NO difficulty in choosing this year's finest photography book: Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the RedLight District of New Orleans (Cape, £50 in UK) is a collection of ravishing, moving and mysterious images taken in 1912 by this enigmatic photographer, printed from a hoard of glass negatives discovered by Lee Friedlander in the 1970s. The anonymous subjects are all prostitutes (left), but there is no hint of prurience, or prudery. A vanished world lovingly restored.
Flora, by Imogen Cunningham (Little, Brown, £30 in UK), has an odd affinity with the Bellocq, although here the hothouse studies are of flowers, taken between the 1920s and the late 1970s - Cunningham died in 1976. The pictures are positively erotic in their concentration, immediacy and nervous tension.
A broader reality is studied in So Many Worlds: A Photographic Record of Our Time, by Dieter Bachmann and Daniel Schwartz (Thames & Hudson, £40 in UK). Funny, frightening and marvellously vibrant photographs from the past fifty years by leading photographers such as Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen. The best verite volume of 1996.
Wolfhound Press continues the splendid series of Father Francis Browne's photographs, taken between 1912 and 1953, with Father Browne's England, by E.E. O'Donnell (£25). Dripping with nostalgia, but clear eyed and witty, too. What a marvellous photographer this "amateur" was. In colour photography, surely the finest volume of this or many another year is Sahara, by Kazuyoshi Nomachi (Viking, £30 in UK). Ravishing.