The Best Photo Books of 2008

Photo by Snowdon

Actress Helen Mirren by Snowdon, 1995. Click photo for more images.

The Beautiful and the Damned

In its original run in the 1920s, Vanity Fair maga¬zine captured what current editor Graydon Carter calls the “fizzy, raffish” modernity of the jazz age. The magazine folded in 1936, as the lights began to go out in Europe, but was then resurrected in the shoulder-padded Reagan era. There are those who dismiss Vanity Fair for its celebration of frivolity. But others understand, as VF contributor Christopher Hitchins writes in this book, that “even in the darkest time, there must be beauty and style and the cultivation of the individual.”

Nowhere has the magazine celebrated the individual more powerfully than in its portraiture. In the early days there was Steichen, Bruehl, Beaton, and others; later came the work of Weber, Newton, Benson, and Leibovitz. If the magazine has one lasting claim to fame, it will be the photography collected in this fine volume. —David Schonauer

Photo by Nick Neasey

X-ray image of a "suit packing heat." Click photo for more images.

Inside Out

Photographs describe the surface of things very well. Everything underneath that surface remains hidden, however tempting it may be for viewers to imagine those unknown parts. "The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image,” wrote Susan Sontag, “is to say, ‘There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.’”

Nick Veasey’s work is an exception to this rule. Veasey uses large-scale X-ray machines—technology created in the battle against terrorism—to look inside everything from shoes and shells to city buses and commercial airliners. “I work in a lead-lined room, with a very heavy lead sliding door that has to be sealed before my X-ray machines will operate,” he writes. “High-voltage electricity is sent to a radioactive source that emits X-rays. The rays pass through the subject I am working on and create a same-size image on a special film placed in a light-safe bag.” The film is later scanned and enhanced on computers.

Veasey admits to obsessive behavior and says he has even dreamed in X-ray. Perhaps that is to be expected in a man who works with cobalt iridium and looks at the world inside out. —Jeffrey Elbies

Photo by Annie Leibovitz

Richard Nixon leaving the White House, 1974. Click photo for more images.

Behind the Scenes

You don’t need to be a Leibovitz lover or a Leibovitz hater (there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground with Annie) to appreciate this book, which is filled with the true tales behind her most memorable pictures. More than a memoir, the book details the creative process of a photographer who has documented the big stories and people of our time. You learn how Leibovitz conceives and stages her images, what equipment she uses, and how she convinces her subjects to do what she wants them to do. In one of the book’s most intriguing chapters, Leibovitz recounts episodes from early in her career, working alongside writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe—while creating her own, unique brand of visual literature. (See our exclusive excerpt on the following pages.) This is a book by a photographer, for photographers. —D.S.