conveying information.... They are meant to be
felt.” Middleton worked alongside research expeditions of marine biologists in Hawaii, the Central
Pacific, and San Juan Island, Wash., to document
the invertebrates, a classification that includes
98% of the known animal species on Earth.
David Bowie, Liza Minnelli, Divine, and Grace
Jones are among those depicted wearing their chic
best in Seventies Glamour (Dey Street, $40),
collected by photography historian David Wills.
The images selected favor moments of gender
transgression, a defining element of the decade’s
glitzy and defiant version of elegance: the camera
lingers over transgender Warhol superstar Candy
Darling, as well as model Christie Brinkley, whose
Vogue shoot shows her restraining a barking
Doberman.
In 2007, former nanny Vivian Maier turned 81
and stopped paying for her Chicago storage unit.
Soon after, the 150,000 photographs she had
quietly taken over her life went up for auction.
Preservationist John Maloof purchased 30,000 of
those images, and when he began to post them
online following Maier’s death in 2009, the
photographer became a sensation, prompting
documentaries and major gallery shows. Vivian
Maier: A Photographer Found (Harper Design,
$80) draws on Maloof’s collection to share many of
these photographs for the first time, from a 1950s
New York man with pigeons on his arm to the
artist’s modest self-reflection in a toaster.
Born out of Lorna Owen’s Mouse Interrupted
blog, which since February 2012 has tracked the
unpresuming mammal’s appearances in literature
and art, Mouse Muse (Monacelli, $35) highlights
work from the first century to the 21st. In conceptual artist John Baldessari’s Two Onlookers and a
Tragedy (with Mice) (1989), for example, a pair of
taxidermy mice in human clothes look out upon a
mousetrap death, drawing attention to the role of
the spectator in contemporary media. Five hundred
years earlier, a mouse frees doves caught in a net in
a Mughal Empire manuscript illustrating an Arab
fable. Owen’s chronicles of high art mice sprang
from humble beginnings—she was inspired after
catching a rodent in her farmhouse.
From the age of 14, photographer and conservationist Ansel Adams (1902–1984) visited Yosemite
Valley annually, the landscape serving as endless
inspiration. Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley:
Celebrating the Park at 150 (Little, Brown,
$100) presents more than 150 black and white
images, selected and sequenced by Peter Galassi,
