Christmas is fast approaching, and with it the eternal quest for the perfect gift, the one that will move, surprise or simply please your loved ones. In a world where screens dominate our lives, the gift of a photo book is much more than a simple present: it’s an invitation to slow down, contemplate and marvel at images that tell stories, reveal artistic approaches, provoke emotions and, above all, reveal the wide variety of ways in which the most talented photographers look at our world.
In this comprehensive guide, Blind has assembled a selection of the best photo books published in 2024.
Homeland by Harry Gruyaert
In this book, Harry Gruyaert invites us to discover his homeland, Belgium, a country he has been crisscrossing for over sixty years. Flemish by birth, Gruyaert has long known that his native land is “a visually interesting place where incongruous things happen”. His subtle intuition for color, combined with his ability to capture the essence of places, is evident in this large body of images that are both “historical and epicurean”, as writer Brice Matthieussent puts it. A sense of the grotesque, of sarcasm, banality, but also emotion and a certain tenderness are sketched out in images of carnivals, religious processions, café-concerts, small towns spiked with brick houses… Four portfolios of black and white images, a lesser-known part of the photographer’s work, punctuate this visual immersion of this trip to the flat country, on a different paper.
Atelier EXB
256 pages, 55€
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Limited edition with print available
This Will Not End Well by Nan Goldin
This Will Not End Well is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker. Accompanying the retrospective show and tour of the same name, organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the book draws from the nearly dozen slideshows and films Goldin has made from thousands of photographs, film sequences, audio tapes and music tracks. The stories told range from the trauma of her family history to the portrayal of her bohemian friends, to a journey into the darkness of addiction. By focusing exclusively on slideshows and video installations, This Will Not End Well aims to fully embrace Goldin’s vision of how her work should be experienced. The book retains the presentation of the slide shows by showing all images in the same format on a black background and sequenced as they are in the sources. The 20 texts, of which the major part are newly commissioned by Goldin, complement and deepen the intention of her work.
Steidl
216 pages, 48€
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At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women by Sally Mann
At Twelve is Sally Mann’s revealing, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls on the verge of adulthood. To be young and female in America is a time of tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction, “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. The young women in Mann’s unflinching, large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer’s gaze with a disturbing equanimity. Poet Jonathan Williams writes, “Sally Mann’s girls are the ones who do the hard looking in At Twelve—be up to it!”
Aperture
56 pages, $50
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Disruptions by Taysir Batniji
Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s diverse practice is often tinged with impermanence and fragility, drawing inspiration from his subjective experience and its relation to current events and history. In Disruptions, Batniji collects fragmented screenshots taken between April 24, 2015 and June 23, 2017 during several WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and family in Gaza. Settled in Europe and unable to return to his homeland for years, this digital commons provided a crucial meeting ground for Batniji and his family: a digital space nonetheless shaped and destabilised by the same forces affecting the artist’s relatives in everyday life. Disruptions oscillates between the casual domestic language of the family phonecall and warped, degraded compositions, saturated with colour, obliterated with pixels, eradicated by distance. Through resolution and compression, Batniji’s poor images politically visualize how communication and daily life in Gaza are compromised by conflict, control and surveillance. In their noise and visual obliqueness, Batniji creates a thread between common intimacy and the colonial, now genocidal violence imposed upon Gaza to date, while evoking the physical and emotional separation that occurs across borders.
Disruptions by Taysir Batniji was awarded the Paris Photo-Aperture Best Photobook of the Year
Loose Joints
128 pages, 40€
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Fundraising Print Edition also available
Return by Larry Clark
Larry Clark was 16 in 1962 when he and his friends started shooting Valo – a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a tremendous amount of amphetamine. Clark returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20 after two years serving in Vietnam. Here he graduated from amphetamines to heroin, and upended traditional documentary photography, by turning his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a ground-breaking series of raw and intimate photographs chronicling the disintegration of the American dream. 50 years on, Larry Clark has returned to his archive of vintage prints, crafting a powerful vision of his work from 1962-1973, to produce his new book Return, a meticulously printed, outsized monograph, which is as shocking today as it ever has been, even in a moment in which opioid addiction is more prevalent than ever before. “I’ve always been interested in small groups of marginalized people who no one would know about otherwise,” said Larry Clark. “I photographed my friends over a ten-year period in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in and done except someone from the inside like me. You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our twenties and how everything changed and how we changed. There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making work, I said, “Why can’t you show everything?”
