The photographers themselves are the artistic heroes of this book, and their champion is Gilles Mora, a French-born critic who loves America in a way that perhaps only a European can. His romantic take on our sleaze and slackerdom has something French New Wave about it. The rebellious photographers in this book are of the generation that came into its own after the publication of Robert Frank’s landmark “The Americans” in 1958, and like Frank they sought various ways out of the bind in which they felt the pictorial and journalistic traditions had left them.

Whether it’s the intensely participatory down-and-out chronicling of William Gedney (an underappreciated photographer who died in 1989) and Larry Clark (not so underappreciated), the deadpan weirdness of Garry Winogrand, the outright bizarreness of Les Krims (he of the nude women portraying murdered corpses or cavorting in Mickey Mouse masks) or the dreamlike surrealism of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Arthur Tress and Duane Michals, the heroism, according to Mora, lies in the ways in which these creative people sought to carve out a uniquely photographic place for themselves outside the conventions of the art world and the workaday requirements of illustration.

The book also includes an insightful section on the birth of the photography market in the early ’70s. While there have been ups and downs since then, many of these “last photographic heroes” are now auction-room heroes.

The Last Photographic Heroes by Gilles Mora. Abrams, $50.