For many of us, looking carefully at photobooks is one of the best ways to get to know and appreciate photography in a truly immersive and intimate manner. As a transportable, collectible object, a photobook can be one of the most accessible ways to engage with photography today. In the past few years, we’ve witnessed a boom in the genre, and photobook fairs and markets are often the most exciting territory to discover new gems.

In 2018, experimentation with materials seemed just as prevalent as new photographic series themselves. Books afford space for comprehensive research projects that incorporate archives with contemporary images just as much as they provide a blank slate for a single, striking image printed on a classic, glossy page. We reached out to a range of specialists from all over the world who are drawn to photobooks for different reasons, and put together this list of personal favorites from 2018. Throughout the process, we’ve been introduced to a number of compelling works that might have otherwise gone unnoticed in the mass of publications we saw printed this year. We hope you find something (well, a few things) here that missed your radar over the past twelve months, and are also reminded of this year’s instant classics!

To be sure, this is not a comprehensive list, nor does it attempt to present all the ‘best’ photobooks of the year. Indeed, there are dozens more that deserve attention and praise and they are not excluded intentionally. This is merely a conversation starter that points to some pretty wonderful publications that we think you might enjoy.

Be sure to scroll to the end of the article as well, where we have more images from the selections, including shots of their covers and interior layouts. Happy reading!

—The Editors at LensCulture

acaso las flores combines photographs from Cecilia Reynoso’s acclaimed series La Familia Flores—loud and crowded photographs of her extended family in gatherings and celebrations— with screenshots taken from Luchino Visconti’s iconic movies like Rocco and His Brothers, Obsession and Death in Venice. This surprising and unlikely pairing refers to the unconscious references present in artistic practice—a subject rarely addressed. Dormant, invisible images that are part of a collective unconscious are accessed by the artist when, for instance, taking a photograph. Cecilia Reynoso daringly moves the focus from her own work to the working process, relating her images to a vast, invisible world of references.
– Mariela Sancari, Photographer & Visual Artist

I first noticed Hitoshi Fugo’s dramatic sense of lighting when viewing his Flying Frying Pan (1979-1994) series at a gallery exhibition in New York City. Blackout, another series made around the same time (1975-1999), is further proof that Fugo is a mature photographer who has hit his stride. Shot entirely in India, the rhythm of the black and white photographs in this book alternate between full bleeds and classically framed images with plenty of white space around them. Interwoven are fragments of a prose poem by Francis Ponge. Blackout reveals itself slowly. All is in balance in this restrained and elegant photobook that occupies a fluid space between representation and abstraction.
– Russet Lederman, Photobook collector & Co-founder, 10x10 Photobooks

Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop by Vikki Tobak. Published by Clarkson Potter

For me, this book is a must have. It’s a real chronological journey from the roots of Hip-Hop through to alternative Hip-Hop. This anthology of Rap is a milestone because it shows the public, for the first time, more than 100 unpublished contact sheets from various photoshoots. There are real nuggets within its pages, like the last images taken of Tupac Shakur before his death, or Jerome Albertini’s famous shoot with the Wu-Tang Clan. There are moments with legends, such as the trio Salt-n-Pepa, forever inscribed in the history of American music as the first successful female group in the genre. Author Vikki Tobak is no stranger to music, as a former journalist for The Fader and Vibe, as well as the founder of the film program FotoDC. This book shows how images—like music—are imprinted in our collective consciousness.
– Jeanne Mercier, Founder, Afrique in Visu

Read the LensCulture interview with author Vikki Tobak here.

