A railroad track leaves off into the wide open prairie. A hostler cleans the fires with a cigar stub clamped between his teeth and leather gloves to protect his hands. The depot is wood paneled with hard pew seating and an empty ticket office. David Plowden had an eye for the working world of steam locomotives. He photographed the grunts, the engineers, the slow trail of freight cars across empty Midwestern fields, the brakemen and the grit of the train yards. Plowden’s Requiem for Steam is the result of a man riding the rails, impassioned on capturing a dying industrial culture.

Berthold Steinhilber photographs abandoned buildings and long forgotten locations in the blue world a blink before dark. Twilight is his muse. Lightning strikes the distant night-shadowed mountains as a brick chimney stands sentry over a busted wagon on the prairie. Dusk-splayed bottles and flags collect dust in Gold Point, Nevada. A ramshackle Colorado water mill slowly falls into the river. All are edged in darkness, but painted with light. Some towns died when the train tracks were tore up, others when the gold and silver was gutted and done from the hills. In Ghost Towns of the American West, Steinhilber records the last gasps of settlements founded on industries that have faded away.

Can’t fit Cameroon into your schedule to watch the mandrills? Don’t want to deal with the heat of the Serengeti to safari with the lions? No time machine to hitch a ride to Saratoga, Wyoming to watch the bison crossing the plain? The life-size habitat dioramas of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History peak into the disappearing environments of these animals and many others. Stephen Christopher Quinn features a full-color examination of over forty of the AMNH’s dioramas in Windows on Nature. The genesis of each diorama is presentedwith never-before-seen archived images of the explorers, painters, sculptors, conservationists and eccentrics who made these educational, compelling artworks.

Rhinestones, construction paper, sequins and glitter cover a house in McComb, Mississippi. Mystical sculptures took over a dilapidated country house in France. There is a concrete park along Highway 13 in Wisconsin that houses visual representations of everything from the chariot race in Ben Hur to Abraham Lincoln. Self Made Worlds is a photographic examination of obsessive environments and those that create them. Religious inspiration, dream instruction and eccentric insight are often the cause of these meticulous, passionate forms of outsider architecture. Brief, respectful essays tell the background of each shell garden, art yard, mosaic home, windmill park and modern, teetering castle, making this book more art review than “freak-show.”

‘Round the beginning of the twentieth century the railroads stitched an iron track out West. The government assigned railway companies millions of acres of land for transportation development. Railroads then had excessive land and track, but were short on folks to use it. So the railroads advertised and sold land near their routes to homesteaders for next to nothing. All the homesteader had to do was contract to be on the land for at least five years and “improve it.” Only Nebraska, Montana and the Dakotas were harsh lands. When the railroads died out so did the small towns every ten miles down the track. Tony and Eva Worobiec document these forgotten towns in their eerily beautiful photography book, Ghosts in the Wilderness: Abandoned America.