HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS : The Fine Art of Photography

Photographers are conjurers; what they present to the viewer varies from the observable to the imagined. Even a straight documentary photograph that captures an ordinary event is magical because it outlasts the moment in time when the exposure was made. And when a talented photographer doesn’t wish to be literal, it’s possible to use the medium to call forth images seemingly from a void.

In Man Ray’s case, he was a printer first, and this undoubtedly influenced the experimental ways he used his camera. The autobiography of this inventive American photographer, painter and film maker has just been reissued and splendidly evokes the man, his work and his time.

In the introduction to Self Portrait by Man Ray (A New York Graphic Society Book / Little, Brown: $35; 320 pp., illustrated; 0-8212-1605-4), Merry Foresta of the National Museum of American Art says: “Man Ray spent his entire life constructing himself as an artist.” This astonishing sense of self flourished during the 1920s and 1930s when he lived in Paris. There he found soul mates in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. His studio was a gathering place for a circle of friends that included Dali, Picasso, Brancusi, Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Ray’s iconoclastic wit and genius were well received, and he produced a formidable body of work.

Perhaps the best known is a photograph of a female nude posed to show the resemblance between the shape of a woman’s back and that of a violin. He altered the original print by drawing the sound holes of a violin or using a stencil on the model’s back, and then rephotographing it. The resulting image, a playful visual pun, is a vivid example of how Ray enjoyed startling and amusing his public.

More insights into a photographer’s creative process are to be found in Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, edited by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (New York Graphic Society / Little, Brown: $50; 416 pp., illustrated; 0-8212-1619-0). Though the revered nature photographer’s autobiography was published posthumously three years ago, the irresistible candor of this collection of letters and the replies he received is a more intimate epilogue.

Adams was an obsessive letter writer. Beginning in 1916 with his cheery notes to an aunt, the correspondence is an outpouring of letters and cards to family, friends, environmentalists and many to colleagues such as Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange and Paul Strand. When Edward Weston died, Adams wrote his close friend Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid camera): “Edward rarely photographed anything he did not find interest in; his pictures were reflections of his inner spiritual and unconscious drive.” More than 100 of Adams’ photographs accompany the text, and they’re proof of the same intense dedication that he recognized in Edward Weston.

There is a tradition of photographers who have committed themselves to effecting social change. Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs by Daile Kaplan (Abbeville Press: $49.95; 239 pp., illustrated; 0-89659-745-8) records the career of one such journalist.

Lewis Hine was a sociologist who began making documentary photographs in 1904 working with a cumbersome Graflex even before the invention of the small, hand-held 35mm camera. He is known for his poignant portraits of exploited child laborers and immigrant arrivals at Ellis Island. Now, finally, thanks to the detective work of author Daile Kaplan, he’ll be remembered for this haunting cache of “lost” photographs commissioned by the Red Cross during World War I.

This is a beautiful book--the design, the paper and especially the fine duo-tone reproductions.

In Personal Exposures (W. W. Norton: 240 photographs and text by Elliot Erwitt; $60; 0-393-02616-7), Erwitt, a Magnum photographer since 1950 with many major international exhibitions to his credit, confesses that he likes to make people laugh and will even stoop so low as to toot a small horn to get a reaction. He’s a visual punster with a knack for finding, for example, humorous pictures.

Take a look at the middle-aged couple sitting serenely on the park bench (she’s knitting, he’s drinking coffee--in the nude), or glance at a statue of Diana, bow and arrow seemingly aimed at the dark silhouette of a man in the distance.

This is a journal of sorts--of Erwitt’s family and friends and his personal work--and of assignments that took him to Venice, Paris, Russia and Tokyo photographing events that were sometimes historic, sometimes commonplace.

It’s a great gift book. Buy two and keep one.

Conventionally, it seems that time can be measured in commonly experienced increments of time by a clock or other instrument. But our inner sense of time is something else. The Way We Were: 1963 The Year Kennedy Was Shot, edited by Robert MacNeil (Carroll & Graf: $39.95; 256 pp., illustrated; 0-88184-433-0) deals with the year in which Americans experienced an event so shattering that it stands out in our memory as if it were prolonged or recent.

