PhotoBooks California

North of the Golden Gate Bridge the legendary coastal route, Highway 1, takes a left turn from growing population corridors to enter the unique world of California's North Coast. A landscape of dramatic headlands and rocky, jagged shorelines carved by surf and rivers, the coast is home to rolling woodlands, bucolic wine country, sleeping fishing villages, and artistic communities strong on preserving a slower pace in life.

The North Coast's wet climate nurtures a great arboreal forest-notably the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens-that has served the timber industry for the last century, and is now the forefront of environmental concern in the region. The five coastal counties north of San Francisco-Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte-beckon both visitors and residents with spectacular scenery, backroad adventure, and the enveloping mystery of primeval forest.

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Photographic portraits of austere and unexpected beauty.

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Father and son, the Muenches capture the glorious panoramas that define our most elusive state. CALIFORNIA is an evocative photographic exhibition of a state that still has the power to make you dream of wild lands and starting anew.

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Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver know their way around the City of Angels, its buildings and boulevards, its alleyways and environs, as well as Philip Marlowe. So get in your Oldsmobile and put the top down for this literary tour of a Lala Land that partly no longer exists and sometimes never was--for Raymond Chandler's locales, as the authors note, are "a pastiche of the real and the imagined." Mostly what we have here is the visual equivalent. Silver Lake became the less glamorous Gray Lake in the novelist's cynical prose; the fabled Bradbury Building (seen in the 1969 film Marlowe) became the Belfont. City hall is for real, of course, but nothing is quite what it seems.

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This extraordinary book of images represents a lifetime of photographic practice by one of Hollywood's most compelling actors. A four-time Academy Award nominee, Jeff Bridges has starred in many of the most beloved films of our time, including The Last Picture Show, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Starman, The Fisher King, Fearless, American Heart, The Big Lebowski, The Contender, and Seabiscuit, this summer's upcoming blockbuster feature from Universal Pictures. Bridges has collaborated with some of the most respected directors in Hollywood, among them Peter Bogdanovich, the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, and Peter Weir, and he has costarred with many of the screen's most compelling actors: Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tobey McGuire, Tommy Lee Jones, Robin Williams, Nick Nolte, John Turturro, Gary Oldman, Tim Robbins, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lauren Bacall, Joan Allan, Amanda Plummer, Isabella Rossellini, Ellen Barkin, Barbra Streisand, Jessica Lange, Penelope Cruz, and Jane Fonda, to name but a few. For more than twenty years, on dozens of film sets, Bridges has perfected his own photography, shooting between takes and behind-the-scenes with a Widelux camera. This fascinating, surprisingly candid body of work began as a personal project, as he recorded the arduous, emotionally intense, evanescent work of the film shoot in books that were privately printed and given as gifts to cast and crew. These are not traditional "Hollywood" pictures, but rather - despite the costumes and lighting, the crowds of extras, the stardom of the subjects - pictures of friends at work. Taken togheter, the pictures act as Bridges' personal and professional diary, with actors, directors, and crew appearing as coworkers, all equal participants in the job at hand. With a foreword by Peter Bogdanovich and Jeff Bridges' hand-written commentary and captions throughout, Pictures promises to be one of the biggest visual books of the year. Proceeds from Pictures will be donated to The Motion Picture & Television Fun, a non-profit organization that offers charitable care and support to film-industry workers.

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For more than a century the refined but playful elegance of Victorian houses has helped define they style and identity of the city by the bay. San Francisco Victorian Houses showcases the variety and charm of the city's signature houses. This generous but portable survey features the most picturesque of the Victorians and exquisite Queen Annes, including classically restored marvels and the more fancifully decorated "painted ladies." Focusing on breathtaking exteriors and finely turned details from homes in all of the city's neighborhoods, and with a fun, informative text by noted Victorian architecture authority Randolph Delehanty, San Francisco Victorian Houses is an enchanting and colorful look at these enduring beauties.

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Greg Friedler's photographs...go a long way toward explaining why the fashion industry has such a hold on us. The simple truth is--judging from this book anyway--most of us look better in clothes. And we're not all exactly supermodels. Friedler's ordinary Joes and Janes answered an ad to pose both fully dressed and buck-naked. The result--a follow-up to his "Naked New York"--is fascinating an altogether consoling. "Anatomically incorrect" has never looked so right.