Stanley Barker
72 pages, 73,95€
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A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon
At thirty-eight, while living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Rosalind Fox Solomon began a new life as a photographer. Studying with Lisette Model in the early 1970s, she honed the photographic voice which would define the prodigious half-century of work to follow. After moving to a loft in New York City in 1984, and travelling to Peru, India, South Africa, Cambodia, and beyond, she became renowned for her unflinching photography of everyday life around the world.
Throughout the same period, Solomon made self-portraits. Taking photography as a means of insistent introspection, over five decades Solomon studied the evolution of her aging body and embraced the self-estrangement her camera affords. A Woman I Once Knew brings these self-portraits together alongside extended texts by Solomon to form a unique work of autobiography, ambitious in its combination of image and text. Solomon’s writings allude to the periodic depressions and euphoric experiences in other cultures that defined her extraordinary life and shaped her empathetic approach to photography. They sit in fraught and suggestive dialogue with her revelatory self-portraits. A remarkable new work from an epochal photographer, this volume shows a startling rigorousness and sensitivity of self-examination which suggests the boundless possibilities of taking the self as subject.
Mack
264 pages, €65 £55 $65
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This is My Life I’m Talking About by Danny Lyon
This Is My Life I’m Talking About by Danny Lyon is a picaresque memoir written from inside the heart of the revolutionary twentieth century by one of its most crucial witnesses. A love story of a beautiful friendship with the great American hero John Lewis. Danny Lyon writes with the tremendous and generous feeling, humor, and a selection of unpublished and unseen pictures ties in Danny Lyon’s life to The Bikeriders. His story begins in Russia under the Czar, when in 1905 Lyon’s uncle Abram is involved in the murder of a policeman during a pogrom and fled to Brooklyn, where, during World War Two, Lyon was born.
Damiani
224 pages, 45€
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Advice for Young Artists by Alec Soth
Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States. Advice for Young Artists comprises work he made there. Its title – perhaps like the visits themselves – is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth offers an angular and unresolved reflection on artmaking at different stages of life and the relations of photography, time, and ageing. The photographs here range from formal studies evocative of the classroom to more unruly works of self-expression. Ambiguous stagings, found forms, and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotes and unfinished credos scrawled on Post-its. Among the students, Soth himself appears at intervals, an uncertain sage in their midst.
Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this latest body of work reveals a new expansion of Soth’s practice and a new vantage, twenty years on from the publication of his first book. Recalling the conceit of Broken Manual, it uses an instructional format as a spurious cover for introspection and provocation. As much as a study of the experience of the young artist, this is a reckoning with the prospect of becoming an old one.
Mack
72 pages, €50 £40 $50
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Father by Diana Markosian
Diana Markosian: Father presents the photographer’s journey to another place and another time, where Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger—her long-lost father. The book explores her father’s absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. The images, made over the course of a decade, take place in her father’s home in Armenia. In Markosian’s first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Father uses both documentary photographs and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the fifteen years of absence and separation from the photographer’s childhood. In this voyage of self-discovery, Markosian touchingly renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?”
Aperture
144 pages, $50
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Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images
Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.
Aperture et The New York Times
312 pages, $39.95
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The New York Notebooks by Jean-Christian Bourcart
The New York Notebooks by Jean-Christian Bourcart immerse us in the photographer’s visual repertoire, with its obsessions, recurrences, disruptions and experiments. Based on the forty-eight notebooks he wrote while living in New York, between 1998 and 2005, the book unfolds like a visual atlas, a black box of the artist’s work that constitutes a first stage in the selection of his photographs prior to the conception of series. A repertory of forms, with its interplay of echoes and formal reminiscences, the New York Notebooks also bear witness to an era. They reveal the way in which Bourcart seizes, lives and captures the world, like a sounding board, as well as the singularity of his protean writing. Transgressing all the rules of documentary photography, his images tell fragments of the stories of our times in a photographic style that blends investigation, personal experience and formal invention.
