By Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy
In selecting our favorite photography books, we gravitate to art that explores the nature and depths of human connection, whether to each other, the land, the stars or the sea. Expressing a range of sentiments through remarkable photography, we are excited to share Our Favorite Photobooks of 2024. These tomes invite readers to immerse into humane and engaging worlds that enhance our appreciation for significant relationships or guide us to new places and considerations of time and memory. In the brief reviews that follow, we hope that you make some eye opening discoveries!
This year, we present eight new monographs and two retrospectives. Listings are in alphabetical order by author’s last name and include a link in blue to a site where the book can be purchased. We also provide links to the notable publications from our comparative reviews throughout 2024.
Family Ties
by Tina Barney
Aperture, $65.00
2024
https://aperture.org/books/tina-barney-family-ties/
The American aspiration to wealth has long fed a fascination with Tina Barney’s exclusive views into the world of society’s elites. Her intimate yet emotionally detached portraits are the subject of a retrospective exhibit at Jeu de Paume in Paris (through January 2025) and this catalog. Spanning 1977 – 2019, “Family Ties” is a longitudinal view that feels anthropologic, as Barney re-visits many of her subjects over time and expands her oeuvre to Europe and China. The book trades on her typically oversized, immersive exhibit photographs for a welcome intimacy and opportunity for review, including magnified details of certain images. Hovering between truth and fiction, her spatially inventive settings detail an opulence reminiscent of Golden Age Dutch painting, providing critical context for her subjects. Her view camera, too, is part of a deliberate “distancing protocol,” conveying a formality that helps her focus on relationships between generations. The way she divulges expression, gesture, posture and clothing elucidate the cultural heritage of haute-bourgeoisie customs and rituals. Barney mesmerizes with portraits she chocks full of clues, but no reckonings, and enough magical ambiguity for us to supply our own meanings.
Duet on the Apple Blossom
By Barbara Bosworth and Jem Southam
2024
Dust Collective, $85
To order: https://www.dustcollective.net/store/p/duet-on-the-apple-blossom
If you are unfamiliar with the Dust Collective then you are missing out on some beautiful book offerings. Managed by book designer Emily Sheffer and photographer Barbara Bosworth, this imprint makes hand-crafted low print run books that are exquisite. But hurry, as they sell out fast, yet constantly offer new and intriguing titles. One of the recent publications, Duet on the Apple Blossom, is an intimate hard cover book with a lay flat binding of photographs made as a dialog of sorts between Bosworth and UK based photographer Jem Southam. Each photographed an apple tree, one in New England and one in England, starting on a winter solstice for a full year. This journey through the seasons reveals a reverence for trees through intricately detailed images and muted palettes. Connections between humanity and nature across continents and oceans can be found in the carefully rendered details of these trees through the eyes of two deliberate and thoughtful photographers.
Thinking Like an Island
Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese
Overlapse $65.00
https://www.overlapse.com/catalog/thinking-like-an-island/
A sculptural and interactive compact album of four books takes readers on a journey to an isolated island in the Mediterranean Sea with a population of under one hundred. Thinking Like an Island allows readers to alter the sequence by choosing to open or close the four flaps, one which opens left, one to the right, and the final two flip up or down. The photographs reveal a location of stark beauty, and the words indicate a profound sense of isolation that is by turns unnerving and comforting. The small society that lives here form strong bonds with the earth and with each other. The book’s interchangeable sequences impart an enticing sense of a paradise lost and found.
Pictures for Charis
by Kelli Connell
Aperture $65.00
2024
https://aperture.org/books/kelli-connell-pictures-for-charis/
Kelli Connell along with her partner at the time, sculptor Betsy Odom, explored western American states in search of the places that Edward Weston and Charis Wilson travelled as they worked on their book California and the West. Connell recreated pictures in the same locations where Weston made landscape pictures and portraits of Wilson. Pictures for Charis is, however, more than a photography book. Like Weston’s Daybooks, it is also a travelogue and diary. This memoir of queer life on the road encourages readers to take a deep dive into issues around the artist and muse relationship, the mundane and challenging aspects of traveling with a lot of photography gear, and the value of following in the footsteps of masters such as Weston and Wilson. A final concluding essay by Betsy Odom offers insights into the exposure and emotional weight of being the muse and subject for a long photographic project by an intimate partner.
Model Citizens
by Debi Cornwall
Radius Books, $60.00
2024
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/debi-cornwall-model-citizens?
Model Citizens is Debi Cornwall’s final, most piercing series in her trilogy exploring our current American political and military complex. With stunning alacrity, she intersperses images of American historical museum dioramas that depict conflicts dating from the American Revolution to 9-11 with “crisis” enactments staged with civilian role-players at the US Border Patrol Academy and scenes of people outside Donald Trump’s “Save America” rallies in six cities. The juxtaposition of staging, roleplay and performance is heightened by Cornwall’s purposely akimbo angles and cropped off body parts. Adding to the confusing blurring of distinctions is the book’s design, in which image fragments spill across gutters and page turns. Eerie, big brother excerpts from W.H. Auden’s The Unknown Citizen (1940) further deepens its psychological impact. Cornwall’s study of citizenship is a thoroughly original, engrossing and unforgettable look at, as she puts it, “an American case study into an international phenomenon.”
