SEASON’S READINGS : Everybody’s Got One : THE BODY: Photographs of the Human Form, <i> By William A. Ewing (Chronicle Books: $29.95</i> , <i> paperback in slipcover; 432 pp.)</i>

“To collect photographs is to collect the world,” as Susan Sontag observed. The world William A. Ewing has curated in this lovely-to-look-at, delightful-to-hold book, is nothing less than the world we all share and in which we are all isolated: the human body. More than 350 photographs, culled after many years of international research, exemplify the myriad ways the all-seeing eye of the camera has regarded the body during the past 150 years. Here is the body romantic and repulsive, modified and commodified, constructed and deconstructed; images of flesh and folks and of the air turbulence caused by sneezing.

The unfailingly arresting selection is arranged according to an intriguing framework; there are sections on the body fragmented, the nude figure, and scientific and medical photography of the body, as well as on the oppressed and victimized body, the body erotic and political, and as conceived by the mind in dream, fantasy and obsession.

The essays that begin the dozen chapters are erudite guides not only to the plates, but to the history of photography. The body has been a favorite subject of photographers since the earliest days, and the technology itself has had and continues to have profound influence upon the body. The snapshot, for example, is largely responsible for our awareness of our own aging, for it provides incontrovertible evidence of the passage of time. The major advances in plastic surgery techniques were once propelled by war; they are now propelled by the camera.

In medical diagnosis generally, the physician’s touch was long ago replaced by photography through X-rays and other imaging techniques. Though these are of undisputed social value, not all the effects of photography on the body have been benign. “Photography is often employed to deceive, to exacerbate anxieties and to reinforce stereotypes and prejudices,” Ewing writes. Some argue that pornography, and advertising and fashion photographs of an impossible ideal of slimness and youth, for example, devalue the female body. And it may be that the widespread promulgation in newspapers of photographs of the body brutalized and in extremis inures us to human misery.

There’s a lot here to think about, and a lot to savor, from the cornball pictorialists at the turn of the century, to the postmodern masters of the last few years. “The Body” would make an ideal gift for anyone who has one.