Atelier EXB
288 pages, 49 €
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Studio 54 by Tod Papageorge
Tod Papageorge’s Studio 54 takes us inside New York’s most infamous club. During the late 1970’s 54 was the place to be seen, attracting thousands of people that regularly included models, actors, rock stars, artists, designers and politicians. Papageorge’s exquisite photographs are filled with all the decadence and glamour that one would expect from 1970’s New York. While photographers were common, most were there to simply search out only the rich and famous, Papageorge’s images transcend the obvious, transforming the glitter into something akin to poetry. “The 66 photographs in this book were made between 1978–80 in Studio 54, a New York discothèque that, through those years, was the place to be and be seen, as the celebrities, partygoers, and those crazy for dancing who filled it every night were happy to prove”, said the photographer. “Unsurprisingly, given its reputation (which quickly flamed into notoriety during a short, 33-month existence), it was difficult to get into: the imperturbable doormen who doled out access as if they were controlling passage into a fabulous kingdom made sure that it would be. Only the famous or socially connected could assume they’d find themselves shooed around the flock of hopeful celebrants milling on the street side of the velvet rope and guided through the door; otherwise, the thing most likely to help was to be beautiful. Once inside, though, everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.”
Stanley Barker
120 pages, 73,95€
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Horses by Jane Evelyn Atwood
Horses reveals a little-known aspect of Jane Evelyn Atwood’s work: her long-running series on horses, or rather her relationship with horses. A major photographic subject, the horse is here the vector of many themes dear to the American photographer: her fascination for this animal developed since childhood, her admiration for its strong physical presence but also its share of humanity. Immersed in the great outdoors, from Brittany to Mongolia to Vermont, the reader discovers the majesty of this animal, wild or domesticated, which has accompanied mankind since the dawn of time. Atwood’s images reveal the very essence of movement, the nobility of posture and the subtle play of light and shadow on the animal’s coat. The horse is transformed into a veritable living sculpture, where the shape of its body sometimes evokes abstract, almost dreamlike landscapes.
Atelier EXB
128 pages, 45,00 €
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Between the skin and sea by Katrin Koenning
Spanning three years (2020-2023), between the skin and sea comes into being at a time of great collective upheaval. The hyper-local takes center stage – captured in the artist’s immediate surroundings, stories of entanglement, relationship, connection and unveiled intimacy. Leaning into the shadows, Katrin Koenning’s photographs show networks of love, grief, kinship, shelter and repair.
Chose Commune
188 pages, 55€
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Silence is a Gift by Ciro Battiloro
Rione Sanità (Naples), Santa Lucia (Cosenza), Torre del Greco. There are places in southern Italy that bear the scars of incurable wounds on the walls and in the flesh of their inhabitants. In these wounds lie the historical memory and the true face of the people. Their names are Alfonso, Elena, Marco, Stefania, to name but a few. Some come from the same neighborhoods and know each other, others do not. But they have one thing in common: they all met Ciro Battiloro, who followed them into the intimacy of their homes, with his camera and with his heart. He portrayed their daily lives by taking part in them. Never an intruder, Ciro Battiloro is a friend, a brother, a confidant. He’s not so much interested in marginality as in extraordinary vitality. He has seen new lives born, children become teenagers, then parents in their turn. He has also had to say goodbye. Silence is a Gift speaks of love and solitude, life and death, pain and joy, but above all of intimacy and resistance.
Chose Commune
92 pages, 40€
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Dolorès Marat
Dolorès Marat’s universe is a photographic enigma, a poetic and unsettling tale. Trees start to move, cinema doors smile at us, a crocodile woman takes notes, it rains birds while a stingray observes us through the aquarium glass. From the metro to the gates of the Middle East, where on earth is Dolorès Marat taking us? This monograph invites us to explore the photographer’s intangible and bewitching work, in the image of the ghostly silhouettes she captures through rare flashes of light. Dolorès Marat likes to photograph in the blue hour, at dusk or dawn, in dimly lit, vaporous atmospheres conducive to the marvelous. “Dolorès doesn’t set the scene, she doesn’t cheat with what she sees. She doesn’t crop, retouch or post-produce. She only takes one photo, and it’s the right one. She makes the instantaneous,” writes Magali Jauffret in the book.
Delpire
144 pages, 49€
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Faultlines by John Volynchook
John Volynchook travelled by bicycle and on foot to photograph fragments of UK landscapes under threat from fracking. The images in his forthcoming book Faultlines, were made between 2015 – 2021 and inspired by the stories gathered from people he met along the way.
