Flowers for Lisa : a delirium of photographic invention /

FLOWERS ARE VERY PRETTY, and that has made them less than compelling as a subject matter for photographers drawn to complexity and contradiction (although a number of modernists, from Karl Blossfeldt to Imogen Cunningham to Robert Mapplethorpe, were interested in them as architectural objects). So it may be hard to believe that the most exhilarating photo book of the year is entirely devoted to flowers - until, that is, you have actually turned the pages of Abelardo Morell's flowers for lisa: a Delirium of Photographic Invention (Abrams, $60). What began as a gift from the photographer to his wife on her birthday - an explosive photo bouquet involving multiple superimposed layers of flowers, rather than a run-of-the-mill three-dimensional one - turned into an expansive project, which tests the outer limits of how a bouquet might be represented photographically. The Cuban-born Moreli is an adventurous formalist with an interest in the mechanism of vision and the roots of photography, in particular the camera obscura (disclosure: I wrote the introduction to an earlier book of his). Here he employs an array of tools and techniques ranging from high tech (Photoshop) to low (painting, collage, bricolage) to amplify or simplify bouquets, flatten and scatter them, render them as Surrealist or Cubist or Abstract Expressionist tableaus, turn them into memento mori or distant memories or looming shadows or impossible, extraterrestrial manifestations of floral energy. The book is a tour de force, a sustained burst of emotion, and a transferable unit of joy. Anne Brigman was a well-known photographer a century ago - one of only two members of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession from west of the Mississippi, exhibited at his 291 Gallery and published in his periodical Camera Work - but as the influence of Pictorialism faded so did her reputation. Now she has been given a lavish revival in Ann M. Wolfe's ANNE BRIGMAN: AVisionary in Modern Photography (Nevada Museum of Art/Rizzoli Electa, $100); the box also includes "Songs of a Pagan," a small book of her poems (with photographs). Her aesthetic is very 1910: ecstatic nudes, mostly female, expressing rapture amid the glorious scenery of the High Sierras, in heavily worked-over prints that may remind viewers variously of Isadora Duncan, Thomas Eakins's paintings, Baron von Gloeden's homoerotic photos, even the White Rock Girl. But an undeniable tough bohemian verve is on display, drunk on willed freedom, along with a strong sense of composition and a deep reverence for the landscapes of the West. There were few photographic avenues that Masahisa Fukase did not explore, from straight black-and-white reportage (his crushing abattoir series of 1961) to crazed, montage-laden psychedelia. He was best known for his eloquently brooding studies of ravens, but perhaps is most distinctive at his most personal - antic group portraits of his family, sometimes unclothed, and some truly champion-level cat photography. MASAHISA FUKASE (Editions Xavier Barral/D.A.P., $90) presents a comprehensive overview of this exuberant photographer, game for anything. Much darker in every way is the work of Shomei Tomatsu, marked indelibly by the war, the atomic bomb, the occupation, the protests of the 1960s, the eruptive force of butoh, the lurid attractions of the Shinjuku district of Tokyo - and given to ominous speculation regarding the future, heralded by the degradation of the natural world and the depersonalization of human populations. SHOMEI TOMATSU (Fundación Mapfre/D.A.P., $70) is a torrent of images, primarily black-and-white, that are off-kilter, aggressive, meditative, bleak, stark, enigmatic, erotic or any combination thereof, each of them not just a window into a time and a place but a terse and unanswerable statement. The young Gyula Halasz arrived in Paris in 1924, initially making his living asa correspondent for publications in his native Hungary. Within five years he had taken up photography, adopted the nom de guerre Brassai (after his hometown, Brassó), and soon had become one of the most prolific and versatile photographers in town. He particularly owned the night - bars, clubs, dance halls, cathouses, alleys, markets, fog-enshrouded parks - so much so that all subsequent night photography cannot fail to give him a retrospective nod, conscious or not. BRASSAI (Fundación Mapfre/D.A.P., $75) IS the most wide-ranging collection of his work in English, particularly good on his early photographs for magazines, from the raffish Scandale to the impeccable Minotaure; his ventures outside Paris and in daylight; and - balancing his extensive coverage of lowlife - his documentation of 1930s high life, which makes today's equivalent look especially tawdry and cheap. There have been many collections of the work of Garry Winogrand, but only the street philosophy of garry WINOGRAND (University of Texas/Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, $60) was written by Geoff Dyer, who selects 100 pictures - many of them lesser-known ones - and devotes a short essay to each. To draw multiple paraLUC graphs from a single photo is not an easy thing to pull off, let alone to do it a hundred times over. As a consequence Dyer engages in a fair amount of stretching; the essays could have been shorter than they are, and some seem inessential. At its best, though, the form becomes a constraint that compels Dyer to plunder his considerable resources in order to cough up unexpected insights into even the most marginal photos. His broad frame of reference and abundant visual memory, not to mention his pleasantly conversational prose style, draw readers into the frame and enlist their collaboration. The task is to extract meaning from pictures Winogrand primarily took while in motion, complex decisions made in a fraction of a second. They are not only vivid slices of the world, but X-rays of the mind that selected them, rich in complications. Chris Stein did not become a professional photographer - he already had a day job as principal songwriter and lead guitarist for Blondie, in business since 1974. But he might have done so in another life. His point of view: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli, $55) IS a fascinating document, not only of the punk scene of the early and middle 1970s but more generally of New York City in its years of chaos, decay and creative energy. The chronology begins in 1969, when Stein moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, as one did then. You witness his self-directed photographic apprenticeship as he records street