By Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy
As the holidays approach, our attention always turns to photobooks. Maybe it’s these dark days that make us want curl up and enter a magical world of images. We also believe that sharing photobooks is a meaningful way to expand conversations with family, friends and you, our readers. In Our Favorite Photobooks of 2025, we have gathered a variety of volumes organized into a section of monographs arranged alphabetically by author, and a section of retrospectives and exhibition catalogs arranged alphabetically by title. Each of these books has impressed us visually and touched us emotionally. In the synopses that follow, we invite you to find out why and hope you enjoy our selection. As always, we provide links to publishers and distributors and include links to the books we reviewed earlier in the year.
MONOGRAPHS
The Weight of Ash by Ian Bates – In this pensive series, Bates looks at the aftermath of wildfires in stark black and white pictures. While on assignment, Bates began making pictures that were more poetic and ambiguous in the wake of several fires that he covered in northern California and North Dakota. Twisted melted metal or the blisters of paint on the back of a road sign emphasize the vulnerability of human structures. A lone chimney is all that remains of a house, and the corpse of a deer trapped by a fence are just a few of the tragedies that Bates reveals. But most of the pictures are marred landscapes and charred trees- some still ablaze— that are by turns apocalyptic and achingly beautiful. We learn in an essay, that suppressing natural wildfires in the west, and the effects a changing climate can result in wildfires that burn hotter, longer and larger. But the book begins and ends with skies that are filled with smoke that could be read as fog, making the tone of this hard cover book enigmatic and elegiac.
Poem by Caitlin Lorraine Johnson, Published by Deadbeat Club https://deadbeatclubpress.com/products/ian-bates
Constant Bloom by Lucas Foglia is an ambitious project that follows the longest butterfly migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Norway. The Painted Lady Butterfly is remarkably resilient with a large population despite the changes in climate that have depleted the numbers of other butterfly species. Foglia takes readers on a journey across the continents with a mix of landscapes, portraits and the occasional gossamer butterfly making its way across a sea or desert. We learn that they live around five weeks, and leave up to five hundred eggs in their wake. The offspring continue northward on the journey each February then return south in September. As long as the butterflies find wildflowers, they can survive. Foglia sees the migration as a metaphor for human immigration and a warning that we should take care to maintain the ecosystems that support both.
Published by Nazraeli Press https://www.nazraeli.com/complete-catalogue/lucas-foglia-constant-bloom
Emerald Drifters by Cig Harvey crafts light, color, textures, flavors, and her musings into extravagant gulps of life. This alchemy is her unique gift. Unlike her previous books, the premise of this volume is her terror of losing eyesight with age. She exorcizes this fear by harnessing natural elements like the silkiness of water, luminous glow of moonlight, enraged flames, and verdant gardens. Likewise, her interior havens throb with sensuous fabrics, luscious flowers and sumptuous cakes. Harvey often sets her subjects in a darkness that seems to symbolize an uncertain world. Paradoxically, the blackness only serves to deepen color saturation and amplify the radiance of highlights. In a rainbow of sensations, “Emerald Drifters” resists despair with an exuberant feast for our bleak times.
Text by Cig Harvey, Afterword by Ocean Vuong
Published by Phaidon: https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/products/emerald-drifters?_pos=1&_sid=9a9d1df6c&_ss=r
Verdant Land by Kathya Landeros – Reflecting on her family’s journey as immigrant farm laborers from Mexico, Landeros photographed communities in California’s central valley where a vast number of migrants toil to create a better life for their children. As a child, Landeros herself stayed with grandparents in Mexico while her parents labored in the States. This collection of pictures, made over twenty years, is a mix of portraits, landscapes and street scenes that create a sense of home and place. They affirm that the experience and presence of immigrants have had a profound impact on both collective and personal American histories. A family album with notes and vernacular pictures in the back of the book enhance her carefully considered observations.
