When you’re stuck in line at the grocery store, a few spirited swipes on Instagram are a great way to inhale a little visual escape. But for those moments when you want to experience the world through the eyes of an artist, it’s hard to beat the sensory pleasures of a photo book. Some of the most dazzling books this season focus on the 1960s: these coffee table books don’t offer us a patchouli-infused hippie nostalgia break from the current chaos of our country. In fact, the reason these books - all by renowned and rebellious photographers - carry so much weight today is precisely because they remind us that even during the years when protests against the Vietnam War raged, when the racial divide seemed insurmountable, when assassinations took the lives of our best leaders, when the Woodstock generation wasn’t talking to the Greatest Generation, powerful art was possible.
1. Elaine Mayes: The Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968
We’ve all seen the Woodstock-era photos of beady-eyed hippies clinging to their fringed boyfriends on the streets of Haight-Ashbury. Elaine Mayes saw them and called b*******. In 1967, Elaine Mayes was a young photojournalist living in San Francisco. “I was a member of the press,” says Mayes, now in her 80s, “and I realized that the press was ‘creating’ the idea of Haight-Ashbury. They were making it up. I wanted something more real.”
So she created formal, clear-eyed portraits of the young men and women she encountered in the Haight. This book collects over 40 of those portraits, and in her counter-narrative of the counterculture, made at exactly the same time Joan Didion was dissecting the Haight-Ashbury in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Mayes shows us what lay beneath the “everything is great” flower-power vibe: naivete, desperation, sometimes even fear. More than half a century old, these 1960s photos are the freshest you’ll ever see, because while Mayes, whose work is housed at MoMA, the Met, and the Getty, shows us the unbridled fashions and explosive hairstyles, she also focuses on something that pierces the human heart.
Buy: Elaine Mayes: The Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968
2. Ernst Haas: The American West
In 1949, Ernst Hass, an Austrian immigrant, did something few photographers would have dreamed of: He turned down a job on the staff of LIFE magazine. But Haas clearly knew what was best for him, and a few years after “The Snub,” he embarked on an epic mission, spending weeks hitchhiking across New Mexico. This experience was pivotal to his career: not only did Haas fall under the spell of Western mythology, but it was there that he first turned to color film (he became such a virtuoso of color photography that when LIFE printed its first-ever color photo essay, they turned to Haas).
Over the years, Haas made at least ten more trips to the western states, and The American West features every glorious aspect of them, from the dramatically contoured canyons to the pulsating neon of cheap motels to the achingly beautiful western skies. He also captured the cultural landscape, offering an incisive look at how crudely appropriated Western iconography was. His striking images made him the go-to photographer for expressing the spirit of the West, from advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes to photos on the set of The Misfits (with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable). “While digging through the archives last year,” recalls Hass’ son Alex, “I discovered some incredible photos that had never been published.” They’re here, they’re beautiful, and these 200 pages will make you want to jump in your car and, yes, head west.
Buy: Ernst Haas: The American West
3. Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power
On June 16, 1966, civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael used the term “Black Power” in a speech - and white America shat a collective brick. Only 25 years old, Carmichael was charismatic, arrogant and controversial, which not only terrified whites, but also divided black Americans along generational lines. It wasn’t long before legendary photographer Gordon Parks, LIFE magazine’s only black contributor, followed Carmichael (who had recently been profiled in Esquire). Over the course of a year, Parks shot some 700 images of the handsome activist as he rallied crowds, strategized, played pool and attended a wedding. But when the story was published, LIFE ran only five images.
Now, 55 years later, comes Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power, a visually rich book (accompanying an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) that reveals dozens of Parks’ remarkable shots, as well as his contact sheets and the typed manuscript of the story. The photographs that make up Parks’ visual profile of Carmichael are “absolutely contemporary,” says Lisa Volpe, the featured curator who, with the Gordon Parks Foundation, conceived the exhibition and book, “because, consciously or not, today’s photographers have absorbed Parks’ very direct, first-person style.” Of course, the subjects covered are also timely: “Voting rights, police brutality-Parks’ photographs foreshadow many of the racial issues we see today,” says Volpe. “It’s important for all of us to look at these photographs, assess the distance between then and now, and ask ourselves if we’ve gone far enough.”
