Aperture's 2018 Holiday Gift Guide

This year, Aperture has published books by Diane Arbus, Judy Glickman Lauder, Deana Lawson, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others. Aperture publications have explored how photographers have chronicled their relationships to family, the garden’s rich history in photography, and more. From iconic monographs by master photographers, to groundbreaking, never-before-published work, we offer titles for everyone on your holiday list.

For the Collector

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs
In 1971, Artforum featured the work of a photographer for the very first time. On its cover and in a six-page spread, it announced the publication of a portfolio by Diane Arbus, and in the words of the magazine’s editor Philip Leider, “the portfolio changed everything . . . one could no longer deny [photography’s] status as art.” The only instance in which Arbus curated her own work for the public, Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs is a stunning large-format reproduction of the artist’s iconic portfolio.

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal
Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal presents a survey of the artist’s prolific and extraordinary interdisciplinary career, with a particular focus on his ability to critically dissect the flow of images that comprise American culture. His work’s powerful themes include race, gender, and the commodification of identity through popular media, sports, and advertising.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Limited Edition)
One of the most compelling artists of her generation, Deana Lawson’s photographs portray the personal and the powerful. This special, signed, limited-edition version of her highly anticipated first volume, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, features rose-gold gilded pages, a luxurious slipcase, and a custom tipped-on C-print of Lawson’s iconic portrait The Garden (2015).

Family Matters

Aperture 233, “Family”
The Winter issue of Aperture, “Family,” considers how artists and photographers have chronicled their relationships to their families and chosen communities, and takes an expanded view of what families can be.

Immediate Family by Sally Mann
First published in 1992, Immediate Family has been lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time. Sally Mann’s extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children reveal universal truths—such as the eternal struggle between a child’s simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy—while embodying the individuality of her own family.

Amelia and the Animals
Since the age of three, Amelia has been the muse of her mother, Robin Schwartz. Amelia and the Animals is Schwartz’s second monograph featuring collaborative photographs of Amelia among the animals. The resulting photographs serve as a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and as evidence of a shared mother-daughter journey through their invented worlds.

Remarkable Storytelling

Judy Glickman Lauder: Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception
Over the past thirty years Glickman Lauder has photographed the intensity of the death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Beyond the Shadows responds to the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust, while telling the uplifting story of how the citizens and leadership of Denmark, under occupation and at tremendous risk, defied the Third Reich to transport the country’s Jews to safety in Sweden.

Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements
Chloe Dewe Mathews spent five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In this resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. Caspian: The Elements explores the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes.

As it may be
Magnum photographer Bieke Depoorter has traveled to Egypt regularly since the beginning of the revolution in 2011, making intimate pictures of Egyptian families. In 2017, she revisited the country with the first draft of this book, inviting others to write comments directly onto the photographs. In As it may be, contrasting views on country, religion, society, and photography arise between people who would otherwise never cross paths.

For the Adventurous

The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip
The road trip is an enduring symbol in American culture that has spurred some of the most important photographs in the history of the medium—from images by Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Berenice Abbott to Robert Frank’s 1950s odyssey The Americans. From Stephen Shore to Ryan McGinley, hundreds of other photographers have continued the tradition. The Open Road is the first book to explore the photographic road trip as a genre.

Highway Kind
For several years Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, and her young son, Casper, traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer. Her life as an artist and mother is finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Kurland’s deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and living outside mainstream values pervades this stunning and important body of work.

A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols
A Wild Life is the story of National Geographic photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols, told with passion and insight by author and photo-editor Melissa Harris. Nichols’s story combines a life of adventure with a conviction about how we can redeem the human race by protecting our wildlife.

For the Foodie

Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography
From basic sustenance to savory repasts, food awakens the senses and touches both private and public life. This is the first book to cover food photography’s rich history—not only in fine-art photography, but also in crossover genres such as commercial and scientific photography and photojournalism.