Gost Books
88 pages, 50€
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The Makeshift City by Joshua Dudley Greer
The city of Atlanta in the US has endured constant change throughout its history. It has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over, survived slavery and racial segregation to become the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, and recently recast the state of Georgia as a blue wave in a sea of neighbouring red states. The Makeshift City by Joshua Dudley Greer shows a contemporary Atlanta in a state of flux—both a unique city with a specific history and culture, and a generic American metropolis struggling to forge its identity.
Gost Books
144 pages, 70€
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Mirror by Diana Michener
Mirror is a sweeping retrospective of Diana Michener’s photography, encapsulating her ongoing journey in the medium across the decades. In three volumes and over 600 images newly scanned from Michener’s archive, Mirror covers her work from 1975 to 2021 and includes many as yet unpublished images. Michener presents her œuvre in lyrical chapters, each exploring a specific theme and including portraits (of friends, strangers, herself), landscapes, still lifes (of Greco-Roman sculpture, mannequins, bones), visual diaries of her travels, and re-enactments of myths such as Narcissus and Leda and the Swan. Short personal texts by the photographer open each chapter, taking us through her memories and giving insight into the images we would otherwise miss.
Steidl
624 pages, 185€
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Route of the Beautiful Star by Daniel Stephen Homer
Route de la Belle Etoile (Route of the Beautiful Star) documents the world of amateur astronomers across four continents. Over five years, photographer Daniel Stephen Homer traced a tangled web of collaborators who have made an outsized contribution to professional astronomical research. His resulting photographs blend the domestic and scientific, the mundane and the cosmic taking the viewer on a journey into the world of astronomical citizen science.
Gost Books
128 pages, 50€
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Office / LA Office by Lars Tunbjörk
Over five years, Tunbjörk explored offices across Stockholm, New York, and Tokyo, photographing ‘like an alien’ in the soulless, banal uniformity of these workplaces. He sought to capture that lingering sadness in what he called “the most common – but closed and secretive – place in the Western world.” While the winds of change may have transformed the grey dividers into WeWork couches or the clunky dialup PC into a sleek, pocketable touchscreen tablet, Tunbjörk’s images capture a contingent sense of ennui and isolation still prescient in an era of bullshit jobs, quiet quitting and working from home. This two-volume series is redesigned by Tunbjörk’s close collaborator, graphic designer and art director Greger Ulf Nilson. Nilson reworks his original 2001 design of Office, presenting a fresh perspective alongside a separate book of unseen works in LA Office, both housed in a slipcase.
Loose Joints
120 pages, 85€
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Special Edition also available with limited print
Death and Other Belongings by Will Green
Death and Other Belongings is a study of loss, fear and legacy. Photographer Will Green caught Covid and lost both his parents to the virus within the course of just two months. The photographs in his forthcoming book were made throughout this intense period when— concurrent with the Covid-19 pandemic—his personal world imploded. Although the photographs are specific to a personal journey and place, they represent the wider experience of human fragility.
Gost Books
104 pages, 50€
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Shadow Cast de Pacifico Silano
Shadow Cast is the latest handmade, limited edition book by lens-based artist Pacifico Silano. Known for his practice of excavating melancholy, tension, emotion, and friction from vintage gay pornography, Silano continues his exploration of the dark interior of queer identity through this evocative work. Shadow Cast follows Silano’s experimental I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, shifting focus to life-size, gritty headshots, obscured beyond recognition through rasterization and printing. Silano’s conceptual gestures of reframing comment on marginality, with his subjects literally kept in the shadows, speaking of a mental hidden space pulsing with desire and longing.
Loose Joints
72 pages, 120€
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Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography
Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writing of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with photographs from Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s collection by photographers including Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, Daidō Moriyama, Janine Niépce, Issei Suda, Henry Wessel, and Bernard Pierre Wolff. Taking Ernaux’s unique artistic endeavour to “describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered”, this project by writer and curator Lou Stoppard uncovers the profound ways the written and visual image can inform and inflect on one another. In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms.
Mack
144 pages, €35 £30 $40
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Blue Movie by Nicolas Comment
In this bittersweet adventure, the photographer plunges viewers into the lost paradises of a bygone dolce vita. A visual escape – an antidote to today’s leaden years – where women born of the (new) wave push open the doors of the “Other Saint-Tropez”, dear to Colette and the Fauve painters.
