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35 Photobooks Perfect for Holiday Gifting
Legendary artists. Must-read essay books. Exclusive editions. 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 to monographs by today’s leading artists and must-have classic photobooks, plus 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.
Pioneering Voices
In A Reprise, David Alekhuogie remixes Walker Evans’s photographs of African art, provoking timely questions about authorship and authenticity. In 1935, Walker Evans photographed hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alekhuogie investigates Evans’s photographs, provocatively remixing them into vibrant collages, and confronting the legacy of authorship behind Western perceptions of African art. Drawing upon the musical concept of the reprise—a performance of repetition—Alekhuogie stakes a claim to restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.
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.”
Collect a limited edition of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours featuring a signed print by the artist and a copy of the volume.
Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules
Ground Rules in the first bilingual survey by one of Mexico’s most innovative and fearless photographic artists. Celebrated for his photobooks Carpoolers (2014) and A Small Guide to Homeownership (2020), Cartagena is known for his formally engaging and socially incisive images that span the politics of the US-Mexico border, suburban sprawl, and the increasing wealth disparities in North America. Ground Rules emphasizes Cartagena’s serial-based approach and innovative production of artists’ books, and deploys an array of photographic formats, from documentary and collage to the appropriation of vernacular photographs and AI-generated imagery—all unified by a commitment to addressing life in Mexico today with humor and pathos.
Collect a limited edition of Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules featuring two prints by the artist and a signed copy of the volume.
Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real
Wish This Was Real is the definitive early-career survey by one of the most acclaimed photographic artists working today. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion—including his iconic covers of Vogue magazine and his photography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition catalog—Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Offering new perspectives by leading writers on his long-standing themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, Wish This Was Real shows how photography can be rooted in a collective past while evoking imagined futures.
Collect a limited edition of Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real featuring three metallic cover volumes presented with two posters in custom deluxe folder.
Coreen Simpson—photographer, writer, jeweler—has done it all. Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is a comprehensive survey of a singular, creative force who interweaves photography, design, and explorations of identity. Working for publications such as Essence, Unique New York, and The Village Voice, from the late 1970s onward, Simpson covered New York’s art and fashion scenes, producing portraits of a wide range of Black artists, literary figures, and celebrities. Her iconic jewelry, the Black Cameo, has been worn by everyone from the model Iman to civil-rights leader Rosa Parks. This long-awaited volume, Simpson’s first, features her celebrated B-Boys series—portraits of young people coming of age during the early years of hip-hop—as well as her experiments with collage and other formal interventions.
Collect a limited-edition print from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph.
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter
The Heart of the Matter brings critical insights into the mind and eye of Carrie Mae Weems, a touchstone artist renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. The volume traces a spiritual and personal journey through Weems’s career, gathering together her landmark bodies of work from Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) to Preach (2024), her most recent series on the Black church, alongside a series of essays and contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.
Words & Pictures
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 this year’s “Liberated Threads” issue guest edited by Tanisha C. Ford—among them Wolfgang Tillmans, Tilda Swinton, Alec Soth, Deana Lawson, Sarah Lewis, and Wendy Red Star, making the magazine essential reading for anyone interested in photography and contemporary culture.
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 Vik Muniz on seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways; 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.
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.
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 189 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 combating racial stereotypes. This volume is the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.
At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira
Throughout his decades-long career, Takuma Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). At the Limits of the Gaze collects Nakahira’s writings in English for the first time, bringing together boundary-pushing essays that challenge the expressive limits of photography. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”
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.
On the Road
Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs—A Chronological Album
Well known for his luminous photographs of landscapes and suburban housing, Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all his work. A decade after the book’s first publication, this revised and expanded edition of Intimate Distance charts Hido’s career with ten years of new photographs. From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this collection reveals how Hido’s unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.