The Photographer’s Cookbook
In the late 1970s, the George Eastman Museum approached a group of photographers to ask for their favorite recipes and food-related photographs, in pursuit of publishing a cookbook. Forty years later, this extensive and distinctive archive of recipes and photographs was published in The Photographer’s Cookbook for the first time. And it does not disappoint: from Ansel Adams’s Poached Eggs in Beer to William Eggleston’s Cheese Grits Casserole, the book provides a time capsule of the era’s contemporary photographers as well as a fascinating look at how they depicted food, family, and home.

For the Outdoor Enthusiast

The Photographer in the Garden
From famous locations to the simplest home vegetable gardens, from worlds imagined by artists to vintage family snapshots, The Photographer in the Garden is the first volume to trace the garden’s rich history in photography, examining the complex relationship between photography and nature.

Picturing America’s National Parks
Picturing America’s National Parks brings together some of the finest landscape photography from America’s most magnificent and sacred environments. Photography has played an integral role in both the formation of the National Parks and in the depiction of America itself. This book traces that history and delights readers with stunning photographs of the best American landscapes.

John Chiara: California
This is California as you haven’t seen it before. John Chiara creates his own cameras and chemical processes, in order to make unique, luminous images along the Pacific Coast. This highly anticipated first book includes the surreal and thrilling landscape and architectural images for which Chiara has become known.

For the Child at Heart

Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs
Aimed at children between the ages of nine and twelve, Seeing Things is a wonderful introduction to photography that asks how photographers transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. In this book, acclaimed and beloved photographer Joel Meyerowitz takes readers on a journey through the power and magic of photography.

Go Photo!
Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations, get messy with materials, and engage with the world in new and exciting ways.

The Martin Parr Coloring Book!
Photography and pop-culture buffs, get out your crayons and colored pencils! Martin Parr’s colorful, tongue-in-cheek photographs—his comedy of contemporary manners—have been transformed into a coloring book, featuring affectionate homages to bad fashion choices, messy foods, trashy souvenirs, and the tourists who buy them.

For the Design Savvy

Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City
For the past thirty years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape—from studies of architectural maquettes to the extraction and use of natural materials.

Self Publish, Be Happy: A DIY Photobook Manual and Manifesto
An economic and cultural revolution has shaken the photobook world in the past decade: self-publishing. An army of photographers operating as publishers have had an instrumental role in today’s photobook renaissance. This book offers a do-it-yourself manual and a survey of key examples of self-published success stories, as well as a self-publishing manifesto and list of resources.

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo
In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s exploration of the cadences of the everyday has begun to swing further afield. In Halo she expands this inquiry, with photographs of the southern coastal region of Izumo, Japan; images from New Year celebrations in Hebei province, China; and pictures of the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. Kawauchi mesmerizingly knits together cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature, and human ritual.

For the Classic Cat

Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981
Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over a period of five years, Shore scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures—such as Wes Anderson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Taryn Simon—to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Nan Goldin’s visual diary, chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers—collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin’s cutting-edge photography.

Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer
The Internet is awash with cat pictures, but Walter Chandoha’s might be seen as the forefather of them all. His photographs of cats in particular have appeared in the pages of National Geographic and Life magazine. They bear examination not only for their singular charm, but also for Chandoha’s signature look: clean, brightly colored backdrops and high-key “glamour” backlighting of his tiny, fuzzy subjects.

Always Learning

Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present
What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between photographers, esteemed critics, curators, editors, and artists from 1985 to the present day.

Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment
In this Photography Workshop Series book, Mary Ellen Mark—well-known for her pictures’ emotional power—offers her insight on observing the world and capturing dramatic moments that reveal more than the reality at hand. Here, she shares her own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from gaining the trust of the subject and taking pictures that are controlled but unforced, to organizing the frame so that every part contributes toward telling the story.

The Photographer’s Playbook
The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories, and anecdotes, from many of the world’s most talented photographers. Whether you’re looking for exercises to improve your craft—alone or in a group—or you’re interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with the photographic process.