorded everything that went on there, from rehearsals for Thelonious Monk's big-band concert at Town Hall in 1959 to all-night jam sessions with Zoot Sims and Roland Kirk. Thought for years to have been unplayable, the tapes—and the photographs—from this lost jazz world have been restored, thanks to Mr. Stephenson's tireless efforts.
"Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History" by Gail Buckland (Knopf, 319 pages, $40). Ms. Buckland tells a familiar rock-music story but from the perspective of the photographers who attended the concerts or hung out in the hotel rooms. Blessedly, she makes no attempt to inflate celebrity portraiture into High Art. Though the musicians pictured, from Elvis Presley in 1955 to Amy Winehouse in the present day, are what you'd expect, the line-up of photographers is anything but the usual suspects. Yes, we find Jim Marshall, Lynn Goldsmith and David Gahr but also Dennis Hopper, Andreas Gursky, Ari Marcopolous and others not solidly embedded in rock culture.
"Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard" by Jeff L. Rosenheim (Steidl, 407 pages, $65). The huge collection of postcards—9,000 of them—owned by photographer Walker Evans was in keeping with this lifelong pack-rat's affection for many things looked down on by the high-minded. Mr. Rosenheim's delightful catalog for a show of the postcards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York explores the many relationships, direct and indirect, between these commercial images—of hotels, parks, lighthouses and much more—and Evans's supposedly austere photographs. Only a sourpuss could flip open this book and not break into a smile.
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