5 Great Photo Books

By Richard Lacayo

ART PHOTOGRAPHY NOW SUSAN BRIGHT Forget twilit still lifes and peachy nudes. The photography in Bright's lively survey of 80 artists who work with cameras has more to do with staged scenes of suburban anxiety, mock heroic tableaux of heavily armed children and the determined contemplation of whatever is enigmatic or unnerving. (There are a fair number of nudes, though none you would think to call peachy.) Thanks to Bright, you also get to enjoy the sight of Kate Moss, above, in a picture by the photo-collaborators Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, holding a lit cigarette between her toes--providing one more reason she's considered among the most versatile figures in professional modeling.

FRAGILE EARTH Massive change is the theme of this book, which documents the climate transformations the planet has been undergoing in recent years, many of them undesirable, most a result of human actions. As you might expect from a book assembled to convince you that something very unpleasant is afoot, the images are sobering. All the same, there's a considerable wow factor in the aerial and space photography the editors frequently use to illustrate their points about melting ice caps, advancing deserts and rising sea levels. They have a particular thing for discouraging compare-and- contrast shots of sights like Iraqi wetlands before and after being drained by Saddam Hussein, the disappearance of the once permanent snow on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and, worst of all, the sinister and apparently unstoppable spread of Las Vegas. So it's true: Celine Dion may be as much of a threat to the planet as global warming.

A PHOTOGRAPHER'S LIFE ANNIE LEIBOVITZ Clever though they may be, Leibovitz's celebrity portraits can sometimes remind you of an armored car: big, heavyset and built for serious business. In this book of pictures taken from 1990 to 2005, the celebrity pics, with their industrial-strength charm, are back--the naked and pregnant Demi Moore, Brad Pitt languishing on an orange bedspread--but there are informal family shots as well, like one of her brother and father, below, and many pictures of her longtime beloved, the writer Susan Sontag, even as the ailing Sontag ventures toward death. Leibovitz's unflinching final portrait of her, laid out just after she died, is unforgettable.

ON THE STREET AMY ARBUS From 1980 to 1990, Arbus wandered the streets of Manhattan making pictures of the more style-conscious locals for the Village Voice. Looking at them now, you can't help seeing affinities with the work of her mother Diane Arbus. They both were drawn to extravagant specimens of humanity, but in Amy's pictures the skinheads, drag queens and assorted hipsters no longer seem like unsettling loners. They're self-possessed public actors, pleased to be flourishing their regalia.

ELLIS ISLAND STEPHEN WILKES Sixteen years ago, the north side of Ellis Island, the famed New York entry point for generations of immigrants, was magnificently renovated. But the hospital compound on the south side, where many arrivals were held in quarantine, was left to decay. For five years, Wilkes roamed the disintegrating buildings, with their cracked plaster and peeling paint, to make pictures of their gorgeous decrepitude. (Congress has since allocated money to preserve them.) Decline has never looked more haunting.