King, Queen, Knave
by Gregory Halpern
Mack, $70.00
2024
https://www.mackbooks.us/products/king-queen-knave-gregory-halpern?_pos=1&_psq=knave&_ss=e&_v=1.0
Gregory Halpern grew up in Rochester, New York, but left the city as a young man. He returned there over the past twenty years, and photographed the buildings, intersections and neighborhoods of his childhood. Guiding readers through the seasons, Halpern creates a sense of place in King, Queen Knave. As seen through Halpern’s lens, Rochester, an aging industrial rust belt city, is haunted by a white deer throughout the sequence, revealing a sense of nature’s rebound over humanity’s dormant machines and vacant residences. But the portraits of people offer the greatest sense of connection. Recalling the work of Evelyn Hofer and Alec Soth in light, palette and formality, Halpern’s sitters are presented in a straightforward manner with an empathetic eye. The city was the backdrop to his formative years, and Halpern builds tension between the familiarity with the decaying structures that bear the marks of the city’s noble past with a precarious economic future under the skies of dramatic cultural and meteorological shifts through the years.
lost & found
by Michael Joseph
Kehrer Verlag, $65.00
2023
https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/michael-joseph-lost-found
It takes all of two seconds to realize that Michael Joseph’s penetrating images of people from the subculture known as “Travelers” is a profound study in empathy. In close-up, direct-gaze pictures absent of distracting backgrounds, Joseph’s street portraits engage the raw physicality of faces and bodies, disclosing hints of each winding path while honoring carefully guarded mysteries. Bearing expressions of remarkable agency, some accompanied by striking testimonials, each portrait reveals the dichotomies of living in freedom and fear, disconnection and community. Encountering people on the street is a tricky business, making these portraits even more meaningful in their sensitive complexity. Joseph’s portraits attest to the innate dignity of these young, often troubled American kids seeking escape, and in doing so, challenge us to discover another way of seeing ourselves in each other.
The Seraphim
by Jesse Lenz
Charcoal Press
2024 $65.00
https://charcoalpress.com/shop/the-seraphim
There are few things in life more soothing than a sleeping toddler. They can look angelic. The Seraphim, Jesse Lenz’s recently published book opens with such a vision on its cover, but the black and white images within reveal an authenticity of childhood play, and indeed, life on a rural farm that emphasizes a quotidian sense of family and place. An illustrator by trade and a self-taught photographer, Jesse Lenz lives with his family in an Amish area of Ohio. Living close to the land, there is a reverence for nature that permeates these pictures with nary an electronic device to be seen. Morel mushrooms, trees, fields and particularly striking owls are scattered in a rhythmic sequence raising the question, are the children the “seraphim” of the book’s title? Or are the owls who watch over them?
Sons of the Living
by Bryan Schutmaat
2024
Trespasser $85.00
https://trespasser.co/shop/sons-of-the-living
(Note, the book is currently sold out, but a second printing is planned.)
Bryan Shutmaat’s epic tome Sons of the Living carries the reader through views of the American west while introducing them to people and places in charcoal tones of black and white. This large black book boasts a sequence that effectively meanders between landscape, still life, and portraiture presented on a toothy matte paper. Motels, rundown gas stations and industrial sites invoke the harshness of life in remote areas, but the interweaving portraits convey a vulnerability despite the tenacity and grit evident in the faces of his sitters. Peppered throughout are western views of skies, mesas, mountains and highways. At regular intervals in the sequence, readers will encounter pictures made with a slow shutter that illuminate the undulations of carved highways in the land through the headlights of passing cars. Shutmaat’s use of atmosphere and light at edge of night endows this book with a profound sense of longing for the open road that is both alluring and haunting.
Another America
Images created with AI by Phillip Toledano, Texts by John Kenney
L’Artiere, $60.00
2024
https://www.lartiere.com/en/prodotto/another-america-phillip-toledano/
Another America riffs on the awareness that facts and truth have become a choice in our country today and leverages that regrettable knowledge to create a history that never existed. Toledano employs artificial intelligence to create lush compositions with visually convincing details that, taken as a whole, are patently absurd. Staging bizarre B&W and color scenes in a 1940-50’s metropolis resembling New York City, he toggles between the bubbly beauty of dreams and ghoulish apocalyptic nightmares. Brief, pithy parodies by the best-selling author John Kenney accompany many scenarios, heightening the sense of irony while infusing comic relief. The alchemy of Toledano’s visual conceptions and Kenney’s spot-on humor temper very real concerns over the potential abuses of artificial intelligence. Imaginative, clever and gorgeously crafted, Another America manages the tricky task of reassuring us that the beloved concept of truth may not be doomed by this latest technological tool.
BOOKS WE REVIEWED IN 2024
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