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31 Photobooks for Everyone on Your Holiday Gift List
Legendary photographers. Thought-provoking essay books. Limited-edition photography gifts and book bundles. Here is the ultimate guide to the best photobooks to give this holiday season.
Looking for the perfect holiday gift? From a gift subscription to Aperture magazine, major debut monographs, newly released book bundles, engaging photography reads, and so much more—we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.
Must-Haves for Photo Lovers
Aperture Magazine Subscription
The source for photography since 1952, Aperture features immersive portfolios, in-depth writing, and must-read interviews with today’s leading artists. Numerous luminaries have guest edited issues, including Wolfgang Tillmans, Tilda Swinton, Alec Soth, Sarah Lewis, Nicole R. Fleetwood, and Wendy Red Star, making the magazine essential reading for anyone interested in photography and contemporary culture.
Josef Koudelka: Next is an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Drawn from extensive interviews conducted over nearly a decade with the artist and his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborations from around the globe, author Melissa Harris offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, this visual biography includes personal and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, alongside iconic images from his extensive body of work spanning the 1950s to the present.
Looking for more inspiring photography reads? Bundle and save with our Reader Book Bundle featuring Josef Koudelka: Next, Strange Hours by Rebecca Bengal, and We Were Here by Sunil Gupta.
The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in art and fashion today, highlighting the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.
In Dislocations, Alex Webb draws from photographs across the many disparate locations of his oeuvre in a meditation on the act of photography as a form of dislocation in itself. A contemporary update of the long out-of-print book by the same name, Webb returned to this idea of dislocation during the pandemic when he began to look at images produced in the twenty years since the original publication. Featuring previously unpublished images, Dislocations expands a beloved limited edition with a series of photographs that speak to today’s sense of displacement.
Contemporary Classics
In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow), centering Native American life and material culture through the artist’s imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections, or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Delegation is a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, gleaning from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring.
From hip-hop to Nefertiti, Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to span this rising artist’s career. Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination,” Erizku states. “When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.” Blending Erizku’s studio practice with his work as an editorial photographer, the volume is accompanied by essays from acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, alongside interviews with Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent.
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has portrayed the personal and the powerful in her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. One of the most compelling photographers working today, Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the long-awaited first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in the book’s essay. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-in c-print.
For the Reader
Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists by Rebecca Bengal
In Strange Hours, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Whether speaking with William Eggleston or traveling with Alec Soth, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and the vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.
Aperture Conversations: 1985 to Present
What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between esteemed photographers and artists, critics, curators, and editors since 1985.
Pioneering Voices
In Elegy, acclaimed photographer Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history in the US, narrowing in on the deep historical memory embedded in its geography. Weaving together three of Bey’s landscape series, the artist takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, the plantations of Louisiana, and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio. Divided into an elegy of three movements, Bey not only evokes history, but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences.
In her searing, diaristic portrait of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together over a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay, “they know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”
Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer
Kimowan Metchewais’s exquisitely layered works explore Indigenous identity, community, and colonial memory. After his untimely death at the age of forty-seven in 2011, Metchewais left behind an expansive body of photographic and mixed-media work—including an extensive polaroid archive that addresses a range of themes, including self-portraiture, the body, language, and landscapes. A Kind of Prayer is the first-ever survey dedicated to the late Cree artist, showcasing Metchewais’s essential artistic vision.
Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful
Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.
For the Armchair Traveler
Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed (Limited Edition Box Set)
In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton offers an insider’s look at the skateboarding community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding, the book reflects on a subculture in the making and the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create. “I picked up a camera to remember my youth as a skateboarder which started disappearing the very millisecond I could fathom I was mired in it,” Templeton reflects. “Playing the roles of both observer and participant, I wanted to document the extraordinary things I was able to do, and the people I was doing them with.” This limited-edition box set features a unique hand-painted print, enclosed in a specially-designed slipcase.
Photographing Shehuo, a Chinese Spring Festival tradition, Zhang Xiao provides a local, hometown look at the event—and how it has transformed over the years. Celebrated in rural northern Chinese communities, Shehuo boasts a history that spans thousands of years. However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with a myriad of regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. Community Fire narrows in on how the mass-produced substitutions of Qing dynasty-era costumes and props have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Through a colorful and fantastical blend of portraiture and ephemera, Zhang blurs the edges between the everyday and absurd.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South
Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture, and reckoned with its fraught history. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with both the history of photography and America, offering an apt lens through which to examine American identity. A Long Arc collects over 175 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, featuring works by artists such as Walker Evans, Baldwin Lee, Robert Frank, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Alec Soth, An-My Lê, and more.
The Road Trip Photographer Bundle
Hit the open road by traveling near and far through the work of illustrious photographers Justine Kurland, Stephen Shore, and Alex Webb. In Highway Kind, Justine Kurland explores the reality of the American dream with photographs equal parts raw and romantic. Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s large-format color photographs, brought together in the legendary Uncommon Places, have influenced a generation of photographers. The Suffering of Light gathers some of Webb’s most iconic images taken in distant corners of the world, distilling Webb’s unique ability to pull together gesture, color, and contrasting cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames.
