IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN. All of the year-end “Best Of...” lists have been published, except for one: Ours. Which, of course, is the only one that matters, right? Each year, on a blustery eve in January, the photoeye staff hunker down for some serious wrangling, haggling, laughter, belittling, scoffing, cheering, empassioned appealing, and food and (lots of ) drinks. And at the end, having come up with a dozen or so titles that we think are absolutely outstanding, we all stagger home, none too worse for the wear. So, here they are: fifteen books (in alphabetical order by artist/author) that we think contribute something to the world.

Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Corrine May Botz (Monacelli Press). Nutshell Studies is Botz’s photographic exploration of the ‘dollhouses’ created by Frances Glessner Lee, an affluent, elderly woman who founded Harvard's Department of Legal Medicine in 1936. Lee built scale models of unsolved crimes that were then used as teaching aids. The in-depth essay points out, however, that Lee projected many of the current views of women and victims into these nutshell studies. The strength of this book is the abundance of material: floor plans of the crime scenes, statements by witnesses, evidential notes and Botz’s photographs of the models all presented on black pages. MM Order Book

Echo, Chan Chao (Nazraeli Press). Chao applies the same distanced yet direct style to his unclothed female friends and acquaintances of Washington D.C. as he did to an eaerlier series of portraits made in Burma (for which he was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial). The result is a challenging, atypical group of female figure studies. And the book is absolutely stunning. DH Order Book

The Perfect Medium, Clement Cheroux (Yale University Press). Undoubtedly, the majority of you are already very much aware of both this book and the exhibition at the Meropolitan Museum that it accompanied. The book has been reviewed in just about every major art magazine and newspaper in recent months, and for good reason. It sheds light not only on a genre of photography filled with quackery, but also the spiritualist movements of the early 20th century (in both Europe and North America), and presages the heated debates over veracity in photography and the manipulations of Photoshop. DH Order Book

Portraits. A Retrospective, Rineke Dijkstra (D.A.P./Schirmer Mosel). Since the early 90s, Dijkstra has recast the genre of portraiture along the stylistic and conceptual lines first suggested by the Bechers and their students. Her primary focus remains young people at transitional times— brand-new mothers, young Israelis about to enter the military, Portuguese matadors just after bullfights, adolescent club kids and bathers on beaches. Her combination of classical composition—full frontal poses against stark backgrounds—and radical objectivity is remarkably effective in uncovering the psychological vulnerability inherent in such charged moments. EM Order Book

Possible Relatives, Tina Enghoff (Journal). Loneliness is both a basic human emotion and fear; dying alone could be said to represent the ultimate extreme of loneliness. Enghoff ’s book puts pictures with those fears without ever portraying a single person. She photographed the rooms and beds of people who had died alone, arriving seemingly minutes after the bodies had been removed. A chilling and thought-provoking body of work. DH Order Book

For Every Minute You Are Angry, You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness, Julian Germain (SteidlMack). Julian Germain stumbled upon the house of Charles Snelling, a retiree living in Portsmouth, England, by chance one day while on assignment to photograph a local soccer game. The quiet demeanor of the man, his attentiveness to flowers, and his bright attitude were enough to entrance the young photographer. He stayed that day for several hours, and returned many times to chat and photograph. The message of the book, so boldly printed on the cover, is spread out over the entirety of the images. Attune your inner ear and listen intently. DH Order Book

David Hilliard (Aperture). David Hilliard is arguably one of the most successful students to emerge from the ‘School of Crewdson’ as the photography department at Yale came to be known in the mid-1990s. Like Crewdson, and Philip-Lorca di Corcia who also taught in the department, Hilliard explores the intersection of photography and narrative, arriving at what is perhaps a stronger synthesis of the photographic and the cinematic than either of his two mentors. He does this via a canny deconstruction of the conventions of composition and point of view; using the multi-panel format he directs our gaze to details in ways not possible in a single frame. For Hilliard, the photograph is no longer a ‘decisive moment’; rather, the instant of the photograph is distended, our gaze pulled asunder in a deliberately choreographed manner. EM Order Book

