This Recording

Our love for the one known as Jennifer Beals knows no bounds. Read of our dalliances with The L Word here and here. Ms. Beals' favorite photography books follow.

This Time With A Little Dedication

Robert J. Hughes:

Actress Jennifer Beals first rose to stardom while she was a student at Yale and appeared in the 1983 hit movie Flashdance, playing a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night. She now plays a driven art department dean in Showtime's The L Word, which has just begun its fifth season.

In real life, Ms. Beals also has a keen interest in art, particularly photography. She says, however, that due to the demands of raising her 2-year-old daughter she doesn't practice that craft as much as she did in the past, when she "photographed every day." Here, she lists five books of photography she admires.

'The Family of Man,' by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg

The book was tied to a 1955 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

"I first saw this book when I was a little girl," Ms. Beals says. "It creates the cycle of humanity starting with birth, chronicles the good and the great and the not-so-great, the difficult and universal elements of what it is to be human."

[Looking at Photographs]

'Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art,' by John Szarkowski

"I encountered it in college," Ms. Beals says. Pictures in this book "made me more aware of how we exist within our environment."

'Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Early Work,' by Peter Galassi

Ms. Beals admires Mr. Cartier-Bresson's "ability to hold two opposites with the same photograph, of struggle and joy and alienation and belonging," she says.