Full disclosure: I saw this work in its early stages, was totally captured by it, and discussed potential editing strategies with the artist. Copper Geographies is a compelling exploration of the political and economic journeys behind one of the most-used metals found in a plethora of commodities today, from technological devices to buildings. It’s a fascinating artist book that is the result of Ignacio Acosta’s practice-based PhD at the University of Brighton. Published by the dynamic RM Verlag, it includes six specifically-commissioned contributions by poets and historians Andrés Anwandter, Marta Dahó, Tehmina Goskar, Tony Lopez, Louise Purbrick and Frank Vicencio López. Acting as a double cartography of both the metal and geographical—as well as environmental—implications its circulation entails, the project deconstructs the layers of transformation that the trafficking of copper involves.
– Federica Chiocchetti, Founding Director of The Photocaptionist

An almost impossibly luxurious photobook, Deana Lawson’s highly-awaited monograph does not disappoint. Encased in deep mauve, featuring forty images taken over the last ten years, this is book is a true tour de force. Spanning sites across the Caribbean, United States, and African continent, Lawson takes her subject as the performance and parameters of black subjectivity. Through highly staged compositions, her portraits often feature nude individuals—they are sensuous, yet tender. Also included is an essay by writer Zadie Smith, and a conversation between Lawson and the artist Arthur Jafa.
– Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Curator & Scholar of Photography and the Arts of Africa and African Diaspora

In East, Benedetta Ristori emotively captures the present day of a part of the world that’s often only viewed through the lens of its past. Balkan history is ever-present in the book, with Spomeniks, crumbling socialist buildings, and other tropes typical to the region heavily featured. But Ristori never leans too far into nostalgia, and there’s a healthy dose of realism in her photographs, with these imposing, beautiful old structures often serving as the backdrop to the ordinary—sometimes even mundane—aspects of life in the region today.
– Nadia Beard, Editor-in-Chief, The Calvert Journal

With his publication Ferox The Forgotten Archives 1976–2010, Nicolas Polli motivates us to become active critical viewers. His dedication to crafting and creating this publication demonstrates his brilliance as a thinker and maker. Through his publication he allows (the observant) viewer to become an active participant by letting them in on a secret.
– Rebecca Simons, Independent Photo Editor, Educator and Curator

Read our interview with Nicolas Polli here.

Ghost Guessed is a fascinating and intriguing reflection on private life and memory through the use of archival photos and personal, autobiographical texts that create a parallel between the transmutation of images in a society shaped by visual culture, and the changes we experience on our own as we pass through life. A remarkable accomplishment of the book is that it is a collaboration between two photographers, who were able to develop a personal narrative that corresponds, in different ways and times, to both of their lives at once.
– Mariela Sancari, Photographer & Visual Artist

Why? Because this is a book that bluntly ignores all theories of post-post-modern, post-mortem photography, and all related theories that are so dear to academics around the world. Good Goddamn speaks punk language and contains zero art academy bullshit, which is mainly why I like it so much. Design-wise, it is a truly elegant exercise in simplicity, in which words and photographs operate at the same level, drawing us not to the meta-properties of photography, but to the story that is being told—a story of freedom and rebellion.
– Pedro Guimarães & Tiago Casanova, Photographers & Founders, a ilha

I was immediately struck by the rarefied atmosphere of Matthew Genitempo’s Jasper: the images have a ghostly, unreal quality to them, like that state between sleep and wakefulness that is uncomfortable and pleasant at the same time. Jasper is a project about isolation, solitude and silence conceived under the spell of Frank Stanford’s poetry and talks about people that willingly choose to live a life far from society in the Ozarks, the mountains of Arkansas. In an interview, the photographer states: “Isolated folks still carry their past. You can disappear, but you can’t escape.” These bruised, lyrical images, with their misty landscapes, battered interiors and rugged faces, manage to quietly take the viewer to a suspended place between reality and fiction—that same place that Genitempo’s subjects seemingly inhabit.
– Chiara Bardelli Nonino, Photo Editor, Vogue Italia

The images and stories in this book get under your skin and haunt you long after you’ve encountered them. Stockbridge has done some remarkable personal investigations, research, audio recordings and large-format portraits and still lifes—all around the people (mostly homeless drug addicts and prostitutes) who are fighting to survive on the streets in this area of North Philadelphia. The work is beautiful and sad, and offers some unforgettable personal stories.
– Jim Casper, Editor-in-Chief, LensCulture

Read the LensCulture interview with Jeffrey Stockbridge here.

Flipping through the black and white images on the pages of Clavarino’s La Vertigine (the Italian word for vertigo), I feel displaced and lost, like returning to some sort of childhood fantasy, or a dream where I am not really in control. Without a conventional narrative, the hidden connections between Clavarino’s pictures guide viewers through the author’s “first journey” as a photographer, from which each one of us can trace back our own memory.
– Rocco Venezia, Photographer & Curator at PHmuseum

What do you think of when you think of Maine? Lighthouses? Puffins? Lobster dinners? Maybe, but that’s not Gary Briechle’s Maine. Briechle’s Maine is tattooed breasts nursing a newborn baby. It’s a loaded Uzi laying across the lap of a faceless underwear-clad girl; a dead coyote in a snow drift; a syringe of an unknown liquid held up in front of a Christmas tree.

In his second monograph, Briechle turns up the clarity and shows us a sickly, oversaturated image of the state of Maine and its people trying to make it through the endless winter. It’s a little grimy, a little unsettling—it feels like it could be a storyboard for a Stephen King novel. At first glance this is nothing new; many photographers have created uncomfortable images of people in desperate situations before. But Briechle is different. This is his son, his mother, his father, and his neighbors. This is Briechle’s home.

Most of the photographs in Maine are in color, and were made with a pocket sized digital camera—a noticeable departure from the large format collodion work of his first book. This newer works looks different, but it is no less raw or powerful. It’s clear that Briechle doesn’t need to lean on gimmicks or historical processes to produce visceral images that seem to gnaw at the back of one’s skull. Maybe there is something in the water way up there in Maine—something gritty, something dark.
– Jesse Lenz, Founding Director, Charcoal Book Club

Margins of Excess is the kind of book that manages to provide a different view on highly debated and portrayed topics. Through “the story of six people who momentarily received nationwide attention in the US press because of their attempts to realize a dream or passion, but were treated as deceivers”, Max Pinckers addresses questions about the perception of truth and the critical view of the audience in the post-truth era. The book is composed of photographs, landscapes, news clippings and captions that guide the reader through the flow of events where fiction is mixed into documentary photography, communicating from a subjective point of view.
– Salvatore Vitale, Photographer & Editor-in-Chief of Yet Magazine

Read the LensCulture interview with Max Pinckers here.

I remember the first time I saw MEAT in person, I was instantly entranced. I have a particular affinity for things—textures, tactile processes and embraced glitches—and this book immediately caressed the sensorial triggers in my brain entwined with each of those magnets. It’s exciting enough to experience just one of these features in a photographic project, so imagine my elation in facing them all at once. Pin-Fat’s confrontational images are a punch to the face on their own, but the craftsmanship behind the book is what really makes this publication a major feat in photobook creativity. Each copy is hand-bound by the Void team, and includes images printed in 6 different techniques, including offset, silkscreen, letterpress, photocopy, digital printing and risograph, encased in a screen-printed piece of rough canvas. It’s a grueling, complicated story told through an equally gritty working process.
– Cat Lachowskyj, Editor, LensCulture

Yan Preston’s four-year long project is a precise and unpredictable physical feat, surveying the entire length of the Yangtze River. Stopping to take photographs at exact 100 km intervals along its 6,211 km long course—no matter how unlikely a view or, in some cases, impossible to reach—Mother River not only takes in the expected glory and expanse of the water; it also captures the ordinary lives and nondescript moments unfolding along its banks. Lens flare, camera faults and physical failure in reaching locations all add to this record of individual and collective moments that would otherwise remain out of sight.
– Mariama Attah, Assistant Editor, FOAM Magazine

In 2018, it’s suddenly easy for me to pick a favourite photobook thanks to Self Publish, Be Happy. Once you see My Birth by Carmen Winant, you can’t unsee it. Dozens of images in which anonymous women, including the artist’s mother, go from labor to delivery leave an imprint in a viewer’s mind and make her question: why haven’t I seen these images before? How such a fundamental human experience could have been so overlooked and under-reflected by the art scene, society at large and, most importantly, by myself? It’s not the content that is shocking, but rather the realization that such a significant act of giving birth and getting born is so much outside of your own visual vocabulary and system. Next to it, the simple gesture of collecting and showing images of birth in a format of a Winant’s journal facsimile emphasizes the incomprehensible gap in representation and recognition of the female body.
– Daria Tuminas, Coordinator, Unseen Book Market

