This year we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of our renowned listing of the year's best photobooks. To mark this milestone, we've decided to do something a bit different. We've asked 88 internationally recognized luminaries from the photobook world to choose their favorite photobook of the year. Their favorite book could be unforgettable for any number of reasons but the chosen books affected our selectors on a very personal level. These books led each of our contributors to conclude, "If there's one book not to miss this year, it would be this!"
Each day for the following two weeks we will publish additional titles selected by our distinguished group of photobook lovers. Subscribe to PhotoBookDaily to get our email announcements in advance!
Check back daily to see a new group of favorite books!
Susan Burnstine's Favorite
Photographs by Meghann Riepenhoff
"During a time when the natural world is rapidly changing and regularly vanishing before our eyes, the impermanent nature of Meghan Riepenhoff’s large-scale, camera-less cyanotypes made in collaboration with waves, wind, rain and sediment, precipitation and materials in the landscape strikes a deep chord."
Laura Moya's Favorite
Photographs by Alain Laboile
"Transported to his corner of village life in France, I get to hang out with his children who make their home and gardens a playground of artful frolic: finding deer antlers! Climbing hay bales! Wearing a tutu instead of clothing! Drawing, painting, running with dogs, and no doubt falling asleep exhausted but happy at day’s end."
Tim Carpenter's Favorite
Photographs by John Gossage
"The pictures are ten years old, and not “timeless” exactly but rather not of a time. Topicality is never much of an element in Gossage anyway because his pictures don’t rely on subject matter for meaning; rather they are new things in the world that engender their own authority."
Andrew Phelps's Favorite
Photographs by Simon Brugner
"He combines historical and found images along with his own in what feels like a seamless collection somewhere between a medical examiner's notebook, a junkie's scrapbook, and a police detective's case file. Brugner dives into some of the original caves — which can still be visited, assuming one knows where to look — hidden away behind and below farmhouses in the mountains of Austria."
Aline Smithson's Favorite
Photographs by Oliver Wasow
"I jumped in with great curiosity and came away thinking about the potential of individuals–something I always consider when taking a portrait, and it appears that Mr. Wasow does the same–elevating his subjects, whether he likes them or not, to a place that ranges between beautiful, poignant, and barely tolerable."
Carolyn Drake's Favorite
Edited by Russet Lederman, Olga Yatskevich and Michael Lang
"Women artists, including myself, sometimes cringe at the idea of being pigeonholed into women-only projects. Perhaps it's the sense that being isolated in this category keeps you at the fringe. Or perhaps it's the wish not to confine the reading of your work to a gender-based lens. But books such as this remind me that “the majors” are often driven by a system of judgment that idealizes the prejudices of the marketplace, and that the fringe is actually a compelling place to be."