Six big books that give readers the big picture

COFFEE-TABLE travel books, those lavishly illustrated -- and often hefty -- volumes, tempt dedicated globe-trotters and armchair travelers. Here are a few worthy of more than a second look.

National Geographic’s ‘sunny,’ haunting images

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In Focus

National Geographic Greatest Portraits

National Geographic, 504 pp., $30

Even stay-at-homes, especially camera buffs, should be enthralled with this volume. Touted as “uncommon photographs of common people,” the 280 images span more than a century and are both art and a visual history.

Stuart Franklin, one of five contemporary National Geographic photographers who wrote the text, notes in the “Before 1930” section the limitations -- and sociological messages -- of early magazine photos. He points out the way in which far-off lands were perceived as “vast museums of folk art,” inhabited by bare-breasted women with artificially elongated necks or costumed subjects representing some mythological, idealized past.

Sam Abell, writing of the 1930s and 1940s, observes that, while tragic events were unfolding in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, National Geographic remained largely focused on bringing readers images of a “sunny, funny sense of life” at home and “steady doses of inspiring adventure” abroad. That would change in later decades. Who can forget Steve McCurry’s 1985 “Afghan Girl,” whose piercing green eyes stare hauntingly into the camera?

That image is in the book, as is David Boyers’ famous photo of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin. So are many of those “sunny, funny” looks at life in the U.S. But there are such jolting images as that of the heads of outlaws on a billboard in 1927 Nanking in China.

New York, when a

hot dog cost a nickel

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New York, Empire City 1920-1945

David Stravitz

Abrams, 160 pp., $35

Transplanted New Yorkers may grow a bit misty-eyed over “New York, Empire City 1920-1945.” Author David Stravitz came upon the 100 historical photos by early architectural photographers in a New Jersey studio that was about to sell them for their silver.

The pictures, shot in black and white with large-format view cameras, are a trip down memory lane -- to Chock Full o’ Nuts, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Thom McAn shoe stores.

There are an awful lot of photos of buildings, some Art Deco gems long since torn down, but the people pictures compensate: men in fedoras, women in cloches taking tea in the ‘20s at a young ladies’ residence (now Beekman Tower Hotel), people riding in streetcars around Columbus Circle and in cars that had running boards and real trunks.

A street banner, photographed in 1924 near Saks Fifth Avenue, urges, “Elect Davis President. Restore Honesty. Condemn Corruption. Keep Governor Smith.” John W. Davis lost to Republican Calvin Coolidge after a fierce political fight with Alfred E. Smith, the New York governor who himself was defeated in his own presidential bid four years later. I loved the billboards -- “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel” -- and the pushcart selling nickel frankfurters. A sign at Colonial Furniture, 3rd Avenue and 124th Street, advertises living room sets for $35. The going rate for parking in the city? About 50 cents for 24 hours.

Photographers’ ‘Faces’ more than skin deep

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Faces of Africa

Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher

National Geographic, 358 pp., $35

Carol BECKWITH and Angela Fisher, who have been photographing the traditional cultures of Africa for 30 years, have compiled 250 images in “Faces of Africa” (National Geographic, $35). Their stunning photos reflect their having been “touched by the wisdom of elders and inspired by belief systems that keep people in harmony with their natural environment, their spirituality and their communities.”

They recorded the anxiety on the face of a Masai boy awaiting circumcision; a voodoo healing ritual in Togo; friends meeting and greeting on market day; and a trio of growling, snarling Namibian women possessed by the spirit of a lion.

Beckwith and Fisher traveled by car, foot and mule to remote regions, integrating themselves so well that while Beckwith was recording a courtship ritual in Niger, a young African man asked to meet her father, to learn how many camels it would take to win her hand.

On the vast, historical expanse of the Sahara

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Call of the Desert

The Sahara

Philippe Bourseiller

Abrams, 424 pp., $50

This is a visual treat and an easily digested history-geography book, with essays by five contributors with links to the Sahara.

It’s a big desert -- 4 million square miles -- and this is a big book, photographed in 10 countries. There are undulating copper-colored dunes, ancient pyramids and rock paintings, all part of this vast expanse that one contributor describes as a place of diabolical beauty, “most conducive to madness, and to wisdom.”

There also are reminders of 20th century strife, such as a burned-out tank abandoned during the war between Chad and Libya in the early ‘80s. The writers aren’t so blinded by camels and date palms that they fail to point out the danger to archeological sites caused by tourists in four-wheel-drive vehicles and the reality of arms and drug trafficking.

Among photographer Philippe Bourseiller’s extraordinary images are an ancient caravan town in Libya, Tuaregs at prayer in Algeria, a 10-kilometer dromedary race in Niger, and Mali fishermen casting sweep nets. One of the most riveting is of a skeleton, splayed in the sand, of a young dromedary that died of thirst in Mauritania.

Seeing the West

in black and white

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Land and Light in the American West

Photographs by John Ward

Trinity University Press, 136 pp., $45

After earning a doctorate in physics, John Ward decided that photography was his true calling. We’re the beneficiaries. Ward, a Colorado-based artist in the mold of Ansel Adams, has selected 60 of his black-and-white images for this volume.

Since the early ‘70s, he has traveled through the West and Southwest photographing the familiar -- the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, redwoods -- but also the unexpected. He finds art not only in sand dunes and sunrises but in a window with a torn screen, twigs poking through the snow, an abandoned schoolhouse.

‘Precarious’ Nepal landscapes and portraits

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Himalaya

Photographs by Eric Valli,

text by Anne de Sales

Abrams, 400 pp., $50

French photographer Eric Valli’s volume is another oversized book, a compilation of his marvelous photos taken during 20 years of travels through the mountains.

Valli, whose film “Himalaya” (also called “Caravan”) was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar in 2000, writes, “My photos capture what they can of scenes whose precariousness frightens me today.”

The society he has captured is one in which wheat is ground by hand, honey harvested from cliffs by men who destroy the hives with bamboo sticks and nomads who barter fish and game for grain.

He has captured the everyday lives of people living in hostile high altitudes between India and Tibet -- an old woman and her daughter-in-law milking yaks, weathered faces of peasants with gap-toothed grins, a honey harvester seemingly oblivious to a bee on his cheek.

While Valli’s landscapes are spectacular -- remote villages blanketed in snow, towering mountain peaks -- it is the people you’ll remember. A young woman trudges home with a rooster for the coop perched on the pack on her back. A shepherd carries a black sheep that has broken its leg. At a monastery, Valli photographed acolytes in scary masks dancing around a fire to exorcise a demon. In western Nepal, he focused on a sheep caravan silhouetted on the horizon.

In Nepal, at least, life is changing. In her text, cultural anthropologist Anne de Sales observes that although “Katmandu has become a mythic destination for young Westerners,” young Nepalese “seek escape from the circle of their mountains,” if only through the magic of the Internet.