The 6 Best Photography Books of 2024
Michael Famighetti is editor in chief of Aperture.
In an era defined by an endless scroll of transient images, the artistic value of photographs can feel called into question. But the photo book form offers a persuasive argument for why they matter: When you flip through the pages of a successful one, you’re offered an irresistible window into personal experience, vexing social questions, and different pockets of the world. They are lovingly produced, with careful attention to design, printing, and materials—creating a transformative experience that only a printed object can provide.
Each year, publishers, both large and independent, produce a vast range of titles, and most of them cross my desk. Here, the six that inspired me most.
1
Rosalind Fox Solomon, A Woman I Once Knew
For decades, Rosalind Fox Solomon has made riveting images that render the everyday with startling clarity, subtle strangeness, and bottomless curiosity. She’s now 94, and her new book is a collection of self-portraits, mostly nudes, with brief texts from her throughout. The result is a vigorous reflection on the body, aging, and the passage of time that is by turns bold and moving—and punctuated with a dose of humor.
2
Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Lines and Bodies
Published alongside a much-lauded exhibition in Paris, Lines and Bodies is an exquisite book that charts the life and photography of this influential photographer, celebrated for his formal studies of ancient Japanese architecture. (These images make the case that the roots of modern design can be traced back to the early 17th century.) Ishimoto, though, spent much of his life living in Chicago, photographing the city’s residents and built environment with staggering precision.
3
Tina Barney, Family Ties
Tina Barney’s large-scale color photographs offer a master class in portraiture and mise-en-scène. Known for studied depictions of her own privileged family in New England, Barney’s images reside somewhere between documentary and fiction. Her emphasis on coded style, saturated color, and social mannerisms has inspired a wide group of creators, from photographers to designers to stylists—this book illuminates her best work, which resides in museums, in books, and on mood boards around the world.
4
Grace Wales Bonner, Dream in the Rhythm
For their “artist’s choice” series, MoMA invites contemporary artists to curate modestly scaled exhibitions of works from their collection. The results are usually associative, reflecting an artist’s thought process and eclectic interests. When the museum recently invited the fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner to dip into their collection, she assembled pieces by Terry Adkins, Betye Saar, and David Hammons, among others, threading works from the African diaspora and elsewhere. If you missed the show, the related book is the next best thing—where image and text are sequenced together with the rhythms of a perfect poem.
5
Joy Gregory (ed.), Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s-90s Britain
Recent years have seen researchers and institutions turn their resources and attention toward artists who have not yet been adequately studied, exhibited, or understood. We are fortunate to live in a moment when past omissions are being corrected and recuperative histories are being told with care. An excellent recent example is Shining Lights, a deeply researched and illustrated anthology of Black women photographers in the UK that is sure to become a key reference.
6
Abdulhamid Kircher, Rotting from Within
The photographic diary is a mainstay of bookmaking, with Nan Goldin’s 1986 The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as the apex of the form. Every so often a project comes along that is fueled by a similar visceral propulsion. Kircher’s debut monograph, Rotting from Within, is an odyssey of familial trauma, a reckoning with the author’s estranged father, and a project that reveals how making pictures is a both a way to tell a personal story and a means of survival.
