Christmas Books: Photography - Tim Hilton Prefers Warmth and Humanism to the "Posed, Hi-Tech, Clever and Amoral" Trickery of Today's Avant Garde

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This year's photography books have an American flavour and are led by a multi-authored study of Walker Evans (Princeton pounds 41). We all know his work in recording the lives of poor Alabama sharecroppers in the Depression. He did much more, so this retrospective tribute is well deserved. Evans's dates were 1903-75 and he was a photographer from 1928 until his death. Some of his last photos, which are in colour and have still-life subjects, look rather like the work of urban pop artists. Seen as a whole - and there are 200 plates in this magnificent volume - Walker Evans's career impresses by its tenacity and simple love of ordinary, man- made things. His attention to …