The Best Photography Books Published in the Last Five Years
2024-10-12 · 5 min read
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.
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.
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.