Published by Dust Collective https://www.dustcollective.net/store/p/verdant-land-by-kathya-maria-landeros
Riverland by Marjolein Martinot – Dutch photographer Marjolein Martinot began taking walks by a nearby river where she was living in the south of France during the pandemic. What began as a way to connect with nature during a difficult time became a visual journal and a means to find comfort despite the isolation we all felt. She discovered a flowing kind of joy along the river banks in the landscape, the occasional animals she encountered, and in connecting with others who were swimming in or sauntering along the river. Her black and white square format pictures are thoughtful and timeless, offering readers a welcome respite to the woes of the world.
Published by Stanley Barker https://www.stanleybarker.co.uk/products/riverland
Morning Bus by Greg Miller – Waiting for a school bus may have been the last moment parents saw their children before heading to school at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December of 2012, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults. Photographer Greg Miller, who lives about an hour away and whose daughter was the same age as many of the victims, felt an anxious unease watching her board the school bus in the following days. Inspired by Lewis Hine, Miller started to make large format portraits of area children as they waited for the bus in a quiet challenge to the status quo around gun control. While topical, the pictures presented in this elegant book are a timeless paean to a daily childhood ritual. And each child appears profoundly vulnerable.
Published by L’Artiere https://www.lartiere.com/en/prodotto/morning-bus-greg-miller/
The Western Edge by Mark Ruwedel – This is Volume II of Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies in which Ruwedel explores the varied terrain of the Los Angeles basin. The first book which we reviewed here, focused on the Los Angeles river and its watershed. Volume II brings the coast into focus from Point Mugu in the north to the Bolsa Chica Wetlands bordering Orange County in the south. Erosion and the changeable nature found at the edge of a continent are evident in these sublime pictures. Ruwedel’s trademark mid-tonal range endows the work with a certain mournfulness. Where I felt a reverence for the ability of nature to endure the built environment in the first volume, this book possesses a more desolate emotional tone. Traces of abandoned homes and infrastructure, however, assert nature’s resilience in the face of environmental volatility.
Published by MACK https://www.mackbooks.us/collections/mack/products/the-western-edge-mark-ruwedel
Invisible Sun by Amani Willett is a mesmerizing, moody and mystical journey, propelled by a force that we sense but cannot easily divine. This is one of its strengths. Willett’s photographs have an instinctual potency that gently lead to an uplifting transformation. Only at the end, Willett offers that this book is his reckoning with recent health challenges that dredged up early medical threats to his life. The resurgence of such fears impelled him to create the book’s provocative photographic experiments with portraits, landscapes and AI-generated imagery. The rhythm of color and B&W images, the cadence of decipherable and ethereal compositions, and the insightful fabrication by Dust Collective, pulse with the urgency and ambiguities of life.
Published by Dust Collective: https://www.dustcollective.net/store/p/invisible-sun-by-amani-willett
RETROSPECTIVES AND EXHIBITION CATALOGS
A Period in Time: Looking Back While Moving Forward by Ed Kashi- Long form documentary photography is perhaps the most satisfying form of photojournalism. Being guided by a visual storyteller as adept and talented as Ed Kashi readers will experience insights into a variety of cultural landscapes. As I leafed through the pages, I could intuit his deep humanity and insatiable curiosity throughout this large tome. Kashi’s forty-five year career began with a self-assigned project to document the Protestant community of Northern Ireland in the late 80’s which led to assignments for the National Geographic and work as a filmmaker. His archive, which will be housed at the Briscoe Center for American History features stories on the Kurds in Turkey, Vietnam in the 90’s when relations with the U.S. became normalized, the oil industry in Nigeria and a poignant series on aging in America. Peppered throughout are the notes and emails Kashi sent to his life partner, Julie Winokur, that function as a barometer for his own emotional state while traveling and witnessing the rollercoaster of life from painful lows to joyful highs with the occasional doses of grace in the mundane.
