PHOTOGRAPHY

Vivian Maier: The Color Work Colin Westerbeck Harper Design

Remember the Chicago mystery nanny whose cache of some 150,000 prints, negatives, transparencies and rolls of undeveloped film were discovered at auction after her death? Her name was Vivian Maier, and this book brings her meandering to life in colour. One self-portrait says it all with a sliver of her face reflected in a hand mirror that rests on a bunch of yellow flowers on street brick, from 1975. ($90)

Literary Chickens Beth Moon Abbeville Press

You heard that right. The New York photographer Moon has paired 52 gorgeous black-and-white portraits of heritage-breed chickens with literary excerpts. The beady-eyed gazes of every last one of the birds are fixed on Moon’s lens. Consider the Silver Phoenix female paired with this from Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day: “I’ve done my best to see you as you are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense.” ($37)

Trees: Between Earth and Heaven Photographs by Art Wolfe, text by Gregory McNamee Earth Aware Editions

Wolfe is a landscape photographer who has worked on every continent. Here, he puts us up close with a leopard lounging in a thorn tree in Botswana. He shares the colourful giant sequoias of California. Light dances through his images, as does the icy Moreno Glacier that serves as backdrop to the tops of Southern beech in Argentina. ($71)