A Diverse Examination of Art and Life Spanning 150 Years

How about an instant collection of photographs made by 500 artists during the past 150 years--for $39.95? Well, OK, they’re not originals, but “The Photography Book” (Phaidon Press, 500 pages) is a terrific deal and an eye-opener for photo buffs and novices alike. Each photographer, famous or obscure, is represented by one big image. The alphabetical layout means that some weirdly delicious pairings wind up on facing pages.

Across from Arnold Newman’s portrait of the stern, weathered face of 81-year-old painter Georgia O’Keeffe is Helmut Newton’s parade of android-like nude fashion models, strutting in high heels. Gotthard Schuh’s shot of a lithe Javanese boy about to throw a marble contrasts poignantly with Ferdinando Scianna’s immobilized view of the blind novelist Jorge Luis Borges, tilting his head toward the sun that floods the window of a cafe in Sicily.

Although the book includes photographs by such luminaries as Dorothea Lange, Andre Kertesz and Alfred Stieglitz, the best thing about it is an open-minded, “all things considered” outlook.

Embracing diverse photographic styles, it includes unsettling views of death and deformity and some wonderfully rambunctious nudes, as well as scenes evoking absurd, mysterious, joyous, poignant and mundane aspects of life. Rather than hiding this weighty treasure on a shelf, you might want to set it on an old dictionary stand, open to a different page each day.

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Low-tech or high-tech, photography is the place where science and art meet. In the 1840s, British botanist Anna Atkins discovered a fragile beauty in the silhouette of an algae specimen. In 1995, NASA’s Deep Field Team produced a picture of galaxies at the known edge of deep space--3 billion to 8 billion light years from Earth--that resembles a fuzzy shot of broken Christmas tree lights.

“Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science” (Yale University Press, 256 pages, $50) looks at the efforts of generations of botanists, zoologists, geologists, astronomers and others who developed photographic processes to describe and classify the world.

Essays by Ann Thomas, curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art, Canada, and five other specialists discuss the history of a medium that offered a permanent image of objects too small, large, speedy or evanescent to be seen clearly by the naked eye.

A sense of discovery radiates from such photographs as Lucien Bull’s magical 1904 image of a soap bubble breaking, the trippy blue-and-orange pattern of skin cells on photographer Roman Vishniac’s left hand and Harold Edgerton’s famous stroboscopic view of a leaping milk drop as a fantastic white crown.

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Does anyone remember that Mrs. Robinson’s leg came in two versions in the 1967 posters for “The Graduate”? One was a voluptuous sketched outline looming over an image of a stern little guy in a gown and mortarboard. The other was that killer still from the movie: Anne Bancroft removing a black stocking for the dazed benefit of Dustin Hoffman.

“Film Posters of the ‘60s: The Essential Movies of the Decade” (The Overlook Press, 127 pages, $35) looks back at the era in movie advertising when stylized drawings competed with increasingly adventurous--and memorable--photographs.

Who could forget the image of Sue Lyon as Lolita--sucking on a lollipop and wearing red heart-shaped sunglasses--or the cheekiness of the “Putney Swope” poster, with a tiny photograph of a woman serving as the upraised middle finger of a man’s hand?

Stylistically, these posters (from a collection assembled in England by editors Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh) are as varied as the films they advertise. Some images scream with wild colors and stylized graphics; others reflect a raw, cinema verite look in black-and-white (“The Miracle Worker,” “Faces”). In contrast to the casual sexual frankness heralding French New Wave films, the compliant bimbos in early James Bond posters now seem downright smarmy. But Clint’s squint, Steve McQueen’s cool and the Beatles’ mugging remain icons of a fab movie decade.

* Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks.