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This morning I'm celebrating two extraordinary picture books.

The first, featuring photographs by the exquisite Christopher Payne and an introduction by Oliver Sacks, is called Asylum. Presenting some of the most moving images I have ever seen, this book takes us on a tour of the institutions that have served as home to this country's mentally ill. There are no people in these photographs—just a wall of toothbrushes, say, or canisters of ashes, or beleaguered ward hallways lit up by sun. Taunton State Hospital, Matteawan State Hospital, Concord State Hospital, and Springfield State Hospital are here; so is the operating room of Norristown and the coffins of Fergus Falls. Every single photograph is breathtaking; I bought the book two months ago and I still don't have the words to express my deep respect for the artistry of Payne.

The second book I'm celebrating today is Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans/Expanded Edition. We had seen the Americans exhibition at San Francisco MOMA, and I'd fallen in love with Frank's depiction of America, mid-last century, with its spewing politicians and its through-the-screen-door barber shops, its movie stars and its road trips. This compendium is graced by in-depth Sarah Greenough essays, context-proving contact sheets, and truly interesting explications of Frank's approach to maquettes and juxtaposition. Looking In was my big Christmas present this year, and it is big—so heavy, so wide that I have yet to figure out how to perch it on my lap. But it should not be/cannot be relegated to coffee table status. It demands to be studied and read.

Every time I'm in San Francisco I go several blocks down the street from the Hotel Rex, where I stay, and see what might be showing at SFMOMA.

This time, I got very lucky, for entire wings had been given over to both Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, photographers whose work has so very much to teach. The Frank exhibition presented, among other things, 83 photographs taken in America during 1955 and 1956—a time of diners, jukeboxes, intense racism, Hollywood, iconic barber shops, and road trips. It's not just the photographs that make this show. It's their heartrending juxtapositions. I'm writing a novel that takes place during this time—or I will be, months from now, when other work settles—and every pulse beat of every photograph mattered hugely to me.

The Avedon retrospective is one of a kind—SFMOMA will be its only host—and features more than 200 seminal portraits of faces wholly alive. A dancer, blurred. Dylan in the street. Janis Joplin inside a fury of hair. Marilyn Monroe with all her beauty still intact. I'd long been an Avedon fan. I'd never stood before his photos, hung, the faces so much larger than they'd ever be in life.

I had my camera with me; I expected someone at the door to take it. But no one did, and when I asked whether photos could be taken at the show, I was given an easy nod. At first it seemed wrong to photograph the photographs. Then I realized that that wasn't the subject at all. The subject was appreciation.