No More No Less is in my opinion the most genial photobook operation of 2018. In a period of inflation of the photobook market, Thomas Sauvin and Kensuke Koike had the brilliant idea of simultaneously creating a book in triple edition, entrusting No More, No Less—the same files (26 photos recto/verso) and the same instructions, avoiding any contact up until to the date of the publication—to three different publishers: the Italian Skinnerboox, the French The (M) éditions and the Chinese Jiazazhi Press Size. The books are realized with the original materials provided and edited by the French artist and collector Thomas Sauvin: an album made up of anonymous portraits, almost like ID photographs, produced in the early 1980s by an unknown Shanghai University photography student, the ‘number 9’.

No More, No Less can be considered an exponential photographic Exercises in Style, a seriously playful exploration of three different styles of books that come from the same materials as well as a playful exercise of the Koike’s style as he experiments with the boundaries of the collage: deconstructing faces in geometries of full and empty, creating sudden three-dimensional forms ‘simply’ by moving or rotating some sections of paper. Every manual intervention of Koike is subject to a single mandatory rule settled with Sauvin: nothing can be removed, nothing can be added: No More, No Less.
– Francesca Seravalle, Independent Curator

Read the LensCulture feature with Kensuke Koike and Thomas Sauvin here.

On Abortion by Laia Abril
Published by Dewi Lewis

The first instalment of Laia Abril’s longterm project A History of Misogyny deals with the trauma caused by the lack of free and safe access to abortion. Abril’s book is a monumental and long overdue body of research that gives voice to the personal narratives of women who have suffered, whilst also tracing society’s longstanding denial of women’s reproductive rights, all the way from the past to the present. To give visibility and face to a topic that affects so many women today yet still remains a stigma is a courageous and difficult undertaking. Abril tackles it with great sensitivity, cleverly weaving together photography, text and design to remind us that repressive attitudes are here and they’re real—and we must remain alert to them. [This book was the winner of the 2018 Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation Photobook of the Year Award.]
– Sophie Wright, Editor at LensCulture

Lukas Birk is something of a photographic polymath. Having previously produced books and curatorial projects in Afghanistan, Peshwar, Beijing, Yogyakarta, he has most recently turned his attention to Myanmar. Birk established the Myanmar Photo Archive to house a wide array of physical material, including studio portraiture, private photo albums, company reports and scientific photography dating back to 1890. One Year in Yangon 1978 is the second publication to be produced by Birk in Myanmar. It’s a collection of close-up portraits taken in professional studios in Yangon, including Bellay Photo Studio (run by Har Si Yone), Central Studio, Latha Studio, and others whose names are unknown. This sort of archival territory has been well-trodden in photobooks for a number of years, but what is interesting here is the focus of Birk’s edit.

As the title tells us, the portraits included in the book are all from 1978 (364 portraits in total), and as such, the book becomes a wonderful repository and reflection on a particular time and place, and a intriguing document of photographic ‘style’, Western influences on fashion, and individual and idiosyncratic choices made in representations of the self in downtown Yangon in 1978. At this year’s Unseen Book Market, we featured this publication at the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive table, and the interest in it was so intense that I could have sold the few copies I had on sale five times over.
– Daniel Boetker-Smith, Founding Director at the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive

I believe Mark Steinmetz is one of the greatest living photographers. His most recent book—Past K-Ville—reinforces this. Through his quiet and contemplative aesthetic, Steinmetz shines a light on love, yearning, and connections lost. Two frogs in a pond, a wedding shop at dusk, are only accentuated by his ability to weave graffiti and text into this narrative that is both touching and , at times, sad. As usual, his portraits are both piercing and tender, always uniquely his own. The understated design utilized in Past K-Ville proves that less can be more when the images are this powerful. And his final, poetic touch: the small heart hidden behind the book’s dust jacket.
– Chris McCall, Director of Pier 24 Photography

