The best fine art photography books

No Cameras Allowed tells the story of how Julian David Stone entirely by sneaking his equipment into concerts, amassed an incredible archive of over ten thousand rock and roll photos. Starting by simply stashing a camera in his socks, then taping equipment all over his body, to finally customizing a jacket to hide equipment from security guards, he shot dozens of the 1980s greatest acts: Prince, U2, the Police, David Bowie, R.E.M., the Ramones, Elvis Costello, the Talking Heads, the Grateful Dead, Joan Jett, and many, many more. Culled from this incredible, never-before-seen archive, this book contains over 250 of his best photos, along with some of the craziest adventures he had as he evaded oversized roadies, aggressive security, and more than a few drunken fans.

Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting weekly sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changed-and changed us.

Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad, in carrying us from the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men, Killing Eve, and the emergence of our first reality TV president.

In his acclaimed portraits, Richard Avedon captured the iconic figures of the twentieth century in his starkly bold, intimately minimal, and forensic visual style. Concurrently, his work for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue revolutionized the fashion photograph. Yet despite his driving ambition to gain respect in the art world, during his lifetime he was condescendingly dismissed as a "celebrity photographer."

Avedon mounted an existential lifelong battle to be recognized as an artist. Compounding his private battles, Avedon fought to be taken seriously in a medium that itself struggled to be respected within the art world. He counted as close friends a profoundly influential group of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers—Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Mike Nichols, Harold Brodkey, Renata Adler, Sidney Lumet. What Becomes a Legend Most pays tribute to Avedon's role in the history of photography—and his legacy as one of the most consequential artists of his time.

British photojournalist Adrian Bradshaw came to Beijing in 1984 to study Mandarin just as everyday life was in flux. He would go on to spend three decades living in, experiencing, and recording the transformation of the reform and opening-up era. The youth whose energy and optimism seized the moment with experimentation and invention back in the first decade of the new era built the foundations of an outward-looking, successful, and confident China today. Bradshaw would stay longer than any other overseas photojournalist, bringing an empathy and understanding to his subjects that is rare.

In his twenties in the 1980s, Bradshaw was in the company of the young people who drove the reform era and built many of the features of 21st Century China: the artists, farmers, entrepreneurs, and industrialists whose enthusiasm and positivity made things happen. This energy that made history is still bursting forth.

From the jungles of Yunnan to the frozen wastes of Heilongjiang; across the deserts of Xinjiang and beneath Hong Kong's neon blur. Tramping through China by train, bus, boat, motorcycle, or hitching on the back of anything that moved. On a budget so scant that he drew sympathetic stares from peasants. Backpacker Tom Carter somehow succeeded in circumnavigating 35,000 miles (56,000 kilometers) across all 33 Chinese provinces during a 2-year period, the first foreigner on record ever to do so. What Carter’s photographs reveal is that China is not just one place one people, but 33 distinct geographical regions populated by 56 different ethnicities, each with their own languages, customs, and lifestyles. 

From the jungles of Yunnan to the frozen wastes of Heilongjiang; across the deserts of Xinjiang and beneath Hong Kong's neon blur. Tramping through China by train, bus, boat, motorcycle, or hitching on the back of anything that moved. On a budget so scant that he drew sympathetic stares from peasants. Backpacker Tom Carter somehow succeeded in circumnavigating 35,000 miles (56,000 kilometers) across all 33 Chinese provinces during a 2-year period, the first foreigner on record ever to do so. What Carter’s photographs reveal is that China is not just one place one people, but 33 distinct geographical regions populated by 56 different ethnicities, each with their own languages, customs, and lifestyles. 

Tideland was the third book in my West Texas Trilogy. It was designed to be highly metaphorical and fantastical. While I'm not much of a fan about pontificating on my own novels, I can relate that the underlying themes of the book deal with the resilience of children, issues of abandonment, and how a creative imagination can power through trauma.

The Grass Shall Grow resurrects the work of Helen M. Post (1907-79), an important if half-forgotten photographer, whose commissions on Indian reservations throughout the American West during the Great Depression produced striking and informative images.

It recounts Post’s career, from her coming of age in turbulent Vienna to her work for the U.S. Indian Service, tracking the arc of her professional reputation. It treats her interactions with such prominent white figures as Indian Commissioner John Collier and a variety of Native Americans: leaders (Crow superintendent, Robert Yellowtail, for example), noted craftspeople (including Sioux quilter Nellie Star Boy Menard), and ordinary individuals, people she photographed wherever she found them – at school, in hospital, dancing in ceremonies, or out in the fields. Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, the book constitutes a serious reappraisal of an independent woman artist who captured a respectful and empathetic portrait of Native American life in troubled times.

In Marlene Adelstein's debut novel, Sophie Last Seen, it is six years after the disappearance of ten-year-old Sophie from a shopping mall. Her mother, Jesse, is living in self-destructive limbo as any sense of closure eludes her. Jesse is observed by her daughter’s best friend, Star, who carries her own secrets about that day. These two wounded souls come together to follow clues left by Sophie in her birding journals hoping to be led to Sophie or answers to her disappearance.

This inspiring tale of one woman’s journey in search of the truth about her child weaves together themes of forgiveness, romance, and acceptance. In staying true to herself, Jesse also gains strength and understanding about love and the fragility of life.

COVID Societies presents a compelling and accessible overview of key sociocultural theories that can help us make sense of the diverse, dynamic and complex elements of the COVID crisis. Throughout the book, a series of intertwined threads cross back and forth between the macropolitical and micropolitical dimensions of COVID-19: contagion, death, risk, uncertainty, fear, social inequalities, stigma, blame and power relations. Overarching these threads are five complementary themes: the historicity of COVID societies; the tension between local specificities and globalising forces; the control and management of human bodies; the boundary between Self and Other; and the continuously changing sociomaterial environments in which the world is living with and through the shocks of the COVID crisis.