Even when a photograph of a wounded or suffering child becomes familiar, it retains the power to unsettle. The smudged face of a sharecropper’s daughter, children arrayed behind barbed wire at Auschwitz, a starving Biafran child, a nine-year-old girl seared by napalm in Vietnam—these images still disturb viewers and prompt strong responses. Yet, as Susan Sontag argued in On Photography, it’s difficult to measure their ultimate utility: “The knowledge gained through still photographs,” she wrote, “will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.” That propensity for

A riddle: What’s made of mink-coated totems, toothpaste Lolitas, Thunderbirds, middlebrow colas, Kotex napkins, and Versace decadence? Answer: Avedon Advertising (Abrams, $125), a three-hundred-and-fifty-page collection of wall-to-wall, in-your-face ads—a dizzying exercise in optic overload. Richard Avedon’s impossibly long-running, far-ranging advertising work—created alongside his fashion and portrait photography—amounted to a sixty-year-long research project. How many forms of mild contradiction could he juggle inside a strictly commercial picture? How many suave anomalies could fit in an

Gracing the cover of BILL CUNNINGHAM: ON THE STREET: FIVE DECADES OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY (Clarkson Potter, $65) is the subject of this tome, rendered as a white silhouette and wearing his trademark bleu de travail. He’s hiding his face behind a camera and perched sidesaddle on a golden bicycle—colored, surely, to match his generous heart. Cunningham died in 2016 at the age of eighty-seven, working to the very end on what he adored most: documenting beauty. His decades-long presence at the New York Times, for which he captured Gotham’s most nattily attired—regardless of age, race, sex, or class—is

The first line of Carrie Fisher’s debut novel, Postcards from the Edge, is still one of the best opening volleys of all time: “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?” It is so good, in fact, that it only could have come from her—despite the fact that when Postcards was published, in 1987, the Los Angeles Times tried to foment a minor scandal about whether or not Fisher really wrote it. She had enlisted a good friend, Paul Slansky, as an “editor” of the book, and his name below hers on the title page was causing readers and critics a bit of

Celebrities endlessly publicize what they eat—supermodel Chrissy Teigen’s two ​New York Times b​est-selling cookbooks feature her face, which is also her job, on the covers and throughout the books; Snoop Dogg’s cookbook promises “platinum recipes,” as if his success began on the plate; Stanley Tucci’s preface for ​The Tucci Cookbook c​ites his family’s Italian cooking as the inspiration for his directorial debut​. ​According to this logic, stardom starts in the stomach. Celebrities’ signature dishes are cruel invitations for the lowly fan to try and elevate their mundane body to a higher plane.