Hannah Starkey’s photographs feature women, and open onto what it can mean to be female in contemporary cities. Starkey doesn’t make bodies of work—each image is to be encountered and contemplated on its own terms. So, books of her work tend to be selections from her oeuvre. The latest is the most comprehensive: a survey of two decades’ sustained exploration. For Starkey, “visual culture is the last battleground for women’s equality and freedom.” But if these images ‘battle,’ it is through their quiet insistence, their reluctance to declare easy positions, and their understanding that it is ambiguity that keeps viewers looking. Today much of the photography that claims to be exploring the female gaze (and insists on grabbing the spotlight) is simplistic, flashy and one-dimensional. It will pass, and Starkey’s revelatory pictures will last.
– David Campany, Writer & Curator

Remembering the Future by Angel Albarrán & Anna Cabrera
Published by RM Verlag

My top pick of Paris Photo this year. I’m not easily persuaded by an intuitive sequencing of images, but when it works I have to admit defeat. It also helps a lot that the printing is exquisitely done, with rich golden tones and subtle blues and greens. This one I keep going back to.
– Tim Mooij-Knip, Office & Store Manager at Huis Marseille

This book is overflowing with ideas and thought-provoking conversations about photography. Campany is a great scholar and writer, and he engages in an upbeat, casual-but-smart manner with a wide range of photographers and artists in this volume—including Broomberg & Chanarin, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Baltz, Paul Graham, Jeff Wall, Susan Meiselas and others.
– Jim Casper, Editor-in-Chief, LensCulture

I saw Subterranean River during Krakow Photomonth 2018, and was impressed for the first time in so long. This book has an incredible mix of mystery, tension, magnificent design and self-reflection. Before going to Japan, in an attempt to understand a foreign country, Lukasz Rusznica started studying its mythology through stories about the deities Kami and Yokai. Later on, in this foreign context, he was stuck with his own fantasy, but managed to turn it into an analysis of his inner feelings. Pictures of powerful nature, strange people in mysterious surroundings, and manipulations of inverted, negative photographs explain to the viewer—no matter how tough the appearance is—that we are all fragile inside.
– Alina Sanduliak, Art Historian & Curator at Bird in Flight Photography School

SWEET LIFE - Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! by Sohrab Hura
Self-published

The third part to Sohrab Hura’s SWEET LIFE is a sentimental portrait of the relationship between his mother and their dog Elsa. In contrast to the first chapter Life is Elsewhere, the photographs are in color and the general mood is optimistic. But at the same time, we see the loss of a family member. This touching portrayal of Sohrab’s family shines a light on familial relationships, all laced with love, hope and tragedy.
– Nishant Shukla, Photographer & Member of BIND Collective

Rafal Milach’s The First March of Gentlemen is not only a narrative riddled with political metaphors, but an example of how striking graphic design—thanks to Ania Nałęcka-Milach—can be used to create a photobook that may be considered closer to an artistic object. Bound in blue string and affixed on bright color, the story is a reference to the childrens’ strike in Wrzesnia, Poland in the early twentieth century. It draws on the archive of an amateur Polish photographer, active in the post-communist era, to construct a series of collages that are seemingly playful, yet carry a serious message. When I spoke to Milach at the beginning of the year, he said that Poland is in a “permanent state of demonstration” against the government. Creating books such as this is his way of warning us not to become complacent.
– Izabela Radwanska Zhang, Assistant Editor at the British Journal of Photography

A timely, multilayered fable (with photos, hand-pulled silkscreens, comics, pop-up cut-outs and more) about what it means to be an unwanted outsider in today’s global reality. The book is a stunning work of art in itself, and the stories it tells are entirely relevant to current events. In addition to its fresh take on the challenges faced by refugees in human migration, it touches on other important social themes, as well, such as the complex relationship between humans and animals, and the consequences of rapid urbanization.
– Jim Casper, Editor-in-Chief, LensCulture

Read the review on LensCulture here.

