Entertainment

05:36 PM CST on Sunday, March 5, 2006

By JEROME WEEKS / The Dallas Morning News

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Book of Cockpits

and Mark A. Avino

Edited by Tom Alison and Dana Bell

(Boston Mills, $24.95)

At first glance, At the Controls looks like a book for the reader who thinks the high point of a Tom Clancy novel is his loving description of the Inertial Navigation System on an F-16.

Of course, that often is the high point. But almost any 10-year-old who has peered into a jet at an air show has sensed the thrill of an aircraft cockpit – like a hot rod to the clouds. At the Controls offers 45 historic, insider views: You can practically smell the fuel oil.

This is not just aviation geekery, though. At one end, there's the frightening crudity and the brass-plate elegance of a SPAD fighter from World War I. At the other, the glowing instrumentation of the space shuttle Columbia – now violently scattered forever. Eric F. Long and Mark A. Avino have photographed everything with large-format, wide-angle cameras in front of night-black backgrounds. This lends these tiny rooms a clarity, a haunting presence. They seem to float in the darkness.

Everything You Need to Know

Paul Gravett

(Collins Design, $24.95)

With Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know, British journalist Paul Gravett has put together the most useful, most illuminating appreciation of graphic novels in print.

This isn't about Mr. Gravett's judgment; it's how he and designer Peter Stanbury have put together their travel guide to comic books. It's a visually smart treatment of a visually smart medium. After the required introductory defense of comics, Mr. Gravett focuses on 30 landmark works from Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan to Frank Miller's Sin City and Osamu Tezuka's Buddha. Sample pages are explained, panel by panel. Then their influence is traced through other graphic novels. It's like the cool art-history textbook you never had in high school.

One fat quibble: To reproduce entire pages, Graphic Novels often reduces them in size until their captions are eyestrainingly tiny. The book should come with its own magnifying glass.

Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

(University of California Press, $49.95)

Those "yesterday and today" photo books – the ones with before-and-after shots of city streets – are mostly exercises in homey nostalgia. After the Ruins upends the process: Here, the old-timey shots of San Francisco show the horror of the famous earthquake and firestorm, "a reasonable facsimile of hell," as historian Philip L. Fradkin puts it in an essay.

What's more, by reversing the ordinary sequence of the photos (left is the present, right is history), Mark Klett underlines the fragility of today, of what we take to be solid and imposing. Those skeletal, fire-blasted streets could be our future; the San Andreas fault still shifts.

In fact, only months after this "rephotography" project was finished, Hurricane Katrina hit. Suddenly, a book with a very San Fran-centered discussion of urban development and congestion attained a new order of relevance. The aftermath photos showing acres of cabins built for survivors now look like a rebuke of FEMA's failures. This is the great precedent of an American urban disaster. So does it offer evidence for or against rebuilding New Orleans?

A Book of Tragaluz Photographs

In our anything-can-be-digitalized age, the "handmade" photo has come back, partly out of rebellious nostalgia, partly out of arty exploration. Pinhole cameras have been around for ages, but it was Barbara Ess who made them seem visionary in I Am Not This Body (2001). With no lens, with long exposures, the camera can keep everything in focus, yet everything can also seem haloed or smeared.

Now Austin screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff (Lonesome Dove ) has turned the pinhole's dreamy eye on La Vida Brinca ("Life Jumps") – isolated scenes of Southwestern life.

I'm wary of all the romantic sepia, the voodoo-ish views of Hispanic culture, the blurry photo after blurry photo of melancholy, disappearing vaqueros.

But there are images here that hover between surrealist wonder and Edward Steichen-ish impressionism. They fascinate. An object, a face or a landscape looms out of the void, is caught in a moment of semiclarity as it sinks back into darkness. A boy, a grandfather, a fog: Subterranean and dreamlike, they seem to exist outside time.

Photographs and Oral Histories

(University of California Press, $34.95)

As powerful as they were, Richard Avedon's photos of truckers and drifters in In the West isolated people from their environments, made them huge, often freakish.

The documentary work of the husband-and-wife team of photographer Ken Light and oral historian Melanie Light is all about context and environment: cultural, economic, natural. Coal Hollow presents a heartbreaking, visually arresting portrait of Appalachia now that, as one resident puts it, "the easy coal is gone." A tent revival, a wedding, a mayor's improvements: These are touching efforts. Otherwise – poverty programs, safety or pollution regulations – nothing seems to have stopped the industrial onslaught. If it weren't for a toy or the make of a car, most of these shots could be mistaken for Builder Levy's photos of coal miners from the '70s. Or André Stern's from the '50s. So little has changed.