Kamaitachi, Eikoh Hosoe (Aperture) and The Map, Kikuji Kawada (Nazraeli Press). These two books are gorgeous reprints of long-out-of-print titles which are integral to an understanding of post-WWII Japanese photography. Aperture and Nazraeli Press are to be commended for bringing these titles back into circulation and public discourse. DH Order Book

Casa Susanna, Michel Hurst and Robert Swope (powerHouse Books). “People take pictures of each other, just to prove that they really existed,” goes the hook from an old Kinks song. The truth that underlies this adage informs much of the recent vogue for found and anonymous photographs, but never has it been demonstrated more vividly than in Casa Susana. This book presents a remarkable New York City fleamarket find—hundreds of snapshots of drag-queens, decked out as average middle-class suburban women like something out of Leave it to Beaver, gathered at a nondescript-looking small townhouse in upstate New York. Susanna, a professional female impersonator, and her friends, reveal that in the days before Stonewall, what we think of as the ‘closet’ might have looked like a picture of manicured suburbia, not much different from the Eisenhower-era American Dream. EM Order Book

Borderlands, Eirik Johnson (Twin Palms). Initially, Borderlands feels awkward in your hands, but the design perfectly fits Johnson’s full-bleed images, one per page-spread. An image of cold, wet river-stones wraps around the outside of the book. Once opened, the viewer is confronted with tires mired in the sludge of a receding tide; orange fabric, reminiscent of flames, flaps in the wind. A variety of wind-blown fabrics appear throughout the book, like Tibetan prayer flags sending prayers out over a landscape that is passive to man’s encroachment. It was the wealth of content and overall design that made this book a unanimous staff favorite. MM Order Book

Why Mister, Why? Iraq 2003-2004, Geert Van Kesteren (Artimo) “What I saw, and what Geert recorded over the next 48 hours with his camera, I will never forget. As the two of us hustled from house to house in the middle of the night, joing U.S. soldiers as they busted down doors looking for insurgent ‘cells’, the suspicions I had long harboured in Washington began to coalesce...I realized that the Bush administration truly had no clue what it was doing in Iraq.” Michael Hirsh, a senior editor at Newsweek, penned this in his introduction to Why Mister, Why? Printed on magazine stock paper, the book reads like a 500 page engrossing news story filled with images of the current war in Iraq. DH Order Book

The Loves of the Poets, Joseph Mills (Nazraeli) Didn’t get enough Dada and Surrealism in your college diet? Find yourself hankering for collages that allude to religion, death, sex, and dark, animistic practices? Look no further! Joseph Mills is a master at using both his own photographs and found imagery to produce eerie, powerful, provocative artworks. Designed like a precious fairytale album, this book delivers by the wheelbarrow load. DH Order Book

Chronologies, Richard Misrach (Fraenkel Gallery). In this unconventional retrospective, careful editing reveals how Misrach established a long-term methodology, cycling through, returning and building on his various bodies of work. Skillfully designed to echo the great sense of openness in his landscape photographs, Chronologies places a single image and a blank page per spread, giving the viewer a chance to catch one’s breath and prepare for the next. In his repeated photographic sojourns through the deserts of California and Nevada, he seems to ponder who will be the victor: man or the earth? Misrach is non-committal either way, using his camera instead to reveal the great beauty of the struggle. SH Order Book

Fashion Magazine, Martin Parr (Magnum Paris). Fashion Magazine is populated with rubber hotdogs, vegetables adorned with clunky jewels, and fishnet stockings worn unabashedly with miniskirts and bad pumps. It is gawdy, bright, tongue-in-cheek and irresistible. Martin Parr is no Anna Wintour but in creating his own fashion magazine we get all Martin, all the time. Parr confronts fashion through a more honest lens, one which seems to reveal the craziness of life itself—it is loud, scrambling for your attention, yet full of beauty and laughter. SH Order Book