Landmark

I'm not normally keen on photo-books that are compilations, and I have also generally been less than impressed by the photo-books produced by publisher Thames & Hudson.  Somehow, despite their track record in art publishing, they don't seem to get photography.  Their books tend to be too large, too glossy, and aimed at too broad a segment of the market -- they always remind me of cookery books.  So you can be sure I'm impressed by the compilation made for Thames & Hudson by William A. Ewing, Landmark : the Fields of Landscape Photography (ISBN 978-0-500-54433-4), because I'd recommend you get a copy if you have any serious interest in contemporary landscape photography. 

The weakness of compilations, generally, is the attempt to be comprehensive.  If you include a little of everything, it's very hard to make a satisfying whole, with a unifying sense of taste, design and intention. Any book which is simultaneously an academic overview and a "sampler" aimed at beginners is pretty much doomed, unless the compiler's taste is exceptional, and the underlying motivation of the publisher is clear.  There are any number of poetry anthologies, for example, which simply re-shuffle the same old selections, or which showcase the compiler's own poor judgement.

This volume is outstanding in every respect.  I suppose I would say that, because this is the selection I would have made myself, apart from the fact that I had never before come across the work of about 50% of the contributors, but wish I had.  There's no "landscape porn", no School-of-Charlie-Waite, but page after page of outstanding contemporary photography, including a number by that brilliant photographer known only as NASA.

It's not cheap, and it's quite bulky, but if you've got any Christmas gift tokens left over, you could do worse than buy yourself a copy.