Here are some of the Strand Staff's favorite photography books under $50.

Looking at Photographs
John Szarkowski
List price: $39.95
Strand price: $31.95
Each picture is presented with a commentary defining its place in the technical and stylistic development of the camera arts since 1845.

Looking In: Robert Frank's the Americans
Sarah Greenough (Editor)
List price: $45.00
Strand price: $35.95
First released in 1958, Robert Frank's seminal work, The Americans, is without question the single most important photographer's book published since World War II, and it continues to be profoundly influential, inspiring countless photographers around the world. This catalogue and the traveling exhibition it accompanies - at The Metropolitan Museum of Art later this year - mark the 50th anniversary of the book's publication.

American Music
Annie Leibovitz
List price: $75.00
Strand price: $19.95
Portraits from the photographer's archives, among them photographs of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, the Grateful Dead, Michael Jackson, and Elvis Presley, but the bulk of the work is new material created especially for this project, in which Leibovitz traveled across the country, taking pictures in juke joints and at iconic sites like Graceland.

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
Diane Arbus
List price: $39.95
Strand price: $31.95
(25th Anniversary Edition). At the time of her death in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, only a relatively small number of Diane Arbus's most important pictures were widely known. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1971 - along with the posthumous retrospective at MoMA - offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth & power of her achievements.

Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power
Richard Avedon
List price: $60.00
Strand price: $47.95
Richard Avedon, America's preeminent portraitist & fashion photographer, photographed the many faces of politics throughout his career. This volume brings together Avedon's political portraits for the first time.

American Surfaces
Stephen Shore
List price: $39.95
Strand price: $31.95
Photographer Stephen Shore's ground-breaking and largely unpublished series of photographs from 1972-3, took documentary photography to a new level. First exhibited at the cutting edge New York City Light Gallery, this visual diary of Shore's travels across the United States confounded critics.

Winogrand: Figments from the Real World
John Szarkowski
List price: $55.00
Strand price: $43.95
(Springs Industries Series on the Art of Photography). Published to accompany a retrospective exhibition at MoMa in 1998, the book contains an eloquent and important essay on the life and work of the photographer and a lavish plate section presenting the photographs thematically under the following titles: Eisenhower Years, The Street, Women, The Zoo, On the Road, The Sixties, Etc., The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show & Rodeo, Airport, and Unfinished Work.

RFK
Paul Fusco
List price: $50.00
Strand price: $39.95
Published on the 40th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, this volume is the long-awaited follow-up to photographer Paul Fusco's acclaimed RFK Funeral Train, a body of work heralded as a contemporary classic.

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West
Eva Respini (text)
List price: $45.00
Strand price: $35.95
The development of photography coincided with the exploration and settlement of the American West, and since the opening of the frontier the medium has shaped perceptions of the West's physical and social landscape. The present volume charters changing myths and cultural attitudes about the West from 1850 to the present, through more than 130 photographs by over 70 photographers and an expansive essay by Eva Respini, curator of photography at MoMA.

Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979
Susan Meiselas
List price: $50.00
Strand price: $39.95
Originally published in 1981, Susan Meiselas' Nicaragua is a modern classic - a seminal contribution to the literature of concerned photojournalism. Her book of images forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil.