As long as we have fine holiday gift books, the digital age is not entirely upon us (never mind all the digital processes that now factor into books). Faced by the new, high-strut pages we gaze, browse, cherish.
Here are the new books to give or covetously keep, as art, photography and adjoining worthies call out for keepsake shelves:
McClatchy-Tribune illustration
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It would be off-focus to say that the great color photographer Joel Meyerowitz has pulled a Venus of beauty from the Vulcan's pyre that is the former World Trade Center. But if you have been to the site, you have felt a certain beauty of hushed regard. In “Aftermath” (Phaidon, $75), Meyerowitz enshrines this in large, embracing shots taken (despite a police warn-off) in the weeks after 9/11/01, causing a steady intake of breath.
With her 9/11 shots, even more with an amazingly deep portfolio on her vital, sick, indomitable, then dying friend Susan Sontag, the artist monumentalized in “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life 1990-2005” (Random House, $75) oddly dwarfs much of her work. Yes, wows of Schwarzenegger in high Riefenstahl mode, of a marble-veined Stallone, of Patti Smith as lioness, are vintage Leibovitz. But richer things compel, such as adorable child Sarah Cameron Leibovitz on 10/16/04.
You can awe yourself by going to the high, wild, distant places, or do it gapingly with the color vistas of “Galen Rowell: A Retrospective” (Sierra Club, $50). Four years after his death, the famed climber and photographer's views of Tibet, Siberia, the Sierras, Alaska and wildlife become a remarkably personal epic. Andy Grundberg, Frans Lanting and others offer keen appreciations.
Great city of czars, Pushkin and Dostoevski, “St. Petersburg” (Frances Lincoln, $60) finds a book that is right, not crushing, for its scale and detail. Two Brit writers elaborate the stormy history, but it is Yury Molodkovets' color pictures that flood your eyes with the glorious urbs of Peter, Lenin and now (discretely) McDonald's.
There is no end to “Frank Lloyd Wright: Prairie Houses” (Rizzoli, $50), because you want to double back and keep going through Alan Weintraub's photos of the warmly inviting spaces. The pictures are unpopulated, except for the spirit of a small, caped genius in every beautiful room.
Tim Fitzharris' “Big Sky: Wild West Panoramas” (Firefly, $45) has 72 wide-scan photoscapes of mountains, deserts, coasts, floral fields and, of course, the Grand Canyon. His color atmospherics lure you deep into situational magic.
Once, Hitler was spiff in top hat and tails, Garbo imitated Marlene Dietrich, Gandhi had hair, Muhammad Ali hammed as St. Sebastian. See them in Robin Muir's “The World's Most Photographed” (NPG, $40). Pudgy Queen Victoria was the first great snap celeb, later came stars like JFK, Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean, people almost more filmic than flesh. This smart book might have been nicer to Garbo, and found pages for Chaplin, Brando, Sinatra and Churchill.
Suited to the season, Steven Rothfeld's small images in “Shrines: Images of Italian Worship” (Doubleday, $18) could invoke mild piety even in an atheist. The lovably humble street and wall pieces, usually of Mary, cast a tender spell that bring you close to the heart, not the pomp, of Catholicism.
Frances Borzello's “At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art” (Thames & Hudson, $40) shows how the nested, frequently lavish home space, often seen in window light, has brought forth artistic marvels. From Jan Van Eyck to the amazingly lucid impressionist Caillebotte, domesticity rules, cresting around 1900. Surprises include James Tissot's fully bedecked officer lounging on plush fabrics, and Vilhelm Hammershoi's magical view of doors opened to rooms revealing a hushed absence.
Tim McCurry's 1984 color image of an exiled Afghan girl with piercing yellow-opal eyes made him famous. Her people's plight endures. So does the Asian power of “Looking East: Portraits by Steve McCurry” (Phaidon, $40). Every person, seen close in startling color, is an ethnic type made fully individual and, by their eyes and McCurry's eye, universal.
How did a pudgy South African ex-boxer with a dawn-glad smile become the most cherished icon of modern humanity? How, even why, becomes movingly clear in “Mandela: The Authorized Portrait” (Andrews McMeel, $50). The great run of photos, documents, testimonials, the text on the good side of hagiography, make this book a worthy totem for a giant.
Did you know that ears average 1.6 million hairs, and that digestive juices were first seriously studied through a permanent hole in a fur trapper's tummy? Compact, clear, factually rich and superbly illustrated, “Human Body: A Visual Guide” (Firefly, $30) is a sure keeper.
