Infidel by Tim Hetherington with an introduction by Sebastian Junger (Boot, £25): A brilliant and touching exposition of soldierly machismo, comradeship and youthful vulnerability, Infidel is a photographic journal by Hetherington and Junger made during their 15 months embedded with a battalion of American soldiers fighting the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afganistan. Their documentary, Restrepo, of what happened came out earlier this year. "A platoon of combat infantry is a brotherhood, and that bond is expressed in ways that aren't acknowledged or really even permitted back home. That — not war — is the true topic of this book. It's an aspect of war that few photographers have even noticed, much less captured," writes Junger.
Dogs by Tim Flach (Abrams, £30):Photographer Tim Flach looks likely to repeat his first success with Equus with this comparably splashy large-format doggy book, in which all sorts of pooches strike all sorts of poses. Andy, a white puli, leaps about looking more like a cotton mop than a dog, while a pair of Doberman pinschers get cosmetic surgery to straighten their floppy ears. Tux (pictured far right), a white standard poodle, takes a turn in the topiary before going to strut his stuff at Crufts.
British Wildlife Photography Awards: Collection 1 (AA Publishing, £25): Prize-winning pics include Steve Young's Herring Gull in a wave and 14- year-old Adam Hawtin's close-up of a blue beetle. This book has a triple ooh aah factor — charming creatures, technical brilliance and the moment the photographer has been waiting for: hares poised to fight, dolphins breaching, a fox leaping ...
A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive (Prestel, £22.50) and Decade (Phaidon, £24.95) are both doorstoppers with big photojournalism appeal. The former features 365 pictures by Magnum photographers stretching back to Cartier-Bresson with his snapshot of the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1932, while Decade — a potted photo history of the past 10 years — attempts to summarise the news of the world in categories from Promise in 2000 to this year's Witness, via Terror, Clash, Tempest and so on.
In Giacometti's Studio (Yale, £35) by Michael Peppiatt is a treat, with a substantial text and pictures taken by Man Ray, Brassai and others. But the best are by Ernst Scheidegger, who reveals not just the artist at work but wonderful grainy close-ups of the half-finished sculptures, the materials and the mess.
André Kertész (Yale, £48) by Michel Frizot and Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq accompanies a major retrospective exhibition now on at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. A must-have for any serious buff interested in the Hungarian photographer whom Cartier-Bresson considered to be one of his masters; packed with pictures spanning his 70-year career.
