Farewell to Bosnia.

Photography book publishing is showing itself to unusually good advantage right now, and the fall and winter have brought a number of excellent--or at least very interesting--books, especially about photographs that are made for the printed page. The most entertaining book in this genre is certainly an official history, The Playboy Book: Forty Years, a big wet kiss for Hugh Hefner from one of his former editors.

Hef himself weighs in with an introduction that is an economical summation of his own continuously revised revisionist history in which the term "revolutionary" figures prominently. Aside from its self-congratulatory tone and skewed perspective, the book is a cornucopia of American pop-cultural, eroto-photographic history that is funny, intriguing, amazing, and, yes, historically significant.

For instance, do you know in what issue the double-page centerfold was expanded to the triple-page centerfold? March 1956! Or in what year the "new honor" of Playmate of the Year was started? 1960! What year a ray of sunlight first officially highlighted a tuft of Playmate pubic hair? 1971!

In addition to these and scads more fascinating tidbits, the reader also gets to see lots of pictures, of the centerfold variety as well as the more artistic (and less interesting) variety. It's hard to choose a favorite from this book, but one of the definite contenders shows a middle-aged Marcello Mastroianni tentatively pressing his ear to the right buttock of a nude and extremely young Nastassja Kinski.

We never do find out what he's listening for.

Another book in which women prominently figure, albeit clothed rather than unclothed, is William Klein's In & Out of Fashion. Klein had a brief, influential career as a fashion photographer for Vogue, and a more ambiguously influential career as a street photographer from the mid '50s to the mid '60s. Since then he's taken the position of a nay-saying ex-fashion maverick, unabashedly dissing the fashion biz and its patent-leather saints. "Even Vreeland got on my nerves, with her talk about 'new girls' and 'pizzazz' and 'we simply have to do this,'" he told author Martin Harrison a few years ago. "I guess I was a killjoy--there was always sarcasm in my fashion pictures. . . ."

That's an admirable, if somewhat dubious, attitude. Fashion photographers often fall into a tiresome routine of disavowal. Still, Klein's fashion pictures are pretty terrific and have been regularly imitated, quoted, and ripped off since he quit still photography 30 years ago for a moviemaking career.

But Klein protests too much when he says (repeatedly) that he never cared about or paid attention to clothes in his pictures. Even his famous New York street photographs, taken before he began his fashion work, show his understanding of the social, political, and emotional function of costume. Roland Barthes pointed to the sartorial descriptiveness of Klein's work in Camera Lucida, an observation with which Klein took heated issue in a recent book entitled Close-Up (1989). Yet just as some photographers communicate through gesture or facial expression and others through mise-en-scene, Klein's expressive arena is certainly the body and its adornments, about which there is much to say.

In his Moscow photographs from the early '60s, for instance, Klein challenged the cold war cliche of elderly Soviet drabness by photographing a phalanx of young, nattily dressed KGB foot soldiers (an image unfortunately not in this book). No one has shown the lush, prissy virility of the torero like Klein has; just as no one, previously, had put a hard-smoking skeptic in flower-bedecked millinery, as he did in his famous picture of Barbara Mullen from 1956.

Klein started photographing again in the '80s and a number of those pictures, taken backstage at fashion shows, are also included. With their emphasis on movement and chaos, though, the specific communications of clothing are sadly obliterated. But this book is a treat, and Harrison's biographical afterword, although too short and a little disjointed, provides useful biographical information and some thoughtful insight.

Women, this time as wives and mothers, also play a major role in Life's America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism. Life magazine was born in 1936, and for the next 30 years it held a preeminent place in American popular culture, offering a pictorial smorgasbord of everything from foreign war to avant-garde art. But despite its power, Life has been studied little outside its own official publications, even by the photographic community. Part of the reason may be the daunting volume of stuff the magazine published. Then too, the Time-Life and now Time Warner juggernaut keeps iron control over its property and especially over the reproduction of its pictures. This book by historian Wendy Kozol is therefore a welcome study of one aspect of Life in the '40s and '50s: the way the magazine's editors framed large social, economic, and political issues in terms of stories and pictures of the middle-class family, especially if it was white and American.

Kozol digs into a diverse group of picture essays--Americans buying on credit, poor Puerto Ricans migrating to New York, the postwar housing shortage in the U.S.--and ably analyzes the way photographs were shot and laid out, and the way captions, headlines, and text construct meaning. Oddly, not one picture story is shown in the book, an obvious drawback in such a study. The few photos that are reproduced are shown as single large images, lacking captions or credit lines. This means Kozol's dry theoretical text has to do all the work, so it's sometimes very hard going for the reader. Despite any caveats, this is nevertheless an important look at an influential product of American mass communications.

A book that completely overturns Life's airless, upbeat view of the family is Gilles Peress' Farewell to Bosnia. The pictures in this large, powerful book chronicle the degradation and destruction of daily life in four areas of Bosnia during a three-and-a-half month period in 1993. Unlike others who document the ravages of war, Peress does not look for single shocking incidents out of which to make single dramatic photographs. Instead, he records the way life is lived after brute civil war has taken homes, towns, life, limb, and peace of mind. He is interested not in conflagration itself, but in the dislocations of undisguised land-grabbing accomplished at the barrel of a gun. Entire families, whole villages, are turned overnight into refugees, and it is the confusion, pain, and seeming endlessness of their plight that Peress' black and white photographs manage to show, the particularity both of individual response and of the larger chaos in which it is expressed.

There is no text in the book to elucidate any of this, save for some excerpts from letters Peress wrote and a brief endnote by him to the effect that he knows he can't "explain" anything. He writes that the book is a "raw take, a non-edit, the most un-photographic project I have done," but I would disagree with the latter disclaimer. In many ways this is his most photographic book, especially as it follows the displacement of weary people who are powerless to react or defend themselves. The book may not explain what Peress has photographed, but it unsparingly records this monstrous historical payback for the sins of two world wars with the disintegration of a country, a people, a way of life.

Carol Squiers is senior editor at American Photo and a regular contributor to Artforum.