Of course, “Shirley Temple” (Applause, $30) is a fan book, but what else do we want? Long before Dakota Fanning, there was the adored Temple. Here is her glory: movies, dolls, storybooks, terrific kids' parties, endless tie-ins, even a Czech calendar of her holding court with Greta Garbo. Rita Dubas, never dubious, wrote and designed with love.
You can almost (but don't) ignore the celeb and nude and fashion shots in “Jazz, Giants and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard” (Scala, $60). His heart's passion led him to the jazz clubs and stages, and only the music is more definitive than Billy Holiday as singing queen among smoke, Tony Bennett clutching a mike almost lasciviously, Ben Webster as a corridor-filling monolith.
Aldous Huxley thought the Taj Mahal was overrated, then came to see it as a great experience. Even his keen mind didn't probe in, 'round and all over quite like Ebba Koch's “The Complete Taj Mahal” (Thames & Hudson, $75). The marbled complex and rich environs of the masterwork is snapped, mapped, given historical depth. This just might save you the trip.
Had he worked in Hollywood, he might have invented VistaVision. But J.M.W. Turner was the greatest of British epic and maritime painters, and Andrew Wilton's beautifully judged and illustrated Turner in His Time (Thames & Hudson, $60) is a fit salute. A compendious text including Turner letters is rightly overawed by his enfolding art of splendid color and atmosphere.
Surveying an impossibly expansive subject, Nils Buttner's “Landscape Painting: A History” (Abbeville, $135) serves in depth. From great fantasists (Giotto, Watteau, Poussin) to ascendant realists (Breughel, Constable, Pissarro) and wizards between (Rembrandt, Turner, Dali), the book is sumptuously exciting and rich in surprise, such as Altdorfer's stunning effusion of tall foliage in which St. George and the dragon are humbled to mere footnotes. Americans tend to get shorter shrift: no Bingham, Ryder, Diebenkorn, Kahn or Hartley.
Fifty years after the bravest anti-Soviet revolt, Erich Lessing's “Revolution in Hungary: The 1956 Budapest Uprising” (Thames & Hudson, $50) honors those Magyars who thought that we (yes, us) would save them from Red Army tanks. Prudence and the Suez crisis said nix, but Lessing's potent images and a multi-writer text bring it all back.
Pizzaro might have slit your throat for “The Lure of Gold” (Abbeville, $75). A savvy text relates mankind's venerably irrational mania for the gleaming stuff. The full-page photos bring on a Fred C. Dobbs mood: a gilt-clad temple in Kyoto, Mycenaean masks, Egypt's Tut, gold-drunk Versailles, a lovable Colombian toy raft made entirely of the sunburst metal.
Harry Katz's “Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress” (Abrams, $50) is a jubilaceous jam of 'toonery, mostly strips and editorial riffs, including such oddniks as Rea Irvin's World War II improv on the Bayeaux tapestries and to such dated marvels as Arthur Szyk's wildly racist “Jap” caricature post-Pearl Harbor and a Cold War vision of Abe Lincoln standing tall against the void of “godless communism.” Here is strip genius Winsor McCay, acidic David Levine not far from Superman, and Dick Nixon getting Herblocked forever.
Including even foldout shots of Elvis talking to a Virginia waitress, Alfred Wertheimer's “Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis” (Insight Editions, $65) is mania made munificently maniacal. A fly on the wall, almost on the Elvisoid lips, the press imagist caught prince Presley before embalming as The King, a dude of humility and stunning good looks, as alert to motorcycles as girls.
The old tension between nature and the classical canon hardly finds a more telling image than Giulio Romano's severe fresco of a noble steed in profile against columns. And Gericault did a grand painting of 25 equine rears. Your eyes lasso “The Horse: 30,000 Years of the Horse in Art” (Merrell, $50), its images exalting history's most amazingly painted and sculpted animal.
A recent Clint Eastwood movie caught the Iwo Jima battle well, but if you want the churning crunch of it whole enter Eric Hammel's “Iwo Jima” (Zenith, $40). Text flows with illustration: the landing, the combat, the carnage, the flag-raising, major medal winners, all a surge of tide where men live or die in the snap of a camera's eye.
Union-Tribune film critic David Elliott feels that “life, often thought of as a movie, could be better as a huge picture book.”
