PHOTOGRAPHY

The best of multiple exposures

By Cate McQuaid, 12/2/2001

The year's crop of photography books ranges from grit to humor, with a little history and artistry thrown in.

''New York Exposed: Photographs from the Daily News'' (Abrams, $39.95) chronicles the rise of photojournalism in the tabloid that calls itself ''New York's Picture Newspaper.'' With a crisp history of the paper written by News veteran Pete Hamill, ''New York Exposed'' takes the reader back to the News's 1919 debut, when three intrepid photographers lugged around cumbersome cameras and flasks of flash powder fired with a flash pan.

The book goes decade by decade, and tells the story of the paper's New York, filled with gangsters, starlets, and young punks - not to mention the Yankees, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and Woody Allen. It shows tabloid journalism at its best: daring and on the fly - such as the time photographer Tom Howard passed himself off as a reporter at the electrocution of murderer Ruth Brown Snyder, where no photographers were allowed. He had a camera strapped to his ankle, and at the moment of the execution, he hitched his cuff and snapped his shot.

There's a Daily News picture in ''Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs'' (Norton, $30): George Mattson's 1956 photo of a B-26 bomber crashed on the front lawn of a suburban Long Island home. It appears in ''New York Exposed,'' too, along with Mattson's recollection of the event. ''Capture the Moment'' reproduces all the spot news and feature photographs that have won the Pulitzer since photography first was given a category, in 1942.

Many have become iconic: Joe Rosenthal's 1944 shot of soldiers planting the stars and stripes at Iwo Jima; Huynh Cong Ut's 1972 image of a Vietnamese child, her clothes burned off by napalm, running for her life; Charles Porter IV's 1995 picture of a firefighter carrying a baby away from the bombed remnants of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The photographers' remembrances make the photographs doubly poignant.

Tim Page, recognized for images he shot in Vietnam during the war, assembles many of those and some taken more recently in ''The Mindful Moment'' (Thames & Hudson, $50). Page breaks his visual narrative of the spiritual journey of the Vietnamese people into three blocks: ''Road,'' ''Quest,'' and ''Passage.'' He starts each chapter with memoir, and he minces neither words nor images. ''The Mindful Moment'' explores the struggles that lead to peace - international, domestic, and peace within one's soul. So we see the corpse of a North Vietnamese soldier in 1969; we see a boy writhing on the road after a 1990 traffic accident. But we also see a man placing incense on a comrade's grave, and lotus blossoms in bloom.

War is a pageant in the sad story of one filmmaker and photographer. ''Leni Riefenstahl: Five Lives'' (Taschen, $39.99) recounts the amazing career of the artist, now nearing 100. She began life as a dancer, then turned to acting and directing, making romantic movies set in the Alps. Adolf Hitler tapped her to make the propaganda film ''Triumph of Will'' (1935). She followed that with ''Olympia'' (1938), chronicling the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Each was a feat of filmmaking, with Riefenstahl inventing new technologies, such as attaching a camera to an athlete, or filming on roller skates.

Her work for Hitler spelled the end of her filmmaking career, but Riefenstahl went on to become a still photographer, shooting brilliant color images of Africans, and in her 70s taking her camera underwater to photograph the spectacle she found there. This book testifies that Riefenstahl was a great artist; even when the career she was born to was foiled, she persevered.

Edward Weston was a giant of 20th-century photography, one of the inventors of Modernism, but little is known about Margrethe Mather, his muse, artistic partner, and occasional lover. Mather wanted it that way, but Beth Gates Warren has brought her career to light in ''Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration'' (Norton, $39.95). Mather changed her name when she moved to California in the first years of the 20th century; she paid her rent and bought her film with money she earned as prostitute.

She met Weston in 1913, and he was enchanted. The two leapfrogged over each other in photographic innovation. Mather was the first to incorporate shadow as a major element in her images, inspiring Weston to do the same. Warren's book demonstrates their influence on each other, and explains why Mather fell off the map of photographic history (although her images are in many major collections): She had the artistry, but not the drive for success.

Photos by both appear in ''Capturing Light: Masterpieces of California Photography, 1850 to the Present'' (Norton, $60). The book ranges widely, from the romantic pictorialists of 100 years ago (like Weston and Mather) to the tart social commentators of today (like Larry Sultan and John Baldessari). It makes a convincing argument that, for all its diversity, California photography holds its own special niche in the field as a place of innovation, daring, and great light.

Anne Makepeace's ''Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light'' (National Geographic, $35) details the remarkable story of one of the first photographers to document the lives of Native Americans, even as whole Indian societies were vanishing in the first decades of the 20th century. Makepeace tells a tale of ambition and pride that cost Curtis his fortune and his marriage, but allowed him to publish a priceless 20-volume photographic ethnography, ''The North American Indian.''

Jean Malaurie followed Curtis's path, but he went north. In the last 50 years, he has studied and photographed natives of Greenland and the vast upper reaches of Canada. His book of color photographs ''Call of the North: An Explorer's Journey to the North Pole'' (Abrams, $60) runs a little rich with purple prose, but the photographs of the wintry lands and the people who make their lives there speak with clarity and respect.

Animal lovers won't be the only ones to find Walter Schels's ''Animal Portraits'' (Edition Stemmle, $75) charming. Schels takes up-close-and-personal black-and-white images of cats, apes, and kangaroos, among others, each packed with character. A quizzical leopard, a pugnacious frog, a flirtatious llama appear. A bear, shot in three-quarters profile in a leather chair, recalls Winston Churchill.

There's plenty of humor in Barbara Norfleet's ''When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America'' (Norton, $35). Norfleet is curator of the Photography Collection at Harvard, which documents the social history of the United States. These informal images taken by studio photographers bring out the hopes and expectations middle-class Americans held for themselves in the '50s. Men worked hard; women looked pretty and raised children. The black-and-white images effectively describe how we constructed our identities: They're both disturbing and endearing.

Cate McQuaid is a freelancer who writes about the visual arts.

This story ran on page E3 of the Boston Globe on 12/2/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.