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32 Photobooks for Everyone on Your Holiday Gift List
Legendary photographers. Iconic monographs. Thought-provoking essay books. Limited-edition photography gifts. 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, classic photobooks for every collection, monographs by today’s leading artists, inspiring photography reads, and so much more, we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.
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. This summer, Aperture introduced a new look for the magazine with “The Design Issue.” Numerous luminaries have guest edited issues—including the most recent, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” guest edited by Deana Lawson—among them 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.
In the nearly seven decades since its publication in the 1950s, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream. This year, to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth, Aperture has reissued The Americans, alongside a special centennial edition with a slipcase and featuring a booklet showcasing Frank’s early films.
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now
I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society. The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades, alongside a range of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians.
Danny Lyon’s riveting book about a Chicago motorcycle club is one of the definitive accounts of American counterculture. First published in 1968, The Bikeriders offers an immersive look into the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, bringing together photographs and transcribed interviews by Lyon from 1963 to 1967. The volume was also the inspiration for the 2023 film of the same name starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy.
Pioneering Voices
Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía
Best known for his intimate portrayals of barrio communities of the Southwest United States, Louis Carlos Bernal made photographs in the 1970s and 1980s that draw upon the resonance of Catholicism, Indigenous beliefs, and popular practices tied to the land. For Bernal, photography was a potent tool in affirming the value of individuals and communities who lacked visibility and agency. The first major scholarly account of Bernal’s life and work, Monografía is a landmark survey of one of the most significant American photographers of the twentieth century.
Featuring over 260 unpublished photographs, The True America is the first publication of Ernest Cole’s images depicting Black lives in the US during the turbulent and eventful late 1960s and early 1970s. After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book, House of Bondage, in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed throughout New York City’s streets and the rural South. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s incisive eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.
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.”
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. First published by Aperture in 1986, The Ballad continues to exert a major influence on photography and other aesthetic realms, its status as a contemporary classic firmly established.
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 Reader
Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images
Race Stories brings together a collection of award-winning short essays by the late cultural historian Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories features seventy-one essays paired with 120 photographs, examining the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combatting racial stereotypes. This volume marks the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.
Josef Koudelka: Next is an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Drawing from extensive interviews conducted over nearly a decade with the artist and his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators 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.
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 reflecting on her exchanges with William Eggleston or her travels 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.
Contemporary Classics
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II
In their evocative self-portraits, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
One of the most compelling photographers working today, Deana Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful through her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the 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 her essay for the book. “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.
In Family Ties, Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common. In the late 1970s, Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Released upon the occasion of Barney’s first retrospective in Europe, Family Ties brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first photobook, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacies of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Frazier, whose first major museum survey ran at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, earlier this year, examines the effects of that decline on the community, her own family, and the narratives of the region. Setting the story across three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—Frazier creates a statement that’s both personal and political.
From hip-hop to Nefertiti, Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines 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 reinterprets 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 conversations with Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent.
For the Style- and Design-Inspired
Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive
Arielle Bobb-Willis’s first book, Keep the Kid Alive, invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaus, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”
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 through the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers who are rethinking the possibilities of representation. Whether on the role of the Black figure in media; cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture; or the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers, The New Black Vanguard opens up critical conversations while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.
Reproduction is the first monograph to collect the photographs of internationally acclaimed multimedia artist Barry McGee. Throughout his career, McGee has recorded the conspiratorial energy and daring acts of street art, a practice fundamental to his work in painting, drawing, zines, and installation. Reproduction provides unique insight into the process of a major American artist and is a testament to the immense amount of visual information McGee has absorbed throughout his career.
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.
Give the Gift of Inspiration
The Photography Workshop Book Series
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. Whether showcasing Richard Misrach on landscape photography and meaning; Graciela Iturbide on how to employ a deeply personal vision while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds; or Dawoud Bey on photographing people and communities, 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.
Inspire young readers with three special books that explore the magic of photography. Eyes Open, compiled by Susan Meiselas, is a sourcebook of photography ideas and prompts for children to engage with the world through the camera. Seeing Things serves 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.
For the Armchair Traveler
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. “This book is a culmination of literally my first idea as a photographer, ” Templeton reflects in an interview from the book. “which was to document this culture that I’m part of.”
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locations in the western United States where the earlier couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.
Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures
The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her idyllic images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Made between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.
Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light
Since the 1970s, Alex Webb has distilled gesture, light, and color into layered compositions. First published by Aperture in 2011 and newly reprinted, The Suffering of Light touches on multiple genres across Webb’s work, charting the expansive career of the acclaimed photographer. “Not a typical documentary photographer or photojournalist, I’ve worked essentially as a street photographer, exploring the world with the camera, allowing the rhythm and the life of the street to guide and inform the work,” Webb writes in the introduction to the volume. “For me, everything comes, first and foremost, from the street.”
For the Collector
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z, Limited-Edition Book and Print Set
In Dark Room A–Z, Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind a single, expansive body of work at a pivotal moment in his career. Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. Dark Room A–Z offers a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. This unique, signed edition of the volume features a clamshell box and limited-edition print by the artist.
Diana Markosian: Father, Limited-Edition Book and Print Set
Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together a mix of documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera,Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father. The volume is a follow-up to Markosian’s first book, Santa Barbara, in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement.
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.
August Sander: People of the 20th Century
A landmark in the history of modern art, People of the 20th Century presents the fullest expression of August Sander’s lifelong work: a monumental endeavor to amass an archive of twentieth-century humanity through a cross-section of German culture. In the 1920s, Sander began to photograph subjects from all walks of life, documenting bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families. Sander’s photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the world wars. People of the 20th Century brings together this long out-of-print compendium in an all-in-one volume featuring over six hundred photographs—the most comprehensive iteration of Sander’s still-essential vision.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.