Christmas Special: Photography books reviewed

In case you hadn't heard, photography is going through a crisis at the moment, a spell of spiritual self-doubt. For 150 years, cameras never lied; now, it seems, they do nothing but. Born in a time of media and spin, young photographers have been struck down by anomie: a feeling that cameras are dishonest recorders, that the only decent thing to do with them is lie.

A recent show at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne asked fledgling snappers from around the world to send in their portfolios. Of the thousands that did, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, not one submitted a piece of street photography. An entire field of practice - the mainstay of olympians like Weege and Walker Evans and Robert Doisneau - had simply disappeared. With it went a belief in Cartier Bresson's decisive moment: that a camera, unposed and surreptitious, could catch a kind of truth. Look at the Elysée's catalogue (reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow 2005 - 2025, Thames & Hudson £18.95) and you'll see the work of a young American, Ted Partin. At first glance, Partin looks like Nan Goldin: actually, his MTV-generation shots are about as far from Goldin's as it is possible to be. Posed, complicitous, made with a large-format camera, they say to the viewer: everything I'm showing you is a lie; the image, the medium; the world.

If you're looking for someone to blame for this self-doubt, then point a shaking finger at Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans's book, truth study center (Taschen £14.99), is a thing of beauty, its images (Shay III, Device Control) at times mistakeable for functional photography: documentary shots, say, or travel pictures. The point of Tillmans, though, is precisely that his work does not have a function. It is storyless, evanescent, self-referential - in a word, art.

Where all trainee photographers once wanted to work for news agencies, they now want to be artists: by the far the largest number of submissions to reGeneration were art photographs. Susan Bright's Art Photography Now (Thames & Hudson £29.95) suggests why. Looking at the work of household names like Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr and Tillmans, Bright's book hints at just how much photography has come to hog the contemporary art scene. Given this success, it's ironic that the art photograph - blamed since the 1850s for the death of painting - now seems likely to wipe out the likes of Doisneau as well.

One painter who would not have crowed at this twist was Francis Bacon. It's widely known that Bacon's work owes a debt to photography, though just how large a debt is described by Martin Harrison's excellent In Camera: Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson, £35). Although lacking images from the Joule archive, Harrison's book traces Bacon's descent from Muybridge and Eisenstein and his obsession with what Harrison calls "working documents": photographs torn from books and magazines and overscored with paint. Bacon, like Monet, saw that photography had changed the way we see; as Walter Benjamin noted, the reproduction of a Velázquez is not the same thing as a Velázquez. A child of his time and a devout Benjaminian, Bacon liked to work from photographs of paintings, not from paintings.

But would he have worked from Tillmans? I doubt it: Bacon's taste was for photography with muscle - newspaper shots, reproductions in art books, illustrations from anatomy manuals. So you can imagine his eye being caught by two of this year's most intriguing monographs, both of work by men from the last pre-art-school generation of photographers, both unjustly lesser-known.

Willy Ronis (Taschen £14.99) covers the career of the 95-year-old Frenchman whose images of Paris - to my mind, rawer than Brassaï's or Doisneau's - sum up the city's malnourished chic in the years after the Second World War. Across the Atlantic, As I See It (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) looks at the work of Ronis's American counterpart, John Loengard. Best known for his stills in Life magazine - Teddy Kennedy arriving at the Kopechne inquest, a civil rights funeral in Mississippi - Loengard is also one of the unsung formalists of the past 50 years. His shot of Louis Armstrong applying lip-balm to horn-chapped lips has the kind of bleak elegance that makes you wonder why its maker isn't up there with Diane Arbus or Bruce Davidson.

My favourite monograph of 2005 is on a bigger name than any of these, though, the one who was always destined to be photography's hero: Anon. Robert Flynn Johnson's Anonymous: Enigmatic Photographs from Unknown Photographers (Thames & Hudson £14.95) tells us something of the real miracle of photography: that, given a camera, anyone can be an artist. There are shots here that amaze - a skein of geese flying across the moon, a man in a prairie full of corn, a stuffed bison on wheels. The really amazing thing, though, is that all these were made by photographers whose names we do not know. They represent the billions of images we all consume and make every day; a process that has changed the way we see, the way we are.