SEASON’S READINGS : Other Worlds

He was just back from one of the world’s longest and most famous expeditions. He’d seen it all: the deaths of the heroes, the fall of Troy. At home, he trod the purple of a royal welcome, but shook his head: “The mortal cannot go fearless through these many-coloured beauties,” he said, or at least that’s how Aeschylus’ version has it. Sure enough, a few moments later his wife was axing him to death. . . .

But Agamemnon was wrong. You can go fearless through those beauties, or watch other people going through them. You can see handsome Vietnamese children crossing dangerous rivers on nothing more than an elegant tracery of bamboo poles suspended 20 feet above. You can watch an Israeli teacher toting a machine gun as he takes a group of little girls on a spring hike along the Jordan. You can admire a Bombay prostitute as she giggles in her shack, beautiful as Helen, though unlikely to be launching any ships (the photographer records a blind beggar stumbling by, a dirty yellow grating, then passes on). Or you can see the smiling faces of the Challenger crew and the explosion that blew them to bits a few moments later. That was the trip you don’t need to envy anybody. And in the bizarre royal palaces of India, the villas of Tuscany, the stately homes of London and of Dublin, you can see how other generations before us enjoyed contemplating other images of life’s many-colored beauties and dangers. Frescoed horses seem to explode from Cinquecento ceiling for the rape of young Persephone. In the Rajput fort a Kota, princess and maharajah ride after a great black boar in the center of a mural that whirls with boats and elephants and wrestlers and dancers and. . . .

You’re looking at the pick of the new photo-books out for Christmas. They can take you anywhere, show you anything, with no risk whatsoever, unless perhaps to your bank balance. But in return for your 40 or 50 or 90 dollars, the quality of these books--their print and design and paper--is superb. And they give you a sense of quiet contemplative control you will never get from TV or video. You can touch the pages’ grainy or glossy surfaces, examine them under different lights, savor their extraordinary colors, meditate on other lands, other lives. . . .

Some of the crop are better than others. The Smithsonian Institute’s huge history of space exploration contrives to be at once lavish and dull, packed with pictures you’ve seen before and tedious reflections of the value-for-money conundrum and NASA’s approach to the press. How much more rich and exotic are the human scenes of Rick Smolan’s Passage to Vietnam: a girl sitting on a buffalo under heavy rain, a group of half-naked fishermen walking through the surf on stilts, a woman leaning into her oars as she crosses the Mekong at twilight. This is one place I must go some day.

Almost all the books have a problem with their texts. They are too long, too factual, too determinedly informative. I shall gloat for hours over the magnificent Villas of Tuscany, its wonderful, wonderful gardens, grottoes, gazebos, but I’m hanged if I shall read more than a page or two or its dry stilted prose. Likewise the people who put together the fine images of A Day in the Life of Israel could have spared us the condescending tone of their comments and the visual irritation of having to see a famous photographer’s name in bold block capitals under every single picture.

But the poverty of the writing perhaps alerts us to why we buy these books. At the simplest level, their images satisfy our atavistic fantasies of escape. Therein lies their commercial success. But as if this were somehow unhealthy, their texts seek to disguise the fact. With their plodding research and mountains of worthy information, they seek to reassure us that we have not wasted our money on a mere collection of photos. And perhaps we are reassured. Perhaps we don’t want to admit, even to ourselves, that we are not really interested in the fact that the Mekong is 2,000 miles long and splits into nine separate channels before emptying into the South China Sea. The text becomes an alibi for what really fascinates us: the expression of grit and hope on this woman’s face as she thrusts her boat forward, the wonderful precariousness of human beauty in wide open water under lowering skies.

For the irony is that the photos need no apology. In an essay on myth in this month’s edition of Artes, the Italian writer Roberto Calasso remarks on the gap between written commentaries and pictorial illustrations of Ovid. The scholars debunk the myths, explain them away in scientific, sociological terms. Paintings and sculptures endorse and exalt them, keep their ancient intuitions alive and potent. Something of the same gulf opens up in these books. For as we surrender our fantasy to their images, thinking to escape, so they begin to speak to us with directness beyond anything in the text, offering a knowledge that goes far deeper: a particular way men and women have of being together, an intimate sense of our place in the landscape. Perhaps this is why the best of these books is the only one that has the courage not to include any text: Raghubir Singh’s Bombay. Seething with a life that comes together for just that fraction of a second the shutter clicks, his images have a perilous luminous fullness about them, an awareness and wit that goes far beyond any political or social comment on the city he is photographing.

I pick up another book from the floor. Here is a man on a camel speaking into a mobile phone. Here is a newborn’s crib, plastered with images of bearded rabbis, here a Bedouin shepherdess, mouth covered by her head-scarf. In a time when PC is just the tip of a great iceberg of orthodoxy, it seems there is a sort of knowledge only images can convey. Over a grim lunar landscape an astronaut photographs a splendidly blue and pink planet hanging in the sky. It is the earth, Agamemnon’s earth after all, many-colored, beautiful, treacherous.

THE VILLAS OF TUSCANY by Carlo Cresti (Vendome Press: $85; 480 pp.)

PASSAGE TO VIETNAM by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt (Against All Odds/Melcher Media: $50; 224 pp.)

SPACE edited by Martin J. Collins and Sylvia K. Kraemer (Hugh Lauter Levin: $75; 320 pp . )

THE GRAND CANAL by Daniel Wheeler and Umberto Franzoi photography by Mark Smith (Vendome Press: $75; 320 pp.)

DUBLIN by Jacqueline O’Brien with Desmond Guinness (Abrams: $65; 264 pp.)

THE ROYAL PALACES OF INDIA by George Michell photography by Antonio Martinelli (Thames & Hudson: $50; 232 pp.)

LONDON by John Russell (Abrams: $45; 256 pp.)

BOMBAY, GATEWAY OF INDIA by Raghubir Singh (Aperture: $40; 120 pp.)