Yorgos Yatromanolakis’ project The Splitting of the Chrysalis first came about as he was serving an obligatory term in the Greek army. It was a great period of darkness for the artist, who sought refuge by going on long walks in nature, trying to locate and reclaim some semblance of his identity and personality. He slowly began experimenting with photographic imagery while on these walks, creating an amazing project grounded in liminal light, using flash and experimental exposure times. The resulting images have an other-worldly feel to them, bound together through the dusky, cool tones of a shadowy alternative dimension. The publication of this series acts as the artist’s visual notebook, and the reader is guided through his ups and downs via alternating page sizes and splayed dust galaxies. It’s an incredible experiment in the photographic medium, brought together in a sequence that takes us through Yatromanolakis’ own personal, poetic metamorphosis.
– Cat Lachowskyj, Editor, LensCulture

Read the LensCulture interview with Yorgos Yatromanolakis here.

The work of Thomas Demand can be, well, demanding and challenging for most viewers. For those who don’t care to sit with it and look closely and think, it might be dismissed with a confused shrug. But thanks to the insights and interviews in this comprehensive catalog (‘catalog’ is too common a word for this exquisitely designed publication), Demand’s ideas feel approachable, engaging and alive. It opens up new ways of thinking about images themselves and how we interact and read and rely on them to help us understand the world around us.
– Jim Casper, Editor-in-Chief, LensCulture

Un Acte d’Une Violence Indicible by Matthias Bruggmann
Published by Editions Xavier Barral & Musée de l’Elysée

I encountered his work last year when I was on my way to get beers after a whole day of looking at photographs. It’s very hard to still captivate someone in that mindset but he did and I stayed in his booth for half an hour, forgetting those Heinekens entirely. I love his work, he brings us so very close to the action while also tirelessly working to represent the complexity of the situations he documents. The book itself is very well put together and his illusive internet presence is intriguing and edifying. Not a light read though.
– Tim Mooij-Knip, Office & Store Manager at Huis Marseille

To the delight of many photobook lovers in 2018, MACK published a super-elegant paperback version of this complex multilayered work that took the art and photography world by storm when it was originally released in 2011 as a limited edition of 100 handmade copies. The book earned the artists the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. As an examination of propaganda, war, and media imagery (among many other ideas), it’s brutal, challenging, depressing and exhilarating all at the same time. The book is literally built ‘on top of’ an English-language version of a book by Bertolt Brecht from 1955, including poems, original WWII press images, overlaid with updated propagandist images of the War on Terror.
– Jim Casper, Editor-in-Chief, LensCulture

White Noise discloses the ongoing chaos in Tokyo, leading readers to simultaneously explore the ins-and-outs of the city. Nakafuji began shooting this series of photographs after the nuclear plant in Fukushima exploded on March 11, 2011. The mixture of black and white street photography and the chromatic, science fictional images are reminiscent of hand-tinted postcards from prewar Japan. All together, they compose a jumbled physiognomy of the urbanscape. The multi-layered book design unfolds and enfolds photographs one after another, as if the book is Tokyo itself, inviting readers to walk into its endless labyrinth.
– Amanda Ling-Ning Lo, Co-founder of Nitesha & Creative Consultant of IntermediArt

We usually retreat indoors at night, fearful of what we can’t see in the dark, and Arko Datto’s Mannequin doesn’t exactly sway us to do otherwise. In a contrasted, oversaturated style that has come to define his recent work, Datto documents raw social and political issues through hallucinatory narratives. The images jump off each page as recordings of accidental fever dreams, referencing classic and contemporary stories in India. What’s more, the book is printed with six colors. Rather than adhering to the normal CMYK printing standard, the artist and his designer removed yellow, replacing it with fluorescent yellow, and also added fluorescent pink and blue Pantone. The resulting prints are characterized by the unsettling vibrancy that Datto successfully captures each time his camera flashes at a subject.
– Cat Lachowskyj, Editor, LensCulture

Read the LensCulture interview with Arko Datto here.

A small and poetic puzzle of a book, 1+1=1 continues Daniel Blaufuks’ interest in the conversations between images. Simple yet enigmatic, I find myself going back to its pages in parts to look at particular connections before going back to the book’s full sequence. Playing on the repetitions and rhythms of memory, 1+1=1 feels much like cinema on paper (which makes sense as Blaufuks makes films too). As he says in his statement, “If you add one photograph to another, and another, how many are you looking at?”
– Sophie Wright, Editor at LensCulture

Special thanks to all of our friends and colleagues who contributed to this list. Cheers!