By Ed Kashi, Preface by Don Carleton, Published by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, https://briscoecenter.org/books/period-in-time/
A Yellow Rose brings together the collaborative effort by one hundred women and female identifying artists organized by Meg Griffiths and Frances Jakubek to respond, reflect and react to the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment. This gave women the right to vote, though many women of color were barred from exercising that right until the Civil Rights Bill was passed in 1964. A wide variety of photographic media is represented, and the essays covering the history of women’s suffrage and photography’s relationship to that history, contextualize the contemporary photography for a deeper understanding. Artist statements and biographies by the participating artists at the back of the book are a treasure trove of information. We recently reviewed the show’s installation at the Griffin Museum of Photography here.
By Meg Griffiths and Frances Jakubek with essays by Lisa Volpe, Christina Bejarano, Shannon Perich and Rachel Hunter Gunter.
Published by Texas A&M University Press https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781648433139/a-yellow-rose-project/
American Photography – Six years in the making, “American Photography” is the exhibition catalog accompanying the momentous show at Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Although most of the photographs are made by Americans, the intriguing viewpoint is European. Divided into thematic sections such as The American Dream, Death and Disaster, and Photography Becomes Art, the selection of images has a distinctly historical bent with an outsized proportion of anonymous vernacular pictures and commercial advertisements. Images by notable American photographers are not necessarily their best known but support the exhibit’s themes. Written context is abundant, clarifying, and perhaps most importantly, illustrates the Rijksmuseum’s intention to show how America’s history is revealed through its photography.
Edited by Mattie Bloom and Hans Rooseboom, Published by Rijksmuseum in association with nai010 publishers: https://www.rijksmuseumshop.nl/en/american-photography
Also available through Photo-eye, amazon, and Walmart.
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is much more than an exhibition catalog for the artist’s retrospective at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin. A superbly produced tour through Weems’ remarkable bodies of work, this relatively slim volume is contextualized by insightful scholars in accessible language and punctuated with lyrical essays by relatives and close friends. What is clear from cover to cover, through Weems’ images, performance and installation views, and her own compelling words, is her brilliance as a witness to history, her generosity of spirit in using herself as muse, and the poignancy with which she makes the political, personal. “The Heart of the Matter” is a comprehensive, enlightening and moving look at Weems’ ingenious oeuvre.
Edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Texts by Dawoud Bey, Jeffrey Hoone, Erich Kessel, Megan Kincaid, and Tiana Reid, and Contributions by Huey Copeland, Kathryn E. Delmez, Elvira Dyangani Ose, bell hooks, Robin Kelsey, Thomas Lax, Sarah Lewis, Alice Weems, Deborah Willis and Mabel O. Wilson.
Published by Aperture: https://aperture.org/books/carrie-mae-weems-the-heart-of-the-matter/
Stephen Shames: a lifetime in photography is a five-decade compendium of images by a remarkable photojournalist with an eye for both action and connection. He has been particularly drawn to those embroiled in rebellion, conflict, and protest, as illustrated by his famed pictures of the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s. There are amorous and tender images, as well, but even these feature off-kilter angles and dynamics that underline a sense of urgency. His grainy B&W images are presented in a nonlinear, mash-up fashion that echoes his approach to documenting on the move. Our favorite images are Shames’ emotionally charged portraits, impactful expressions of his fierce advocacy for children suffering the effects of poverty, abuse and neglect.
Texts by Stephen Shames and Jeffrey Henson Scales.
Published by Kehrer Verlag: https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/stephen-shames-a-lifetime-in-photography-978-3-96900-172-1
Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real – Photography is a medium that has very few prodigies, but at 30, Tyler Mitchell’s work is strikingly sophisticated. This ten year, early career retrospective features breathtaking pictures that engage history, beauty and the imagination for a more utopian Black existence in the future. As a fashion and fine art photographer, Tyler’s pictures are playful and creative. This large, softcover book will take the reader on a journey through a kind of Garden of Eden.
Essays by: Anna Wintour, Sophie Cavoulacos, Brendan Embser, Rashid Johnson, Robin Coste Lewis, Sarah Lewis, Drew Sawyer, Rachel Tashjian and Salamishah Tillet.
Published by Aperture https://aperture.org/books/tyler-mitchell-wish-this-was-real/
BOOKS WE HAVE REVIEWED IN 2025
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