Books by Ryan McGinley, Robert Longo and More Ryan McGinley From "Whistle for the Wind," by Ryan McGinley. The savviest piece of advice I got as a rookie reporter-photographer came my first week on the job at The Exeter News-Letter in New Hampshire. The picture editor told me, "If you think you're close, get closer." Words to brand on your brain, maybe even your retinas, if you're being paid to see, especially when laying bare the natural world. To be an artist focused on nature means to shed your human skin and peer so fiercely and near that you forget where you end and where nature begins. We still respect the uncanny eye that can get close in and clearly see the flora and fauna one county, or one country, over, then report back in a way that renews the world for us. The artists featured here transport the reader to Iceland and rural Ohio, southern France and the middle of nowhere, and to that deepest of interiors: the imagination. In these books a volcano distills the landscape to abstraction, birds" nests are wrought, and irises bloom and fade, bloom and fade. ASKA By Thelma Herzl 137 pages. Kerber. $49.95. When the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland blew in 2010, Thelma Herzl couldn't stay away. Raised in Iceland but living in Austria, Ms. Herzl is a collagist, sculptor and land artist, but here all she had to do was look hard and photograph formations - natural land art - born of volcanic ash. The recommended musical pairing for these images, which take us back to our primal origins as the guts of the earth met the sea, are the ethereal Icelandic soundscapes of Sigur Ros. VAN GOGH UP CLOSE Edited by Cornelia Homburg 288 pages. Yale. $60. The poet and visionary William Blake raved about seeing "a Heaven in a Wild Flower." That sentiment certainly would have stirred the soul strings of Vincent van Gogh, who once wrote, "I myself have a great desire to do that dusty blade of grass." There are plenty of dusty blades in this book, which focuses on van Gogh's wish to get as close to nature as possible in his art. In "Iris" (1889), for example, he boldly gets in the flower's face to place it before ours. This book accompanies the exhibition "Van Gogh Up Close," which closed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in May and is now at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Hatje Cantz. $95. Art doesn't get more basic than charcoal drawings, unless it's those scratched in the dirt with a stick. In the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in France, the charcoal drawings are (perhaps) 32,000 years old. Mr. Longo's hyper-realistic drawings here are a bit more recent, though no less lively. Many of them dwell on nature: skyscraper waves out of a surfer's dream, and razor-mouthed sharks out of a surfer's nightmare; white tigers and vast nebulas; and mushroom clouds as if drafted by Georgia O'Keeffe. Rizzoli New York. $55. The feral heart of "Whistle," a comprehensive monograph of Mr. McGinley's career, thrums in his photographs of summer-long road trips made by groups of 20-somethings, wild and naked and ripe with joy. They romp and caper through forests, caves and meadows, forces of nature abroad in a land where death is a myth. These photographs are songs of innocence. Princeton Architectural Press. $45. If Emily Dickinson had been an amateur naturalist and painter, she would've been Genevieve Jones, whose life and work are lovingly resurrected here. Inspired by Audubon's "Birds of America," Jones, the daughter of a country doctor, sought to create a book, "Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio," to complement his work. Jones died during the project - at 32 from typhoid fever - but her family finished it. Just 90 copies were made, but now a classic work of science and art, and a fascinating 19th-century life, have been returned to us.