The Best Photography Books Published in the Last Five Years

Photography books occupy a unique space between art object and document. The best ones create a viewing experience that no gallery or Instagram scroll can replicate, using sequencing, printing, and design to transform individual images into something greater. These recent publications represent the form at its strongest.

Judge a photobook with your hands before your eyes. Open it in the middle and see whether it lies flat, because sewn sections do and perfect-bound glue blocks do not, and a spread that curls into the gutter loses the centre of every image across it. Check whether the blacks look black or slightly brown, which tells you whether the printer built them as a duotone or tritone rather than standard four-colour. Then feel the paper: a heavy uncoated stock absorbs ink and softens detail, which is a decision rather than a fault if the pictures were soft to begin with.

Gregory Halpern's Let the Sun Behold Me won the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award. Shot in the Ivory Coast, the book pairs vivid color photography with a text by Leila Slimani, creating a dialogue between image and language. The printing quality is exceptional.

Deana Lawson's self-titled monograph from Aperture cemented her status as one of the most important photographers working today. Her staged portraits of Black intimate and domestic life combine the grandeur of Old Master painting with contemporary Black experience. Every image feels monumental.

Alec Soth's A Pound of Pictures reflects on photography itself. Soth turns his camera on flea market photographs, studio portraits, and the detritus of American image-making culture. After two decades as one of Magnum's most distinctive voices, this is his most introspective work.

The prices move in a way that catches people out. A new monograph from Mack or Aperture is £40 to £60, and that is what these books are worth. But print runs are small and rarely repeated, so a title can travel from shop shelf to three figures inside two years. Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi was out of print for a decade and reissued by Mack in 2017 precisely because originals had become collectors' items. Buy the book when you see it, or wait for a reissue and accept the wait.

Tyler Mitchell's I Can Make You Feel Good extended his groundbreaking Vogue cover work into a full statement. The book's images of young Black people at leisure propose a visual language for Black joy that pushes against the medium's historical tendency to document Black suffering.

Other essential recent photobooks include Raymond Meeks' Halfstory Halflife for Oregon landscapes and adolescent risk, Tarrah Krajnak's El Jardin de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan for reinterpreting Edward Weston through a Peruvian lens, and RaMell Ross's South County for the images preceding his acclaimed film work.

Buy from people who actually read them. Photobookstore in the UK, the Photographers' Gallery shop in London and Dashwood in New York stock by editor rather than by algorithm, and Offprint in Paris and the NY Art Book Fair are where small publishers sell direct at cover price. Follow the imprint rather than the photographer: Mack, Aperture, Loose Joints, Chose Commune and Steidl, whose Gottingen press controls its own paper and ink, each publish something worth owning most years.

https://aperture.org/books/