PhotoBook Awards
Announcing the Winners of the 2023 PhotoBook Awards
Celebrating the evolving narrative of the photobook, Aperture and Paris Photo present this year’s winning titles.
Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—the eleventh annual celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. A final jury met in Paris on November 9, 2023, to select this year’s winners. The jury included Laia Abril, artist; Tamara Berghmans, curator, Fotomuseum Antwerpen (FOMU); Alexis Fabry, curator and founder, Toluca Fine Art; Alona Pardo, curator, Barbican; and Mark Sealy, director of Autograph and Professor of Photography Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London.
Berghmans observed that the shared goal of the final jury was to “select photobooks that are relevant today—choosing some books that celebrate the pleasure of looking, and others that offer us deeper insights into the lesser-known histories, or to the deeply personal journeys of an individual photographer.”
An exhibition of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2023 PhotoBook Awards is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 12 and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City, from January through February 2024, and then to international venues, including presentations at the Helsinki Photo Festival and Photo Australia Melbourne, among others.
Below, read about this year’s winning titles.
Photography Catalog of the Year
The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project
Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Nepal Picture Library / photo.circle, Kathmandu, Nepal
The Public Life of Women is an inspirational collection of images, documents, and the profiles of key contributors to feminism and champions of women’s rights in Nepal. Organized by photo.circle, a platform for photography and the force behind Photo Kathmandu, the more than five hundred images included in this volume were drawn from the Nepal Picture Library, a visual archive created with the goal of preserving and exploring the country’s social, cultural, and photographic history. The Public Life of Women was published on the heels of an exhibition of the work that has traveled to New Delhi, Singapore, and, most recently, the 2023 Istanbul Biennial. Shortlist juror Lesley A. Martin calls the book “a compelling, eye-opening document delivered in a compact but satisfying and impactful form. It’s a testament to the power of a carefully cultivated archive activated via the book form.” In words and images, The Public Life of Women is a moving roll call of lives and names—a fierce and consequential preservation of the inspiring stories and contributions of Nepali women who made a difference to their mothers, daughters, sisters, and fellow citizens.
First PhotoBook Award
Tender by Carla Williams
TBW Books, Oakland, California
“This reads and feels like a beautiful and intimate journey realized in book form, evocative of an artist in tender commune with her younger self, by someone who has committed much of their artistic practice to advocating for Black women’s visibility and representational politics,” observes juror Renée Mussai. Tender by Carla Williams reveals a series of images, including private self-portraits of an eighteen-year-old Williams taken during her time studying photography at Princeton University in the mid-1980s and ’90s. The design is modest yet sophisticated, offering an intimate glimpse into a pivotal moment of the artist’s life. The book remains coherent and engrossing in all aspects of the work, from the artist’s motive to its intellectual rhythm communicated through an essay by artist and scholar Mireille Miller-Young that serves as a mediation around Black feminist expression. “Williams conjures a visual alchemy and shifting sensuality from one page to the next—from image to image, consistently imbued with a profound sense of being and becoming, of stillness, fierceness, and desire. This publication is a very generous and special gift,” says Mussai. Tender is gentle yet immensely seductive as a platform for the artist’s coming-of-age, conveying maturity, sensuality, and possibility.
PhotoBook of the Year
The Drawer by Vince Aletti
SPBH Editions, London
The Drawer illustrates the vivid accumulation of photographic ephemera gathered over the years by esteemed photography critic and curator Vince Aletti. “This phenomenal publication offers special insight into one person’s unique commitment to collecting, curating and archiving imagery in public circulation over several decades. Deeply engaging, it represents a bold testament to complex notions of desire and visual pleasure,” states juror Renée Mussai. The seventy-five multi-layered compositions brought together in this book include gallery announcements, magazine tear sheets, newspaper clippings, and other printed materials dating from the 1970s to the present. The pages’ layout references the chance layering and juxtapositions of Aletti’s flat files. Each oversized spread is printed on lush, uncoated paper, unencumbered by text, entwining the worlds of art and fashion with homoerotic candor that feels provocative and daring. The images utilize the entire printed page, as full bleeds from beginning to end. “A visual feast, it is an apt reflection of Aletti’s long-standing career and commitment to art history, inviting readers to an astute mode of looking and seeing which has long nourished his practice as a critic,” says Mussai. The Drawer is an ode to the collector, a personal yet recognizable retelling through the printed page and the lure of the photographic image.
Juror’s Special Mention
Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures
Sandrine Colard, Lannoo Publishers, Tielt, Belgium, and Fotomuseum FOMU, Antwerp, Belgium
Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures takes on the crucial task of reclaiming the colonial visual narratives of the Congo, providing an extensive, multi-layered examination of this complicated photographic history. Published as a companion to an exhibition at FOMU Antwerp, the volume functions as a dialogue between texts by contemporary Congolese writers Sinzo Aanza, In Koli Jean Bofane, and Annie Lulu, and the historical archival photographs, breathing new meaning into images created and received through a biased, colonizing lens. The catalog design takes its inspiration from the minimalism and primary colors utilized by W. E. B. Du Bois in the sociological graphs created for his 1900 Paris World’s Fair “Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique.” This understated approach allows for an elegant and clear visual structure in support of the consequential and pressing historical analysis contained within. Anna Planas called out for special attention the book’s work to “bring together invaluable research conducted across three continents.” In addition to the generous spirit of scholarly collaboration as a means of redress and reconciliation, Planas notes that this is a thorny but important subject, recalling that the jury appreciated its concern with “the role of visual culture and its influence on history, as well as the importance of addressing the colonial roots of photography.”
An exhibition of 2023 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo November 9–12, and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City in January 2024.
Note: Given jurors’ extensive engagement in the scholarship and production of photography books, the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards maintain a strict policy of recusal, in which the juror in question must state their conflict in advance and remove themselves from the discussion of books in which they were directly involved; any such book must be unanimously voted in by the remaining jurors.