MacNeil’s cogent essay and thoughtful interviews with people ranging from Jacqueline Kennedy to a third-grade teacher in Niles, Mich., are deeply moving. But most of all, the pictures transport us back in time. Not because they’re glossy or beautifully reproduced, but because they’re good.

Appointment in Venice by Alex Gotfryd (Doubleday: $30, illustrated; 0-385-24841-5) is the reconstruction of a recurring dream that haunted Gotfryd. Compelled by the vision of a mysterious woman in black, he used a friend as a model and photographed her in the gray early-morning mist of Venice in November.

This becomes a mythic setting for a beautiful, evocatively filmed scenario that takes us on a surrealistic journey into the subconscious.

Album: The Portraits of Duane Michals 1958-1988 (Twelvetrees Press: $55; 144 pp.; 0-942642-36-8) is the work of another photographer who is more interested in abstract ideas than what he calls “observable facts.” Perhaps it takes a self-taught cameraman who hates studios and never bothered to learn how to use strobes to challenge photographic conventions; instead he makes surrealistic images that redefine the medium.

For Michals, photography begins in the mind. He believes that portraits should not just duplicate physical appearances and prefers to use double exposure, soft focus and other off-beat techniques to portray his subjects’ inner lives. In a compelling narration, Michals writes: “We are a brilliant and unknown moment, suspended between memory and anticipation, anxious in our uncertainties, and doomed to fade with our consciousness.”

How Michals deftly photographs such intangibles is a question answered in large measure by this handsomely produced album.

Photography and architecture make excellent between-the-covers bedfellows, because buildings, unlike people, are patient subjects, and a photographer who cares about design can put architectural forms on paper with aesthetics and precision. Manhattan Architecture, photographs by Richard Berenholtz, introduction by Ellen Posner, text by Donald Martin Reynolds (Prentice Hall Press: $45; 0-13-551987-X) is an outstanding example of how well these two arts blend.

Page after page of dazzling color photographs give us a tour of the Big Apple, from its great skyscrapers to its decaying tenements. The essays are knowledgeable and the virtuoso photographs well seen by a lensman also trained as an architect. Anyone who loves New York will appreciate this book.

Cityscapes by Algimantas Kezys (Loyola University Press: $24.95, illustrated; 0-8294-0595-X) is a very different way of viewing cities. Somehow Kezys manages through his pristine images to give the reader the feeling of accompanying him on his travels. It’s a sense of being there, a mood that emanates from his velvety black-and-white images. Together we stand admiring the view from a window of the Paris Opera House or we look up with him at the dramatic shape of Richard Lippold’s sculpture framed against the backdrop of a lacy, cloud filled sky.

This Great Land, Scenic Splendors of America, photographs by David Muench, $59.95; 160 pp.; 0-528-83331-6) is both art book and reference book in one binding. Muench uses a large-format 4x5 camera on a tripod, spare filtration and usually daylight Ektachrome film. But his magic transcends technique.

Muench’s colors are never garish; he understands light and is guided by intuition. This majestic collection of photographs is described by Muench “as a celebration of the American Landscape,” and he pleads with the reader to preserve it for future generations.

Essays on the history and culture of the various regions of the United States, including one by author Tony Hillerman on his beloved Southwest, make this book, like its subject matter, a treasure.

Another important book of nature photographs worth giving or collecting is The West by Eliot Porter (New York Graphic Society, Little, Brown: $60; 132 pp., illustrated; 0-8212-17611-9).

Eliot Porter, like a Thoreau with a camera, gave up a career as a doctor more than 50 years ago to sit quietly in the woods studying and recording the natural scene. In color: a surprise in those days when others in the field were shooting in black and white. When the renowned Alfred Stieglitz gave him his first show in New York in 1939, Porter felt encouraged to leave his job as a professor at Harvard and move to New Mexico.

People and place are inseparable, and in the West Porter developed his theme as a naturalist-photographer exquisitely articulated in photographs of rare beauty.