A few times a year, we like to take the opportunity to review some
of the new photography books that come across our desk. After reviewing
novels and nonfiction week in and week out, it’s nice to feast on
purely visual books, and no art is suited for bound reproduction better
than photography. Here are some of the indispensable titles we’ve
enjoyed recently.

Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work by Susanne
Lange (MIT Press) Husband and wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher
(Bernd died last June) are two of my favorite characters in
photography. For over 40 years, the duo has made thousands of
variations on the exact same photograph, and virtually nothing else.
They photograph water towers, blast furnaces, and other anonymous
industrial sites from the exact same vantage point on identically
cloudless days; after doing so since the late ’50s, they’ve amassed an
enormously deep catalogue of nearly identical images. I have to admire
and chuckle at their single-minded asceticism, wondering if somewhere
there’s a stash of colorful nudes or rainbow photos that will surface
after their archives are open. Life and Work suggests not, but
opens, for the first time, the Bechers’ working methods and techniques,
complete with incredible and fascinating sketches, interviews, and
photos of the duo in “action,” most of which have never been seen
before. (It also provides gorgeous reproductions of the Bechers’ iconic
works.) This behind-the-scenes look at photography’s most
straight-faced duo might be a little wonky for the casual viewer, but
for real art lovers, it’s a goldmine.

In the Face of History, by Kate Bush and Mark
Sladen, eds. (Black Dog Publishing) Although photography was born
in Europe, the continent has never had as tidy of a photo history as
America. From Stieglitz to Soth, the 20th century Yankee trajectory is
fairly easy to trace, but Europe, with its splintered politics and
myriad artistic cultures, has never had an agreed-upon history of the
medium. In the Face of History doesn’t provide a textbook
narrative of how European photography developed, but it does lay out a
reasonably sturdy outline for high points along the way. The book
chooses 22 photographers—some no-brainers, some less familiar
names—and lumps them into themes intended to reflect the
“European experience” of the 20th century, the bulk of which evidently
revolves around various wars and their interludes. By sticking to these
“European experiences,” the book hedges close to traditional
documentary approaches, and avoids some of the best avant-garde art of
the last century. I’d venture that Claude Cahun’s gender-bending
self-portraits, John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages, or Anton
Bragaglia’s technology-obsessed movement studies reflect just as much
of the human experience in the last 100 years as do Henryk Ross’s
photos of the Warsaw ghettos, included here. But as In the Face of
History‘s goal is to reflect photography’s documentary
applications, it succeeds, bringing together well-known work with more
obscure names to create a tentative story about the growth of an art
form and a continent at the same time.

Joel-Peter Witkin by Eugenia Parry (Phaidon) As
far as I know, the world wasn’t clamoring for another collection of
Witkin’s greatest hits, but Phaidon’s reprint of their 2001 monograph
is welcome for two reasons: It’s slim and affordable, and it was
written and edited by Eugenia Parry, one of the best photography
writers working today. Witkin is a little passé among those long
familiar with his work, but his images of amputees, transsexuals,
anorexics, corpses, contortionists, and the morbidly obese in mythic,
haunting tableaux have lost little of their power over the past 25
years. If Witkin’s sole strength lay in his ability to shock or revolt,
he’d be sequestered to goth-y underground bookstores, but he’s an
amazing printmaker as well, and his images are loaded with art
historical references and increasingly complex arrangements of bodies
and props (a preserved penis, for instance). Unfortunately, this book
doesn’t set new standards in the reproductions department, and a lot of
the subtlety of his printing is lost in these high-contrast plates.
Witkin often serves as a “gateway artist,” leading nascent audiences
into the world of fine art photography, and this book would be a fine
starting point for just about anybody, especially given Parry’s concise
and informative texts that accompany each image. For seasoned
audiences, there’s not a lot of new info in Phaidon’s thin monograph,
but for newcomers, it’s a well-guided tour into the heart of Witkin’s
grotesque beauty.