Give the Gift of Inspiration
The Photography Workshop Series Book Bundle
In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. From Richard Misrach on landscape photography and meaning, to Graciela Iturbide on how to employ a deeply personal vision while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds, to Todd Hido’s insights on the genres of landscape, interior, and nude photography—these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.
Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph
What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, or sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.
PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice
How does a photographic project or series evolve? How important are “style” and “genre”? What comes first, the photographs or a concept? PhotoWork is a collection of interviews with forty photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained body of work. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, editor Sasha Wolf’s interviews provide essential insights and advice from both emerging and established photographers—including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Todd Hido, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth, and more—while also revealing that there is no single path in photography.
For the Design Lover
Viviane Sassen: Venus & Mercury
In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited by Versailles to make a series of photographs throughout its vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours when the buildings were empty, to wander and photograph the palace’s extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette’s private correspondence. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace’s many marble statues, Sassen created hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender, calling to mind traditions of Surrealist art and the work of figures such as Hans Bellmer. Brought together in a limited-edition book crafted by the iconic designer Irma Boom, Venus & Mercury offers a fresh vision of the storied palace—and all its beauty, melancholy, and intrigue.
David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis
With his mesmerizing analog photograms, David Benjamin Sherry melds queer history, abstraction, and darkroom magic. Born out of what Sherry has called the “transformative potential of the darkroom,” each of his large-scale, cameraless color photograms is laboriously made by hand in the darkroom. Using cardboard masks to create geometric forms and incorporating his own body into the images, Sherry actively references histories of photography—while also thinking through the intersections of identity, form, and the hypnotic power of extreme color. Pink Genesis collects twenty-nine one-of-a-kind works that delight in the pleasures of form and color.
Children’s Activity Books
Inspire young readers with three special books that explore the magic of photography. In Eyes Open, Susan Meiselas compiles a sourcebook of photography ideas and prompts for children to engage with the world through the camera. Seeing Things acts as a wonderful introduction to photography, with narration by Joel Meyerowitz on how photographers can transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography.
The Colors We Share by Angélica Dass
Inspired by her family tree, Angélica Dass—a Brazilian artist of African, European, and Native American descent—began creating portraits of people from all over the world against backgrounds that match their skin tones. Brought together in a book made for young readers, The Colors We Share celebrates the diverse beauty of human skin, while also considering concepts of race and the limited categories we use to describe each other.
For the Collector
As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic (LP)
Aperture’s first record release is a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the diaspora, featuring artists such as Jamaican dancehall musician Tenor Saw, North American guitarist Jeff Parker, British funk band Cymande, and South African artist-singer-activist Miriam Makeba. The LP expands upon the ethos of the book As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Limited-Edition Puzzle by Tommy Kha
Released in celebration of Tommy Kha’s first major monograph, Half, Full, Quarter, this limited-edition puzzle features one of the artist’s idiosyncratic self-portraits. Known for his visually mischievous, yet deeply personal photographs, Kha’s work is an investigation of Asian American identity in the American South.
In this special book bundle, take an inside look at the photography collections of renowned artist collectors Judy Glickman Lauder, Dr. Kenneth Montague, and Elton John. Presence brings together over 150 images from Glickman Lauder’s collection in a celebration of photography’s ability to capture the human experience. Drawn from Montague’s Wedge Collection in Toronto, As We Rise looks at the multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Considered one of the greatest private collections of photography in the world, The Radical Eye presents an unparalleled selection of modernist images from the collection of musician and philanthropist Elton John.
Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (Limited-Edition Box Set)
Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases in visually complex photographs that examine how images circulate online, as well as how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. This special limited-edition box set features a differentiated version of Cwynar’s debut monograph, Glass Life, accompanied by a signed print from the artist.
Visions in Black & White
Kristine Potter’s dark and brooding photographs reflect on the Southern Gothic landscape of the American South, as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Brought together in Dark Waters, Potter’s seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs—capturing the landscape and creating evocative portraits that stand in the oft-unnamed women at the center of these stories. Featuring a short story by Rebecca Bengal, Dark Waters both induces and exorcises the sense of threat that women often contend with as they move through the world.
American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams
For fifty years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. American Silence features over 175 works from Adams’s career photographing throughout Colorado, California, and Oregon—capturing suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and the land. By examining the artist’s act of looking at the world around him, this volume showcases the almost palpable silence of his photographs.
In a signature, modulating gray scale, the late Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg spent decades rendering the shapes and forms of everyday life in his exacting vision. From dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, to the hard edges of an automobile or curved tunnel, to anonymous figures cast in shadow, Sandberg creates subtle yet transformative studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints project a powerful physical presence. Tom Sandberg: Photographs is the first major publication dedicated to one of Norway’s most important photographers.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, book bundles, magazines, and limited-edition prints.
