Also of interest…in pictures worth 1,000 words

Skeleton Coast

by Amy Schoeman (Protea, $54)

“One would think that life could hardly survive” on Namibia’s desert coast, said The Wall Street Journal. But it’s easy to see now why photographer Amy Schoeman was drawn to the place. The region is home to “a dazzling array of geological phenomena” and a desert that somehow sustains lions, ostriches, and 2,000-year-old trees. Schoeman captures it all—cracking-dry riverbeds, shorelines littered with the hulls of rusted wrecked ships, and what seems like “every color a stone can be.”

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Prom

by Mary Ellen Mark (Getty, $50)

Mary Ellen Mark was looking for more than her lost youth when she attended 13 proms between 2006 and 2009, said Kerri MacDonald in The New York Times. The esteemed photographer explored the teen rite of passage from Staten Island to Los Angeles, looking for cultural differences. With its 127 straightforward black-and-white images of diverse high school couples, Prom offers “an honest, delightful portrayal of one of the most memorable moments of adolescence.”

Blown Covers

by Françoise Mouly (Abrams, $25)

The cover of The New Yorker follows a code of its own, said Liza Donnelly in Forbes. In Blown Covers, Françoise Mouly, the magazine’s art director, offers insights on an array of proposed cover images she didn’t publish. Mouly “seems to love outrageous”—think Barack Obama dressed as a terrorist on a 2008 cover. But her gut doesn’t always win—as when she couldn’t explain to editors what she found funny about an image of the pope with his robe blown open, Marilyn Monroe–style.

Information Graphics

by Sandra Rendgen (Taschen, $70)

“Sometimes simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity,” said HuffingtonPost.com. German art historian Sandra Rendgen has created “a design nerd’s fantasy” of a book by gathering 400 terrific information graphics, which illustrate everything from government spending to the worth of body parts on the black market. Since you might also crave a solid block of straight text, Rendgen has included an insightful essay on the history of visual communication, beginning with early cave paintings.