Slideshow: The Best Photo Books of 2008

The Blue Room
by Eugene Richards (Phaidon, $100)
Richards's first color monograph comes from several years of exploring abandoned houses in the rural outlands of America -- far removed from the gritty urban world of his black-and-white work. Richards clearly felt that his change of medium and subject required a different approach, and at times The Blue Room seems to fight the taught structures and shrill detail that give his previous work its energy. The new photos substitute a more fragmented, arbitrary composition and an unsentimental gauziness, attained as much by shooting through weather-torn curtains and broken windows as by defocus. Though the houses' deteriorating contents are sometimes expected (children's dolls, broken dishes), sometimes they are surprising (a prosthetic leg, the carcass of a large owl). Either way, inside or out, these dwellings look as if their erstwhile occupants had walked out of them in the middle of everyday lives, never to return. -- r.h.