I was bowled over by Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith, by Robert Elwall (Merrell, £35/offer £31.50). Smith lived between 1912 and 1971 and was widely regarded as one of Britain's most perceptive and responsive landscape photographers. His poised and deceptively simple black and white photographs are ravishing in their purity and intensity of vision.

Elwall manages to convey a sensuous feeling for surfaces and textures, and so evocative are some images that it is as if his lens becomes a finger guiding us to touch and feel the place he is recording. His subjects range from the most humble to the magnificent: the ancient tithe barn at Great Coxwell, in Berkshire, or the stone satyr resting on a wall in a glorious Arcadian setting at the Villa Garzoni, at Collodi in Italy. He knew well that nothing takes the light more gratefully than a piece of carved, weathered stone in European light. In old monuments he found a way to touch at least a shadow of the past.

A different evocation of the past can be found in Michael Freeman's photographs in New Zen: The Tea-Ceremony Room in Modern Japanese Architecture (eightbooks, £35/ £31.50). This beautiful book is also all about texture and surfaces in a distinct setting. Freeman's camera homes in on the stone, tatami matting and bamboo surfaces, and then pulls back to show the beauty of restraint in these modern spiritual spaces, deeply informed by centuries of Japanese culture. You can almost smell the clean scent of fresh tatami and sandalwood coming off the pages. A gem of a book for anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture and in Japanese cultural history.

Fans of photography should have been watching BBC4's magisterial six-part series The Genius of Photography. If you missed some episodes or want to read further into the subject, I strongly recommend Gerry Badger's book accompanying the series, The Genius of Photography (Quadrille, £25/£22.50). In his survey of the history of photography, Badger is both enlightening and provocative. If you can get over the off-putting design of the book, which makes it feel like a school textbook, you will find plenty to chew over.

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Fashion photography is largely by-passed in the BBC series, but those drawn to it will enjoy Albert Watson, by James Crump (Phaidon, £19.95/£17.96). He is one of the world's most distinctive fashion photographers, with a sharp eye and a confidence that makes his work stand out. In 1990, he photographed a five-year-old boy for a Gap commercial, and then asked him to return to the studio later that day. He spray painted the boy, hair and all, with gold paint, and photographed him face on, producing an image that is unmistakably modern yet which has the surprise and the shades of mystery of a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait.

Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography, by Todd Brandow and William Ewing (Thames & Hudson, £48/ £43.20), is packed full of fabulous portraits memorably carved in light and shadow, and also includes some of his little-known colour work. Steichen was a master photographer, pioneer museum curator, designer and all-round Renaissance figure. A comprehensive text successfully places him as a central figure of 20th-century photography.

Taschen has brought out another of its big, block-busting, muscle-straining tomes in the form of Africa, by Sebastiao Salgado (£39.99/£35.99). Salgado finds poor men, women and children from all over Africa and photographs them and their lands in black and white, turning them into huge, forceful biblical tableaux. He has set himself the enormous task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient and living tradition. He succeeds on many levels, recording terrible privations but giving his subjects dignity. There are glimmers of hope in these faces.

Taschen's Africa may inspire you to give Oxfam goats for Christmas, but you can always put books in stockings. Any of the following small books would please a photophile: André Kertész's The Polaroids (Norton, £19.99/£17.99), and three new books from the Photofile series, Araki, Elliot Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson (all Thames & Hudson, £8.95/ £8.50). And for anyone with a dog, Dogs (Phaidon, £9.95/£9.45) is a charming collection of old, anon- ymous and often comical snapshots of dogs and their (sometimes part-canine) owners from the turn of the century to the 1950s. If this doesn't win a smile, you should go away and examine your mental state.

Bestsellers 2007

1 The Digital Photography Handbook

Doug Harman and David Jones

Quercus, £4.99

Everything from pixels to print-outs.

2 Digital Photographer's Handbook

Tom Ang

Dorling Kindersley, £25

3 The Digital Photography Book

Scott Kelby

Peachpit, £13.99

4 Burlesque and the Art of the Teese

Dita Von Teese

Harper, £25

5 How We Are Photographing Britain

Val Williams and Susan Bright

Tate, £19.99

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