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A compilation drawn from the photographer's classic books features several images from his last work, Yosemite and the Range of Light and includes excerpts from his most noted writings.

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As America stands to the rest of the world, so stands California to America - a bright shining promise of endless possibility. This exquisite celebration of "California The Beautiful" is both a portrait of the diverse natural beauty of the Golden State and through the incredible voices of its writers, a testament to the ever-renewing spirit that it has come to embody. Aldous Huxley, British author turned Hollywood resident, described the California dream as "This great crystal of light, whose base is as large as Europe and whose height for all practical purposes, is infinite." Among the other authors offering praise are Maya Angelou, Mary Austin, Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, Gretel Ehrlich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, M.F.K. Fisher, Robertson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Clarence King, Jack London, Henry Miller, John Muir, William Saroyan, April Smith, John Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Nathanael West, and Walt Whitman. Land of innovation and opportunity, California is both dream and reality. California The Beautiful is a gift for all who have felt the lure of this dual promise and who have marveled at the unrivaled beauty of this quintessentially American land.

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This marvelously evocative book by Stephen Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawsonall natives of the Great Central Valley of Californiais the first to explore in detail the rich natural and social history of the state's agricultural heartland. Gerald Haslam's text celebrates the tenacious people of the Valley, where hard work and ingenuity are the means to both survival and success. This is land that gives little but yields, under pressure, to creative experiments with unusual crops. Stephen Johnson's and Robert Dawson's stunning photographs reveal the immense beauty of the region as well as the delicate relationship between the land and the people who work it. The Central Valley is California's economic hub as well as its physical center. A plain some 430 miles long and up to 75 miles wide, surrounded by mountains and covering nearly fifteen million acresabout the size of Englandthis valley has become the richest farming region in the world. More than 25 percent of the table food produced in the U.S. is grown here. Its southernmost county, Kern, produces more oil than some OPEC countries. The Valley is as rich in people as it is in resources. Tagalog, Hmong, Spanish, English, Cantonese, Russian, Italianall are spoken here. The population of farm laborers, small family farms, powerful agribusinesses, and, increasingly, urban professionals make the region's economic disparities as palpable as its cultural diversity. The Valley has also produced a wealth of writersMaxine Hong Kingston from Stockton, Richard Rodriguez and Joan Didion from Sacramento, Gary Soto from Fresno, among othersas well as the award-winning El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers' Theater). But the Valley is imperiled. The past 150 years of massive agricultural expansion and population growth have systematically destroyed much of the area's original wildlife, and the "plain of majestic oaks" seen by early travelers has vanished. The region is also plagued by a host of critical issues: chemical pollution, soil erosion, water politics, the treatment of minorities, economic inequities, farm foreclosures. Johnson's and Dawson's photographswhich are complemented by engravings by Thomas Moran, paintings by Albert Bierstadt and William Hahn, and photographs by Carleton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee, among othersbring home to us, as only visual images can, that it is up to us to safeguard the future of this endangered valley, to conserve its extraordinary human and natural wealth, and to try to reclaim some of its lost grandeur.

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Ansel Adams may be one of the most famous nature photographers ever, but his often-overlooked portraits of people and images of buildings and manmade landscapes are as stirring and beautiful as his inimitable wilderness photographs. This is a manageably sized volume that collects images of the state's beaches, mountains, parks, architecture, and people, as well as writing--poems, essays, fiction--by authors such as John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, and Joan Didion. The combination of words and images is a visual and literary homage to California, a place that was home to and the source of inspiration for the great photographer.

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Quirky, dynamic, breathtaking, and wonderfully overwhelming--there is no singular way to describe San Francisco. If it is possible to capture the spirit of this amazing Californian city in one book, then San Francisco: A Photographic Celebration is the book to do it. More than anything, it celebrates the diversity of the city's cultures, landscapes, people, and architecture. Spectacular shots of the modern San Francisco skyline are juxtaposed with photos of the Palace of Fine Arts, an exquisite Egyptian-style building of vast proportions. The famous bay windows on Telegraph Hill are in striking contrast to the charming but cluttered storefronts of Chinatown. Few words are required to describe this city, as the photography says it all. But for good measure, snippets of San Francisco nostalgia are thrown in: the Transworld Getaway Guide of 1975-1976 astutely observed, "When you get tired of walking around San Francisco, you can always lean against it." It's hard to imagine ever getting tired of this beautiful place. --Naomi Gesinger

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