I recently acquired a copy of Cindy Sherman's The Complete Untitled Film Stills, and I can't put it down. This may come as a surprise to those of you who think of art books as a rather limited-use commodity, mostly for the potent intellectual accessorizing of one's coffee table, but it's true.

Sherman is well known for her photographs, made in the '80s and '90s, in which she posed herself (using wigs, costumes, various and often obvious prosthetics) in various scenarios that borrowed their high artifice from such visual tropes as film and old master paintings. Some of these images are so well known as to have become part of the very noise they were meant to stand out from. And although you can lose yourself in considering what it means to change your identity from image to image, to see in their entirety the Film Stills, which were shot from 1977 to 1980, is another kind of exercise altogether.

These 70 images--the original 69, plus new a print, from a lost roll of film--in grainy black and white are most suggestive when the subjects are expressionless, caught perhaps in the moment between expressions. There is partly the phenomenon of Sherman's curiously blank face, which it seems she can mold into any set of features (the college-era photobooth shot of Sherman as Lucille Ball is uncanny), and the other phenomenon of how little it takes to suggest a world of things, and how greedily a viewer ingests these little things: an upward camera angle, an apron, an arch, the traces of another person's presence, the sense of something that's happened, or about to happen. To look at these images is to simultaneously be taken in by them, and to see how fake they are, and to see how these things are achieved. In Sherman's frank and smart introduction, she writes of this kind of layering, "I hated the memory of how it had felt to wear sanitary-napkin garters, stockings with a girdle--in the fifth grade, for God's sake--and to sleep with soup-can rollers on my head, but I loved the idea of these things as curious artifacts."

Screw Christmas presents--get this for yourself.

And speaking of books, Kirsten Anderson, owner of the elegant oddball gallery Roq la Rue, is working on a new book for her imprint (called Ignition). The book's premise is photographs of mall Santas--in all their ambiguous, often slovenly, possibly boozy glory. (Who are these people we allow to take our children on their suspicious laps every year? What sort of vetting is done for potential Santas? It seems to me there ought to be a test as rigorous as the Foreign Service exam.)

At any rate, if you've got photographs of your young self or someone else with a mall Santa, or of Santa by his lonesome, and you'd like to submit them for consideration in Here Comes Santa Claus (due out fall of 2004), you can mail them to Kirsten Anderson, Ignition Publishing, 4015 Airport Way South, Seattle, WA 98121, or send a 300 dpi scan to kirsten@ignitionpublishing.com. If your image is used, you'll get a copy of the book.

emily@thestranger.com