Éditions André Frère
152 pages, 39 €
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Paradise by Maxime Riché
On November 8, 2018, the megafire Camp Fire ravaged Paradise, a California town of 26,000 souls 140 km north of Sacramento, in less than four hours. Caused at daybreak by a short-circuit on a near-century-old Pacific Gas & Electric electricity pylon, its flames spread across this Sierra Nevada highland under the effect of strong winds, heat and abundant dry vegetation.
Éditions André Frère
128 pages, 49 € — 900 €
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Flowers Drink the River by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth
Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s gender transition, as she photographs her small community in rural Maine, and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Scenes of moths and floating spider silk, mud-drenched bodies intertwining, a burning house, girlfriends pissing on each other from tree branches, nocturnal animals, and euphoric rituals adorn flash-soaked landscapes. Under the moon, the boundaries between people, animals, and the land soften and blur. Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine. The photographer finds beauty and belonging as she creates a utopia hidden just barely out of reach.
Stanley Barker
80 pages, €86,95
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Holy Land U.S.A. by Lisa Barlow
In the Summer of 1980, Lisa Barlow was following the curve of Connecticut’s Route 69 in a beat-up rental car, when she came across a giant cross looming above the highway. Barlow had heard about Holy Land U.S.A. but never encountered the painstaking replica in miniature of Jerusalem with illustrative scenes from the Bible, replete with precepts and biblical quotations engraved in cement. There was Pilate’s house, the Inn with a “No Vacancy” sign, a mummified lump spray painted white representing Lot’s wife turned to salt, and a repentant looking Lucifer locked in a small dog cage. Built 20 years earlier with concrete, plaster, wire and wood, the diorama had been sparingly repaired with modern materials such as plastic and aluminium siding. The Stairway to Heaven, cracked asphalt steps ascending the hill, had a cyclone fence along one side, and the Garden of Eden was completely obscured by thick vines under a tin sunshade. It was from there that Balow first saw the city of Waterbury spread beneath her, its church spires and factory smokestacks in odd juxtaposition with Holy Land’s little foot high buildings at her feet. “Before long, it was more than a fascination with Holy Land that kept luring me back to Waterbury,” said Lisa Barlow. “It was the people who captured my attention, my imagination and eventually, my love. This is the story of that year in pictures.”
Stanley Barker
104 pages, €67,95
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Long Walk Home by Robbie Lawrence
For the past five years, Robbie Lawrence has travelled throughout Scotland and the United States photographing the Highland Games. His new book Long Walk Home examines the cultural significance of the traditional community tournament and questions the very notion of what it is to be from a place. “The Games have always interested me, not just visually, but also as a vehicle for considering how we as Scots allow history to inform our modern identity,” said Robbie Lawrence. “At first, I struggled to look past the myth-making and nationalism often espoused in the Games. I was trying to document these events objectively, without clarifying how I felt about them. What you see in the pages of these two volumes is an attempt to engage with the myriad of fabricated ideas surrounding the modern Highland Games. Whether on a dusty sports field in Denver or at the local park at Burntisland, the Games is at its core a coming together of friends and family to enjoy sports, dance and music.”
Stanley Barker
120 pages, €92,95
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No Fences by Mark McLennan
Perhaps nowhere in North America is as symbolically rich as the American West. In the harsh light of day there is a disparity between what is imagined and what exists. But as the light falls, the myths that sustain the region’s collective identity are revealed. Part love letter and part elegy, No Fences takes the viewer off the highway and into the spaces where the myth remains—in the shadows of the mountains, deep into the pine forests, and to the last open plains along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Inspired by 19th-century frontier poetry, Mark McLennan’s photographs produced between 2020-2023 explore what has been lost and what persists in ranching communities between Southern Alberta and West Texas. “Having lived abroad for a decade, I returned to the West to experience the promise of its expanse,” said Mark McLennan. “What I found was miles of barbed wire and no trespassing signs. My camera allowed me to jump a few fences and encounter the remaining people and places that still embody the West’s mythic tradition, despite encroaching modernization and decay.”
Stanley Barker
88 pages, €67,95
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Cover picture of this article: La route du paradis, Jordanie, 2008 © Dolorès Marat
