PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS : Picture Perfect

With Christmas lurking around the corner like a petty thief about to roll us for our wallets, the annual deluge of holiday gift books is upon us--and as always, there’s an abundance of art photography books among the heap. This seasonal onslaught of photo books has become so routine it’s easy to forget that publications of this type are a relatively recent development; prior to the 1950s it was the rare photographer who had the luxury of executing a body of work revolving around a specific theme, then seeing it beautifully bound and marketed.

A case in point is Walker Evans. The subject of WALKER EVANS: The Hungry Eye (Harry N. Abrams: $60; 368 pp. ), this seminal American photographer, who was born in 1903 and died in 1975, had ideas for several books he dreamed of doing over the course of his life, but succeeded in completing just two (“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and “Many Are Called”). This book, which attempts to provide a comprehensive survey of Evans’ life and work, leaves one keenly aware of the degree to which his great talent was constrained by the fact that he was making fine art photographs at a time when such a thing was barely recognized, much less supported by the marketplace.

Including a serviceable text by Gilles Mora and John T. Hill and 470 illustrations (many of which are reproduced on a ridiculously small scale), the book includes all of Evans’ best-loved work along with a few surprises. Generously represented here are those bodies of work that have come to be regarded as his most important: During the 1930s when he was employed by Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration, Evans created an indelible record of racism in America, the Depression, the South, the birth of car culture and the signs and symbols of the American road.

More interesting, though, is the lesser-known work he was making in the years preceding his death, when he was taking pictures of garbage--in cans and in the street--and using a color Poloroid camera for candid portraiture. One of the revelations of the book is that this artist, widely known as a master of black-and-white photography, turned to color in 1948, and continued to make color pictures up until his death. Evans’ color work has been largely overlooked thus far and that’s a shame--many of his color images are easily as compelling as the best of his work in black and white. This thoroughly researched book is to be commended for setting the record straight in that regard, and for providing a solid nuts-and-bolts chronicle of his evolution as an artist.

Evans’ influence can clearly be felt in LETTERS FROM THE PEOPLE (Distributed Art Publishers: $95) , the ninth book by New York-based photographer Lee Friedlander. Including 213 black-and-white images made in the streets between 1979 and 1988 during travels in America, Europe and Asia, this haunting visual essay on language opens with images of the letters of the alphabet, segues to pictures of numbers and concludes with photographs of sentences. This beautifully simple format allows Friedlander’s cool, formal pictures to resonate with the poetic complexities of language. A manifestation of our need to connect and leave a stain on the world, language comes across here as an exquisitely perfect metaphor for humankind itself: Both mean well but invariably fall dreadfully short of the mark. One closes Friedlander’s book with the thought that although language allows us to name the things of the world, we can never truly know the essential nature of the things we speak of.

Language takes a nasty beating in CINDY SHERMAN: 1975-1993 (Rizzoli: $60) , a comprehensive survey of work by a young New York artist who’s established herself as one of the most significant talents to emerge during the 1980s. Using herself as the model for an ongoing series of increasingly violent photographs investigating fantasy and American myth, Sherman is an intensely visceral artist. You’d never guess that, however, on the basis of this book’s incomprehensibly dry text by Rosalind Krauss. Currently one of the reigning queen bees of cultural criticism and author of the recently published book “The Optical Unconscious,” Krauss, who teaches at Columbia, is guilty of all that’s objectionable about academia. Her chief crime is that she’s boring and obtuse; bing-bang, clunk-thunk, the $20 words rain down, pelting the hapless reader about the head, communicating nothing. Buy this book for the beautiful color plates, but skip the text lest you be tempted to hurl it out the window.

Krauss could learn a lot from John Wood, who contributed the text to THE ART OF THE AUTOCHROME: The Birth of Color Photography (University of Iowa Press: $65). The writing in this modest book is surprisingly wonderful. Witty and thoroughly researched, Wood’s text draws boldly original revisionist conclusions about the history of photography. It occasionally slips into a wickedly gossipy tone that really brings to life the story of the Autochrome, an ill-fated color technique that flourished briefly in the early part of this century, only to be replaced with color processes of greater efficiency. Wood systematically dismantles many of the myths surrounding photography and its history propagated by American artist and impresario Alfred Stieglitz (not the least of them being a mythical conception of Stieglitz himself). Stieglitz gets into the act here because he toyed for a while with Autochrome. Producing a shimmering, lyrical effect that linked it to Impressionism and the Symbolists, Autochrome essentially functioned as a bridge between the treacly Pictorialist school of photography and Modernism. Though a minor footnote in art history, the Autochrome has a singularly beautiful look wholly its own, and the color plates in this expertly written book are gorgeous.

Also of note in this year’s crop is SALESMAN (Twin Palms Publishers: $35) a collection of industrial imagesof comically bland, buttoned-down salesman shot during the 1950s and used during that decade in seminars promoting selling techniques. Sensitively edited by Diane Keaton (who also contributes an eloquent text), this strange little book functions as a terrifying reminder of post-war zombie America, when consumer culture was at its zenith and heaven was thought to exist in a sparkling new appliance and a freshly-mowed lawn.

Last on the list is 108 PORTRAITS (also published by Twin Palms: $50) by filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who emerges here as a photographer of considerable gifts; his simple black-and-white portraits of figures from the worlds of art, film and music are surprisingly powerful.