The End of Innocence: Photographs From the Decades That Defined Pop, The 1950s to 1970s.

Perhaps there's irony in the fact that some of the more interesting photographic books of the season are about the loss, rather than the creation, of illusion. Released by relatively small publishing houses, these entries are not likely to appeal to a mass audience - in an environment where superstore buyers have as much, if not more, editorial clout as in-house editors, the term "illustrated books" means cooking, decorating, lifestyle, gardening, and pets.

These challenging photography books are coming from publishers who seem to imagine the audience for their creative projects as people who love, and actively think about, pictures, including those that form our cacophonous commercial image environment. Increasingly, publishing projects are drawing their subject matter and strength from revisiting and recontextualizing commercial photographic images from the past. One of the best is The End of Innocence: Photographs From the Decades That Defined Pop: The 1950s to 1970s. It's an achingly hip collection of publicity pictures taken by the staff photographers of Britain's music conglomerate, EMI, whose job it was to bang out black and white glossies for record stores, newspapers, and fan magazines. Judging from their work, these photographers didn't have the time or the need to develop a sense of who would become famous (Dion, The Yardbirds, The Supremes, Pink Floyd, Lulu, David Bowie), and who would soon be forgotten (The Four Sights, Carl and the Cheetahs, The 'N' Betweens, The Pretty Things).

But it's not the celebrity status of the performers that matters most in this book. What's important - and revealed with loopy energy in the 200 images - is how gradual shifts in culture, fashion, and photographic style reshaped the genre of publicity pictures. The story emerges from the telltale details that can be extracted from shots of girl groups balancing under architectonic wigs, their bullet busts and hand-span waists crammed into matching outfits, or from repetitious pictures of male, mod quartets, lined up in stovepipe pants, tab collars, and skinny ties. In the earliest pictures, retouchers had a field day, smoothing away pimples, rashes, and crotch bulges. By the mid 1960s, the artificial smoothness and happy faces contort into self-consciousness, as performers strike their own cool and individualized poses. By the late '60s, an inscrutable weirdness begins to seep in. The performers - now wearing beads, ribbed turtlenecks, and Afghan vests - look increasingly sullen, as if their stoned stares could penetrate the camera's soul and refocus photography's power to represent them.

For a fresh and provocative analysis of the photographic, economic, and cultural construction of media images, read Patricia Johnston's Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. Steichen's talent, business acumen, and social shrewdness had already established him as a serious painter and art photographer before he became as famous as the celebrities he photographed in the 1920s for Vanity Fair and Vogue. Readable, scholarly, and refreshingly unbiased, Johnston makes no hierarchical claims for either Steichen's fine art or commercial work. In this text-driven book, she neither "rescues" Steichen's images from the period advertisements they illustrated and shaped, nor denigrates the new visual language of consumerism he helped define for corporate America when he became the director of photography for the trailblazing J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, a position he held from the 1920s through the 1930s.

Instead, she delves into the class implications of Steichen's Pond's cold cream ads, analyzes Eleanor Roosevelt's surprising celebrity endorsement for Simmons mattresses, and questions the ethically suspect and melodramatic tableaux Steichen made for Scott Tissues, which depicted people traumatized, bedridden, and hospitalized because they erred and purchased a harsh toilet tissue, Tracking Steichen's stylistic turns from pictorialism to realism to modernism, Johnston suggests that it was his facility and the burning arc of his successes that infuriated purists and turned former friends like Alfred Stieglitz into enemies. Paul Strand also chastised Steichen for selling out and Walker Evans found Steichen's pictures full of parvenu elegance and superficiality. But Steichen was unstoppable. After World War II, he was back in the spotlight at the Museum of Modern Art, where his 1955 blockbuster, "The Family of Man" - the startlingly brilliant and manipulative installation of five hundred "we are the world" pictures that smashed conventions governing the content, use, and even display of photographs in a museum setting - set tongues wagging yet again.

At least one of Steichen's goals - the need to satisfy the customer - was shared by Mali's most beloved and honored photographer Seydou Keita. In the sweetly modest autobiographical text that accompanies this refined collection of portraits, Keita describes how difficult the goal was to achieve. In 1948, when his career began, Keita, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, was nervous about his limited photographic skills. At first, portrait sittings were clearly as new an experience for him as for his subjects, who posed before a fringed bedspread backdrop with expressions of trepidation, delight, curiosity, and pride. But Bamako-Koura, where Keita lived, was a city of 100,000, a crossroads for people traveling to Dakar. Soon his studio filled with government workers, shop owners, politicians, and customers off the street, and he became known for photographs that were elegant, accomplished, and sharp.

By the early 1960s, Keita's pictures had documented subtle changes in Mali's culture. While some sitters arrived with objects they were particularly fond of (sewing machines, bicycles), others could choose from props (watches, fountain pens, plastic flowers, a radio, a telephone, a scooter, an alarm clock). Men increasingly showed up in Westernized garb, while women's clothing styles changed more slowly over the decades, the extravagant jewelry and elaborate textiles of their flowing traditional clothes giving way to pantsuits, platform shoes, and minidresses.

The encyclopedic nature of Keita's project has precedents in August Sander's comprehensive Weimar portraits and Michael Disfarmer's midcentury, small-town American portraits. In Mall, the esteem for Keita's pictures was so strong that he was obliged to close down his studio and become the country's official photographer. But before he did so, he traveled into the country, where villagers still ran when they saw a large camera, believing that if it was pointed at them they would lose their souls and die. Others thought that the photographer, looking through the camera, could see them naked. Only after they were invited to look through Keita's lens and see safe, even regal, images, were villagers reassured. They posed for portraits, long acknowledged as Malian treasures, that are just now becoming known in the West.

There is no dignity or reassurance to be found in Joel Sternfeld's recent color photographs, published in On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam. This is a lavishly produced book of darkly critical pictures, radically different in content and mood from the snappy, barbed observations of American life-styles and foibles or lush Italian classical reveries for which Sternfeld is known. On This Site is a personal project, but it has an odd air of anonymity in its documentation of sites of violence across America, photographed long after the media has gone: the seat in the Dallas movie theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in 1963; the parking lot at Kent State University where National Guardsmen killed four students in 1970; Foothill Boulevard, where Rodney King was beaten by four white Los Angeles cops in 1991; the motel in Washington where Daniel Kaspar, a twenty-eight-year-old chemical plant worker, committed suicide after attending a memorial for Kurt Cobain in 1994. On each spread, a single photograph faces a caption that states its location as well as the political, economic, social, or moral horror that took place there.

Sternfeld doesn't simply ponder the disturbing events that fill the evening news, he presents us with a collection of topographic renderings of the various and mundane sites where evil comes to a dead end. The book's point of view is introverted, even a touch righteous. Still, the project is mesmerizing. In a brief, closing text, Sternfeld writes, "Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a facade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape, is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading." This creepy and compelling monograph drives home his point, reminding us that the bombastic spectacle and the feigned innocence we pay to stare at often separates us not only from history, but from our own hearts and minds.

Marvin Heiferman, a curator, writer, and book packager, is a project editor of Flaming Creature: Jack Smith, His Amazing Life and Times.