With techniques for laying out and printing archival material improving year by year (if not month by month), there has been a surge in powerful illustrated histories. In a parallel development, documentary photography has come to the fore to suspend moments of our own digitally paced era so that we might come to know better what happened and what is happening. Books trying to come to terms with images of September 11 continue to appear, and books on New York are proliferating logarithmically (including a "mini" reissue of Richard Berenholtz's panoramic New York, New York), but some of the most moving involved a photographic return to still-deserted Chernobyl, in Robert Polidori's Zones of Exclusion (Steidl) and Armin Linke's peripatetic globalism in Transient (Skira). The following books, through what they show and how they show it, make the world a little more visible.
Diaspora: Homelands in ExileFrédéric Brenner (HarperCollins)
Complex questions of identity are provoked by Brenner's stunning collection of photographs, taken over the course of 25 years, chronicling Jewish lives, often in declining communities, in every corner of the world, from Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan to Ethiopia and Las Vegas. For anyone, Jewish or otherwise, who generally thinks of Jews in terms of Israel and the United States, the book will be a revelation.
Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American CultureHoward Dodson (National Geographic)
Effortlessly spanning audience and age-group divides while it popularizes serious and compelling scholarship, this superb book demonstrates in words and pictures the extent to which the colonization of North and South America depended on slave labor, and how black resistance resulted in cultural adaptations that now form the basis of cultures in the Americas.
You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the ImaginationKatherine Harmon (Princeton Architectural Press)
Into this seemingly lighthearted 7"×10" look into people's love affairs with maps and mapmaking, Harmon packs some serious intellectual concepts about the human impulse to locate oneself in the cosmos; the intricate and thoughtful works she presents show mapmaking as diverse and extraordinary a human act as any other.
Crossing the Blvd.: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New AmericaWarren Lehrer and Judith Sloan (Norton)
New York's undersung borough of Queens, home to the city's airports, may be the most diverse county in the country, and documentarians Lehrer and Sloan have innovatively brought it to life in this arresting, vividly printed mosaic using first-person narratives that sometimes intertwine several voices, matched by a bold and colorful layout.
100 SunsMichael Light (Knopf)
Despite all the thousands of caricatures and artistic re-interpretations of the nuclear "mushroom cloud," photographs of the real thing are still intensely frightening and visually fascinating. Culled by Light (Full Moon) from formerly classified documents held by the United States National Archives and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the photos, dating from 1942 to 1962, will leave readers changed.
The Treatise on Perspective: Published and UnpublishedEdited by Lyle Massey (Yale Univ.)
These essays on and illustrations of Renaissance perspective treatises read like good murder mysteries, allowing the excitement of the scholar's discoveries of these books, and the original discoveries about how to render three dimensions from two by the Renaissance artist who wrote them, to come together beautifully.
Making Pictures: A Century of European CinematographySven Nykvist, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marcello Mastroianni, Michael Leitch, Cathy Greenhalgh et al. (Abrams)
Illustrated with gorgeously produced movie stills, this book offers a stunning look at the way that movies are made, both technically and creatively, and the influence European cinema has had on global filmmaking.
Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963—1975Patrick Rosenkranz (Fantagraphics)
In its detailed account of an art that celebrated sweating burnouts and libidinous creeps, this lavishly illustrated history captures the frenzied ambition and communal bonhomie that made the comix counterculture click.
The InnocentsTaryn Simon (Umbrage)
Working to free convicts who are convinced that DNA evidence will exonerate them, the Innocence Project has had a role in more than 100 overturned convictions. A Guggenheim fellow who is not yet 30, Simon photographed 39 men and one woman whose convictions have been reversed or overturned via the program, often taking the portraits at the scenes of the crimes that they did not commit.
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