PhotoBook Awards
Announcing the Winners of the 2026 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 2026 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—an annual celebration of the vibrant field of photobook publishing. A final jury met in Paris on November 12 to select this year’s winners. The jury comprised Justine Kurland, photographer; Pablo Larios, writer and senior editor, Artforum; Chiara Bardelli Nonino, features director, Harper’s Bazaar Italia; Lou Stoppard, writer, critic, and curator; and Ferdinando Verderi, creative director.
“We were drawn to books that introduce a new approach within each of their respective categories, and that was a guiding principle in determining the final selections,” says juror Ferdinando Verderi. “Each of these four titles expands the creative possibilities of the medium, pushing photography in new directions and opening new conversations of what the photobook can be.”
This year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards received a record number of books from fifty-six countries around the world, including standout entries from Armenia, Iran, Morocco, Venezuela, and more. On September 22–24, the 2026 shortlist jury met in New York for three concentrated days of review and deliberation by an international team: Alejandro Cartagena, artist; Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, director of design, Judd Foundation; Michael Famighetti, editor in chief, Aperture; Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo; and Anshika Varma, curator and founder, Offset Projects.
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A presentation of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2026 PhotoBook Awards, including the winners, is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 15 and will travel to Dublin at PhotoIreland, in December 2026, and other venues to be announced.
Below, read about this year’s winning titles.
Photography Catalog of the Year
L Is for Look: Children’s Photobooks, Edited by Anne Lacoste and Rose Durr
Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany. Design by Ina Kwon and Helmut Völter
L Is for Look illuminates the vibrant but previously underexplored field of children’s photobooks. Featuring more than one hundred global examples, from the 1930s through the present, this catalog is organized thematically by editorial approach and concept: the pedagogical, designed to instruct toddlers on vocabulary or the alphabet or promote an understanding of geometric shapes and forms; fictional storytelling paired with photographs, creating tensions between invented narratives and depictions of reality; animals, often anthropomorphized and conversing; and “photographism,” the interaction of photography, graphic design, and other media. “This book is a thoroughly researched and visually compelling catalog documenting the intersection of photography and childhood,” says juror Chiara Bardelli Nonino, “from the emergence of image-based teaching methods to more experimental artistic endeavors.” The books assembled here no doubt captured the imaginations of young people when they were first published, just as this compendium, with its delightful array of visual pleasures—and rich contextual research—will be equally illuminating for readers of all ages today.
© Late Estate of Broomberg and Chanarin
First PhotoBook
Notation(s) by Moeko Ishiguro
Self-published, Tokyo. Design by Moeko Ishiguro
Moeko Ishiguro’s self-published debut feels less like a book than an intricate sculpture, dispensing as it does with traditional pagination in favor of folds, overlaps, and shifting layers that must be physically negotiated by the reader. The photographs—wryly observed and uncannily seductive shots of concrete planters, litter, and other mundane phenomena—are revealed through a process of peeling back layers of paper with notations, making each image appear discovered rather than simply turned to. Around the height and width of a smartphone, this book offers a brilliant alternative to passive scrolling, asking readers to spend time with images that refuse to surrender their core unknowability. “This book questions what it means to look and to see,” says Lou Stoppard. “It is a project that challenges the traditions of photobook-making and justifies itself as a book—it’s not a project that can be anything else.”
Courtesy the artist
PhotoBook of the Year
Passports, 2012–2025 by Keisha Scarville
MACK, London. Design by Keisha Scarville and Morgan Crowcroft-Brown
Since 2012, Keisha Scarville has been reworking an ID photo from her father’s first passport, taken when he was sixteen years old and living in Guyana. She has embellished each reproduction of the photo with daubs of paint or little beads or collaged images from magazines, amassing a collection of three hundred unique artworks. Sometimes her father has red skin; sometimes he’s surrounded by black stars. Tears of yellow ribbons fall from his eyes, or abstract masks obscure his face altogether. The tactile variations layered over the ID photo causes “an irrepressible urge to touch,” writes Tina M. Campt in Passports, a book that meditates on the love between a father and a daughter, and the ambiguous relationship between homeland and diaspora. “Scarville’s book explores how images hold histories, and how one can use photography to imagine a world they want to live in,” notes juror Justine Kurland. Scaled to the size of a novel and studded with ruminative lines from a dialogue with Scarville’s father, Passports, which gestures to the collages and painterly techniques of Lorna Simpson, Chris Ofili, and Kerry James Marshall, is an indelible photo-essay about the meaning of kinship.
Courtesy the artist and MACK
Jurors’ Special Mention
Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences by Sara Bennett
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. Design by Teun van der Heijden and Heijdens Karwei
Following a career as a public defender, Sara Bennett spent over a decade photographing women convicted of violent crimes. Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences combines Bennett’s portraits of the women she met and collaborated with—spanning their lives inside prison walls to their reentry into the outside world—with personal ephemera like letters, polaroids, and drawings to weave a layered story of humanity. Each portrait is paired with a handwritten response to the question “When you see this photo . . . what does it make you think?” bearing witness to their experiences from within a cell to their reconciliation with feelings of regret and forgiveness. “The tenderness, poetry, and complexity of what Bennett documents, together with the degree of political commitment and personal devotion, reveals photography’s ability to move the dial on sociopolitical discussions,” says juror Pablo Larios. Shining a compassionate light on an often underrepresented population within the discourse surrounding mass incarceration, Bennett invites us to question the justice system as we know it.
Courtesy the artist
An exhibition of 2026 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo through November 15 and will travel to PhotoIreland, Dublin, in December 2026 and other venues to be announced.
