FOR a major chunk of a local lad's work, try David Hockney Portraits (National Portrait Gallery £35).

The book is timed to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, which opened yesterday and continues until January 21.

There are six essays and a catalogue of pictures. The first four are self-portraits from 1954, with the rectangular glasses, vivid colours and serious expression; there's a couple of his dad a year later, and of his brother, who was to become a Mayor of Bradford. Soon there's Hockney's A Rake's Progress 1961-63, 16 blitzed images including The Start of the Spending Spree and Door Opening for a Blonde. Of his iconic Californian work, it's mostly the bodies clothed or unclothes of Beverley Hills; the pools look enticing though. There's also W H Auden, J B Priestley and Alan Bennett. Later self-portraits show a blond with round glasses. His mum and dad crop up through the decades, My mother 1982, a photomontage at Bolton Abbey. There's Margaret and Ken, Bridlington 2002, and a nice one of Stanley the dog.

It's women mostly in Matisse and the Subject of Modernism by Alastair Wright (Princeton £22.95). It seems one is to contemplate figures in woods, parties in naked picnic-dance mode, with an eye to the "contradictory anatomy" of flesh and the synergy of old and new ideas. Picasso is quoted as saying: "if he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design".

If Matisse caused a stir, the work in The Artist's Body is designed to dislocate. Much of the stuff assembled by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones is intentionally and actually horrid (Phaidon £24.95). About the most decorous image is of a naked Tracey Emin, with scorpion tattoo, giving a demo of art as people watch through portholes.

Much more appealing are the portraits in Shelter Dogs, by photographer Traer Scott (Merrell £12.95). They fix you with their gaze and pour out volumes; few are camera shy and they are beautifully shot. Austin the beagle is "strong-willed, scent obsessed, and very talkative". The who's who at the back says he was adopted after seven days. Rosie is an unaltered female boxer"; she was adopted by a biker and now rides pillion "sporting her own helmet". Bonnie, a pit bull, survived Hurricane Katrina and was reunited with her family a year later.

There are many abandoned pit bulls and pit bull mixes because of laws regarding the breed. Scott likes these maligned dogs and writes that the "modern plight of this breed is tragic"; most get adopted, but Malaki was unwanted and "euthanized". Oliver was nice to people, but not other dogs; Shadow's depression was his/her undoing.

Hardly a person or an animal pollutes the scene in Approaching Nowhere: Photographs by Jeff Brouws (Norton £30). His large-format highway landscapes have empty skies, bare asphalt, the normal images in the genre. But he gets the monochrome effect, the bleakness, despite the shock vibrant colour of petrol pumps and motel signs.

His discarded landscapes are brick, timber, mess and old names. Shudder or delight in the franchise landscape from Indiana to Wyoming: big bright names, giant box stores. In a short introduction, he writes that "Americans now move every five years". With the advantage of a home-from-home mall and McDonald's, they have "no trouble abandoning one community for the next".