hippies and nodding junkies and Coney Island carnies, burning cars and improvised apartments on the Lower East Side, and the many old people who lived upstairs or next door or down the street in those years, too old or too contrary to have moved to the suburbs with the rest of their families. He is a more assured photographer by the time the punk scene gets going, and he discovers his true calling as a portraitist. That is an especially good thing because he enjoys the daily presence of Deborah Harry, Blondie's incomparable singer and Stein's companion then, who in addition to her other accomplishments surely belongs in the pantheon of models. The book is erratically designed, with a jumpy arrhythmic magazine feeling, but it contains more than its share of solid and immediate photographs. Fred W. McDarrah was hired by The Village Voice in 1955, soon after it began, and was still associated with the paper at his death in 2007. As a photographer he was primarily a recording agent, who aimed to convey the gist of a given situation by positioning as many readable faces as possible near the center of the frame. But he was everywhere in Lower Manhattan during the 20-odd years when it was the red-hot core of the advance-guard arts in America, fred w. mcdarRAH: New York Scenes (Abrams, $40) contains somewhere in its pages seemingly everybody you've ever heard of from that era: Amiri Baraka, Betty Friedan, Tuli Kupferberg, Kate Miilett, John Cage, Diane Arbus, Willem de Kooning, the Velvet Underground, A. J. Liebling, Janis Joplin, Susan Sontag, Moondog - the list could go on for the rest of this column. To be fair to McDarrah, he did take some exceptional pictures, for example the one of a contemplative Robert F. Kennedy, a framed suffering Jesus over his shoulder as he visits a slum apartment, a perfectly positioned lens flare at the bottom of the frame. And the global collective image bank will forever include his saluting Bob Dylan and his Allen Ginsberg in an Uncle Sam hat. Above all, he was a reporter, and he reported for duty not only at art premieres and in-crowd party scenes, but at the forefronts of the antiwar, feminist and gay liberation movements, as well as the ongoing struggle for racial justice. He made it his business to not let his photos express an opinion - except by virtue of what they documented. A different sort of reportage is practiced by Lynsey Addario, whose editorial career tracked this century and whose datelines (for venues that include this paper) say the rest: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Libya, Syria. Those conflicts were covered by many hands, of course, but that is not to say her pictures could easily be mistaken for anyone else's. Addario's particular gift is for rendering chaotic scenes as concise and intelligible theater, very often grouping figures about 6 to 12 feet from the lens, against a backdrop that helps situate the action without interfering in it. She manages this as effectively on the battlefield as in field hospitals or at elaborate weddings, assisted by an exquisite sense of color that supplies additional shades Of nuance. OF LOVE & WAR (Penguin Press, $40) includes scenes that are disturbing (despite the presence of dead and maimed bodies, among the more indelible images is that of a trussed-up member of the Iraqi Baathist party, robed and with a sack over his head, with its echo of the Abu Ghraib photographs) and delicately moving (her gender allows her entry into otherwise closed women's worlds, which glow with an intimacy and tenderness available nowhere outside them). Her presence is always implicit - she is usually close enough to her subjects to touch them, and her ethical decisions can very nearly be sensed. Among her predecessors in the field is Steve McCurry, whose career essentially began in 1979, when, while freelancing in Central and South Asia, he crossed into Afghanistan and came away with some of the first pictures of the growing conflict there. He has since enjoyed a remarkable career that has taken him to seemingly every part of the world and has produced such memorable images as his 1984 portrait of a 12-year-old Afghan orphan with deep green eyes, which was featured on the cover of National Geographic. STEVE MCCURRY: A Life in Pictures (Laurence King, $70), by his sister Bonnie McCurry, includes many arresting pictures, from harrowing scenes in the burning oil fields of Kuwait to an extraordinary composition showing a red-robed woman making her way down a huge wall of stairs in Abhaneri, India. It also includes striking semiformal portraits of tribal commanders and combatants in Afghanistan, shots that would likely be more difficult to obtain today. The book's chronological organization means that such pictures are very often interspersed with much more anodyne images - sunrise at the Agra Fort station in Uttar Pradesh, India; a dog sleeping on Red Square in Moscow - that appear all the more sentimental and inconsequential in such context. McCurry indisputably possesses a great eye and often superb timing, but his sensibility, in contrast with that of the warm but unsparing Addario, leans toward "The Family of Man": unspecific fuzzy empathy, sometimes infused with facile irony, wrapped in colorful eye-appeal. The book is a complete biographical package, with numerous photos of McCurry at work and play and montages of documents (maps, diaries, postcards, covers of favorite books), all of which suggest fanclub activity rather than a serious monograph. sante'S most recent book is "The Other Paris." He teaches at Bard.

The artist's process--and the relationships that motivate the individual art maker--are at the very heart of every art practice. What started out for Cuban-born American photographer Morell (b. 1948) as a single image created for his wife's birthday became an extended series that explores the myriad possibilities of the flower still-life genre. This subtitle accurately conveys the riotous colors and wild forms in the 76 beautifully printed color still-lifes included here. A Q&A interview of the artist conducted by journalist and author Lawrence Weschler (New York Inst. for the Humanities, New York Univ.) explores Morell's career-long fascination with issues of perception and photography. Morell's psychotherapist wife, Lisa McElaney, contributes a perceptive essay both about the artworks and her relationship with the artist. VERDICT Using collage, multiple exposure, mixed media, and making reference to art traditions classic and modern, Morell's images are a delight for both fans of the genre and for those interested in how this singular contemporary artist pursues his craft.--MD