Justine Kurland: Highway Kind (2021 Edition)
Justine Kurland’s Highway Kind contrasts the fantasy of the American dream with the nation’s reality. In the early 2000s, Kurland and her young son, Casper, traveled in their customized van through the United States. Balancing her life as an artist and mother, Kurland reveals in her photographs her fascinations with the road, the western frontier, escapism, and ways of living outside mainstream values. Casper’s interests—particularly in trains and later cars—and the people he befriends along the way weave throughout Kurland’s images. From images of open vistas and epic landscapes to depictions of out-of-the-way communities and subcultures, Kurland’s work is equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian.
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 2024 film of the same name starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy.
Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast
In Atlantic Coast, Anastasia Samoylova puts her distinctive mark on the American road trip, adding a new chapter to a storied lineage of photographers. In 1954, American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document the historic US Route 1, already predicting seismic changes to small towns and major cities along the route brought by the rapidly expanding Interstate Highway System. Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along Route 1, Samoylova retraces Abbott’s trip seventy years later, in reverse—beginning in her home state of Florida and ending in Maine. In color and black and white, Samoylova’s photographs explore the enduring impact of Route 1 as a corridor of commerce, migration, and myth, revealing how the American landscape continues to be shaped by infrastructure, ideology, and illusion.
Collect a limited-edition print from Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast.
Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places, The Complete Works
Stephen Shore’s photographs of the American vernacular landscape have influenced not only generations of photographers but the medium at large. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered his unarticulated vision of America via the highway and camera. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, inaugurating what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years. In 1982, Aperture published Shore’s first monograph, the now-legendary Uncommon Places. Since then, this formative work has continued to be expanded on and reissued, including in The Complete Works (2015) and Selected Works, 1973–1981 (2017), which features previously unseen images from the series.
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 community 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 notes, “which was to document this culture that I’m part of.”
Collect a limited edition of Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed featuring a hand-painted print by the artist and slipcase edition of the volume.
Contemporary Classics
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.
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.
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 the 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.
Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Richard Misrach’s images offer a timely meditation on the profound impact of global trade on the environment. In 2021, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its height, seemed to nearly halt the networks of international trade, Misrach began taking thousands of photographs of cargo ships as they moved to and from the Port of Oakland, California. Cargo presents the acclaimed photographer’s sublime meditation on the often-unseen patterns of global trade and commerce.
Collect a limited-edition print from Richard Misrach: Cargo.
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.
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.
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.
Aperture Legends
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. In 2024, to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth, Aperture reissued The Americans, alongside a special centennial edition with a slipcase and featuring a booklet showcasing Frank’s early films.
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.
For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. First published by Aperture in 2005, this twentieth anniversary reissue brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, Small Wars, and 29 Palms—alongside a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later. Taken together, this trilogy presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war.
First published by Aperture in 1988, Sally Mann’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is an intimate exploration of the complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann made portraits that capture the excitement and social possibilities of a tender age—while not shying away from alluding to experiences of abuse, poverty, or young pregnancy—and the girls in her photographs return the camera’s gaze with equanimity. “The true subject of At Twelve is time itself,” writes Rebecca Bengal, “perceptions of time and youth, about being a girl, versus a woman, about the chasm between those two phases, and what it means to cross them, and what selves are lost and what selves are inhabited in that process.” This reissue of At Twelve features new scans and separations from Mann’s 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a quality true to the original edition.
Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979
Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In Nicaragua, Meiselas forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from films by the artist in which she interviews and collaborates with the people she photographed and local communities. By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”
Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition
Sixty years after its publication, Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition continues to offer unmatched insight into the mind, life, and work of a twentieth-century icon. Originally issued as a hardcover volume in 1965, The Flame of Recognition holds the distinction of being the very first title in Aperture’s publishing history. The volume was reissued in 2015 on its fiftieth anniversary, and ten years later in this new paperback edition. The volume brings together a selection of Weston’s iconic images—from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still lifes—alongside excerpts of his writing from his now-famed Daybooks and letters, channeling the photographer’s creativity and, in his own words, “present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty . . . without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique.” Additional contributions to the book include two of Weston’s sons, Brett and Cole, and other Aperture cofounders, Dody Weston Thompson and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist.
Exclusive Editions
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, Limited Edition
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, and this limited edition features a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print on the cover. “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.”
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.
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. 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.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.