Buy: Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power
4. The Unseen Saul Leiter
No one has captured the ephemeral magic of the streets of New York like Saul Leiter. The son of a Talmudic scholar, Leiter sought - and found - his truth in the small moments that unfolded before him in his East Village neighborhood: neon signs, rain-stained windows, Kodachrome-compatible yellow cabs, fashionable women. In the 1960s, Leiter shot photos for Esquire, from a sexy Jane Fonda to an impressionistic walk through the streets of Harlem accompanying an essay by James Baldwin. But those images are not included here, nor are his coveted prints that sell for up to $30,000. Instead, Unseen Saul Leiter offers something quite extraordinary: 76 pristine, never-before-published slides selected from 10,000 stored candidates. These never-before-seen images show us how Leiter, with his unique eye and sublime sense of timing, could elevate mundane moments into the extraordinary essence of life itself. We also see that “the color he captured was as important as the subject,” says Margit Erb, director of the Saul Leiter Foundation and one of the book’s authors. “In fact, often the color was the subject.”
Leiter lived in the same East Village building from 1952 until his death in 2013, and he spent much of that time unburdened by fame or money. Today, he is one of photography’s true pioneers. “He wanted to slow you down,” says Michael Parillo, associate director of the Foundation who co-authored the book. “In a frenetic city like New York, he asks your eye to slow down, focus and sort through the wonderful confusion of his frames.” In an age of disposable photos and Instagram gratification, Unseen Saul Leiter is a book that will teach you a new way to see.
5. Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the Hollywood star machine was in full swing and photography magazines regularly sold out on newsstands, photographer Bob Willoughby was the king of the movie set. In fact, when we recall moments from films like The Graduate or Rosemary’s Baby, the images we remember are probably Willoughby’s photos. With over 200 photos, A Cinematic Life offers all kinds of creative images, from Sinatra and McQueen to Hepburn, Hitchcock and Billie Holiday (who once invited the photographer to her apartment for tea). What takes the book to the next level are the intimate, behind-the-scenes quotes from the late photographer that accompany most of the images. How, for example, while photographing the screaming saxophonist Big Jay McNeely in 1951, did the 24-year-old Willoughby make one of the most enduring concert photos of all time? “[McNeely] would kneel, sit down, lay on his back playing in the faces of orgasmic girls,” the photographer recalls. “I just climbed on stage without thinking.”
Buy: Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life
6. Southern Fiction
How does a writer’s environment - the kitchen where he cooked, the red dirt road he walked on - affect his work? Tennessee native Tema Stauffer’s quiet, poetic photographs reveal the surroundings of a handful of Southern writers, from Flannery O’Conner’s horse barn to the small-town church where Alice Walker was baptized to William Faulkner’s kitchen, notable for its gingham curtains. But Stauffer’s photographs are less a voyeuristic look than a meditation on the power of place and the sensation of time passing.
Buy: Southern Fiction
7. Recreation
What do Americans look like when they’re not punching the clock? Back in the 1970s, long before we started posing for self-aware selfies, famed photographer Mitch Epstein traveled the country - from the swamps of Florida to the fetish clubs of Los Angeles to the junk restaurants of Indiana - to answer that question. His psychologically astute photographs document our many leisure activities, but they also reveal something deeper: pleasure sickness - those awkward, alienating, uncomfortable moments on the edge of a good time. First published in 2005 and long out of print, Epstein felt the time was right to revisit this work “done in a pre-digital age, before the creeping commodification of American society.” Recreation has now been reissued, with 34 beautiful, previously unpublished additional photographs.
Buy: Recreation
