The Online Photographer

Lost Balls, Charles Lindsay. Charles Lindsay is a serious photographer of long standing with many fine projects to his credit. Here he's created luminous, masterful and humorous photographs out of situations that most golfers will sympathize with. Ever seen the famous picture of the golfers being chased off the green by an angry bear? It's his, and it's here. Photographers could almost study these pictures as an object lesson in how to compose. The perfect gift for any friend who's both photography enthusiast and golfer.

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The Call of Trains, Jim Shaughnessy. A book to treasure for anyone you love who likes either Americana or trains. A life's work in stunning, dramatic, deep-toned black-and-white, guaranteed to contain pictures you'll come back to visit again and again. Many of the pictures are from the '50s and '60s, and have a social-documentary and nostalgic aspect aside from their pictorial charm. Not just for the train buff on your list, but definitely for the train buff on your list.

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The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole, Stuart Klipper. Talk about luminous landscapes! A labor of love, obsession, and determination, this unique book is the summation of six trips Stuart Klipper made to the Antarctic over a period of twenty years. For all their impressiveness in the original, panoramic photographs can be hard to handle online and in books; this book, which is large but not huge and opens from the top, strikes me as a particularly elegant and suitable treatment of the format. The many pictures have a surprising variety and depth. Perhaps predictably, I like best the ones that center on the human presence in Antarctica, but lovers of pure (and dramatic, and very beautiful, and—yes—luminous) landscapes are very well served too. If there's a better book on the continent, I'm not aware of it.

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Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign, Scout Tufankjian. It was a reader, in the comments, who turned me on to the work of Brooklyn, N.Y. photographer Scout Tufankjian, whose immediate, intimate, and thorough coverage of the epic Obama campaign makes perfect fodder for a book-length photojournalistic project. Many of the pictures, which really catch the energy of this campaign, can be seen on her website. An impressive example of a devoted (and talented) photographer capturing history as it happens.

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The Daily Coyote, Shreve Stockton. Everybody has an animal lover or two on their gift lists, and this is truly a book that's good to give. Not so much a book of photography as a book about life and love that happens to have photographs (although you'll not be disappointed with those), Shreve Stockton's tale of raising an orphan coyote pup in her tiny Wyoming cabin (she was making her way from San Francisco to New York City when she found her adopted home) will move and delight anyone who has ever lived with or loved an animal. I don't mean to be crass, but this one's guaranteed to get you points and plaudits from your giftees. Seriously. I've bought two to give—so far.

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What the World Eats, Peter Menzel. Photography as sociology. This is a simple idea—pictures showing families from all over the world with one week's worth of the food they typically eat—but it's deeply fascinating, especially for people who are interested in food. The current title is a repackaging and abridgment of last year's Hungry Planet, which is still available and which I would actually prefer (also available in paperback). This is a coffee table book that really does belong on a coffee table—it will interest the most casual browsers but reward careful inspection too.

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Equus, Tim Flach. I honestly hardly know what to make of Equus. Horses as top models? Equine-based art? A photo-technical tour-de-force, you'll see every imaginative treatment you can think of here—horses as high fashion, abstracts avec le cheval, hyper-intimate details (including horse fetuses), horses from every angle (including directly underneath), individual specimens that can only be described as gorgeous, fantasy landscapes with equine accents—no car, no human supermodel, no haute couture has ever been treated with more sumptuous lighting, more spare-no-expense technique, more excessive stylishness. Appropriate for mere horses? You kinda have to say, who cares?

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Seen Behind the Scene, Mary Ellen Mark. For forty years, still photography behind the scenes of movie sets has been one of the ways that renowned documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark has paid the bills. In this surprisingly fascinating collection of the best of all that work, Ms. Mark and her editors have created a book that at once caters to celebrity culture and also shows its bones. It's at the same time an important photography book and a book that will find an audience among people who don't know or care the first thing about photography or photographers.

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Instamatic Karma, May Pang. Both words in the title date the book, and the Beatles fan on your gift list might find it hard to believe that there are people pushing thirty who weren't alive when Lennon was murdered. Time does get behind us, doesn't it? This book of personal snapshots of an undisputed legend of music have a quality that is casual, elegiac, and real. This won't be mistaken for high art, but it's got the same sort of appeal of some of the many books of snapshots that have come out recently. And it seems curiously transparent to the role of photography in its subjects' lives.

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Hot Chicks with Douchebags, Jay Louis. Every list of gift suggestions needs one gag title, right? I don't know if this will do, but I thought I'd try. Admit it, though—no matter how hip you think you are, if you count your decades on more fingers than you need to make a peace sign, you have no idea what to get for older teenagers and early twentysomethings, do you? This book's a bastard in many ways—it's derived from a website, its photos are scavenged, and if you're not in the target audience, its "humor" is pretty sure to grate. But lots of them whippersnappers like the website, and just maybe this will get a laugh from someone on your list you're seldom privileged to hear a chuckle from. Worth a try?

Good luck.

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Mike

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