PhotoBook Awards
Announcing the Winners of the 2024 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 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—an annual celebration of the photobook’s enduring role within the narrative of photography. The awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year. A final jury met in Paris on November 7, 2024, to select this year’s winners. The jury included Kim Bourus, founder and director, Higher Pictures; Azu Nwagbogu, curator; Lisa Sutcliffe, curator, Department of Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jean-Baptiste Talbourdet-Napoleone, creative director, M le magazine du Monde; and Mame-Diarra Niang, artist.
This year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards received 940 books from fifty-nine countries around the world, including standout entries from Argentina, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. On September 18–20, the shortlist jury met in New York for three concentrated days of review and deliberation, narrowing the entries down to a shortlist of thirty-five titles. The shortlist jury consisted of the following international team: Negar Azimi, editor in chief, Bidoun; Jacqueline Bates, photography director, Opinion, New York Times; Michael Famighetti, editor in chief, Aperture; Nontsikelelo Mutiti, director of graduate studies in graphic design, Yale School of Art; and Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo.
A presentation of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2024 PhotoBook Awards is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 10 and will be on view at Printed Matter in New York, January through February 2025, and then to the Leipzig Photobook Festival, in Germany, in March, with additional venues to be announced.
Below, read about this year’s winning titles.
Photography Catalog of the Year
Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain
Joy Gregory, editor, and Taous Dahmani, associate editor
Autograph and MACK, London, Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown
Shining Lights, edited by artist Joy Gregory and Taous Dahmani, is a restorative anthology that charts Black women’s essential but often overlooked contributions to Britain’s photography scene in the late twentieth century. Extensively researched and vividly illustrated, the book showcases a tremendous range of visual materials, including photographs from over fifty artists, archival images, documents, and more. This constellation of visual resources is carefully organized by theme—self-portraiture, family, and community activism—and includes scholarly essays, personal reflection, a roundtable discussion, and a detailed timeline. “I love the use of the materials; there’s a friendliness to the cardstock cover, and beautiful neon spine that carries through in how certain elements get highlighted within the running text,” remarks juror Nontsikelelo Mutiti. “For a project so comprehensive, it feels very generous and inviting. I’m so glad that this project exists.”
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned by Autograph. Courtesy the artist
First PhotoBook Award
Born from the Same Root by Tsai Ting Bang
Self-published, Taipei, Design by Tsai Ting Bang and Shū Hé Zhì
Tsai Ting Bang’s Born from the Same Root forms a moving portrait of the artist’s older brother Hsien and reflects upon their shared family trauma. The boys grew up in separate homes, and as a young adult, Hsien began suffering from mental health issues and cut contact with the family for three years. Tsai uses the book to explore the estrangement, misrecognitions, and mystery at the heart of their bond, interweaving archival family photographs and his own tender portraits of Hsien and his day-to-day life. “The book tells a simple but powerful story and is full of lovely, unguarded moments,” says juror Anna Planas. The intimately sized volume involves a clever bipartite structure, forcing the reader to turn the pages of the book in opposition, as one might open a gatefold. Per Planas, “we loved how the design thoughtfully reflects both the distance and closeness of the brothers’ relationship.”
PhotoBook of the Year
Disruptions by Taysir Batniji
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London, Design by Loose Joints Studio
Opaque, yet frighteningly urgent, Taysir Batniji’s Disruptions compiles pixelated screenshots from WhatsApp video calls to his family in Gaza, taken between April 2015 and June 2017. The fragmentary aesthetic of fragile phone connections offers a metaphor for the breakdown of the psyche in the midst of daily life compromised by conflict. This compact softcover houses about seventy images, which are accompanied by a poignant text from photo-historian Taous R. Dahmani. Amid warped portraits and pixelated landscapes, the viewer is confronted with bursts of vibrant color signaling failed communication, broken only by solid pages of green that display the date of each call. Disruptions is an oblique but essential reflection on life under occupation. “As Gaza is obliterated in real time, Batniji’s Disruptions is a timely reminder of the precarious nature of human life,” remarks juror Negar Azimi.
Jurors’ Special Mention
i am (not) your mother by Hady Barry
Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York, Design by Hady Barry
In 2002, amid a civil war, Hady Barry and her family fled Côte d’Ivoire to resettle in Senegal. As her mother left for the United States to seek asylum, and her father was mostly absent, traveling for work, Barry, age thirteen, found herself taking care of three younger siblings. Her self-published photobook i am (not) your mother interlaces portraits and documentary photographs, archival imagery, journal entries, and transcribed conversations, unpacking the trauma of an adolescence cut short by the tremendous responsibilities of parenting. The book’s imagery alternates between the vivid, nostalgic palette of rediscovered family photographs and the black-and-white of Barry’s own austere pictures of nature, people, and interiors. “There’s this parallel with her personal story and the personal way she made the publication,” says juror Anna Planas. The book’s smaller 6 ½-by-9 inch format and use of one-of-a-kind Risograph printing, befit the intimacy and rawness of Barry’s painful subject matter.
An exhibition of 2024 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo through November 10, and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City in January 2025.
