Perimeter Editions Archives

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2025

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2025 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark and Editorial Assistant, Thomas King.

1000 Words | Top 10 (+1) Photobooks of 2025 | 5 Dec 2025
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1. Mari Katayama, Synthesis
SPBH Editions

Mari  Katayama gathers six years of her practice, 2019 to 2025, into an artist’s book that reads as both playful and challenging. Those familiar with Katayama’s work will recognise the materially rich choreography. Her body appears, often entwined with hand-sewn sculptures, threaded forms and collaged papers, the objects acting less as adornments than as co-actors in a carefully staged performance of the self (Katayama chose to have her legs amputated at the age of nine following a developmental condition). The book’s nine photographic series were made in Katayama’s home studio in Gunma, a conscious return to her ‘rural roots’ after years in Tokyo, during a period in which she became a mother. Yet in this turning back, she also looks forward. Synthesis is, in many respects, not a tidy catalogue but a layered fusion of self-portraiture, object-making and the living textures of experience.

2. Phoebe Kiely, She Could See Herself In The Darkness
Witty Books

From Torino’s ever-discerning Witty Books, founded by Tommaso Parrillo, comes a vivid compendium of prints created between 2020 and 2024 by artist Phoebe Kiely. Kiely’s images interlace tight, intimate fragments of the human body, guiding the eye through surfaces, gestures and the subtle slippages between presence and absence. Following her previous book, They Were My Landscape, which explored the anonymity of people, objects and street scenes, this new work continues such investigations, deepening attention to materiality, tactility and intimacy, in which darkness holds the contours of queerness together, producing a long-awaited next-part of her photographic practice. For Kiely, bodies are never the whole story, nor is the idea of a fully realised subject; what takes precedence are parts, textures and the distances between them.

3. Daniel Lee Postaer, Mother’s Land
Deadbeat Club

China’s vertiginous transformation over the past 15 years has been devastating if not dizzying (its high speed rail network now spans over 500 cities, all constructed since 2008, is just one example of this expansion). Postaer, who lived in the country in the early 2000s and returned repeatedly in the latter decade, witnessed the country’s rapid development firsthand (his grandparents fled the communist regime there more than 50 years ago). Mother’s Land, a 15 x 11″ hardcover monograph, documents these shifts with careful eye. The demolition of old structures, the emergence of new architectures, feeling signage and spaces glimpsed in passing… ‘a country in constant mutation’ as one description puts it. And yet, despite the scale of its subject on the surface, the book remains quietly intimate and reflective, an exploration as much of Postaer himself as of the country he photographs. In his words, ‘I could feel my mother. I could also feel that wonder of what it would have been like if I had grown up there.’

4. Rosie Harriet Ellis, The Boyfriend Casting
Libraryman

From the uncertain beginnings of a project while on her MA at the Royal College of Art, thwarted when her ex-boyfriend withdrew consent, Ellis’ The Boyfriend Casting has, over five years, evolved into a work that consummates the journey of its inception. What initially appeared as a personal and professional impasse has, over time, transformed into an act of reinvention. The book documents this evolution through short, diary-like chapters that feel disarmingly intimate, revealing a presence both within and beyond the frame, while testing how photography can function as tool for grief, yearning and reversed objectification. After the initial photographs of her former partner, Chapter 2 takes the shape of a pose guide. True to its titular promise, it functions as a casting, yet one that is inseparably bound to Ellis herself, her desires, her pursuits of intimacy, and her reckoning with what it means both to observe and to be observed.

5. Mimi Mollica, Moon City
Dewi Lewis

Mimi Mollica’s Moon City stages a spectral dialogue between the eternal and the engineered, juxtaposing the silent, cyclical pull of the moon with the stark, relentless ambition of London’s financial skyline. Shot in a film-noir style and loosely inspired by Luigi Pirandello’s Ciàula Scopre La Luna, the series positions the celestial body as a luminous, enduring counterpoint to high-rise towers, indifferent to human schemes. Through telescopic framing picturing deserted office blocks, Mollica creates a tension between vast skies and the city’s scale of power, choreographing space like a careful negotiator, drawing attention to the rhythms, shadows and silences that punctuate the square mile. As in Pirandello’s novel, the moon offers something else, perhaps a quiet resistance, to anyone daring to look up and escape the deceptive halo of capitalism.

6. Katherine Hubard, The Great Room
Loose Joints

In The Great Room, Hubbard is daughter, caregiver, artist, collaborator. Berger is mother, subject, co-maker. This is the first time Hubbard has photographed another person consistently, and the volume, published by Loose Joints, is shaped by that proximity and closeness, and this goes as far as one-to-one scale contact prints and monoprints made in the darkroom from the impressions of their skin. The house in which the photographs were made becomes a kind of palimpsest of life lived, and the book, in some respects, a record of care and change, of memory inscribed in gestures and the objects that fill it. At its centre lies the mother-daughter relationship, which is tender, uneasy, always shifting between attention and distance and Hubbard neither hides the discomfort nor leans into melodrama.

7. Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room
Ediciones Posibles, Fundación Photographic Social Vision, PHREE

Another parental story, and sharing some similarities, is that of Mohamed Hassan, whose Our Hidden Room received the Star Photobook Dummy Award 2024 and was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2025. At once a response to what some have called ‘the fall of Egypt’s democratic experiment,’ the book draws in part from the photographic archive of his late father, a gifted portraitist diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age. Interlacing his father’s surviving images with his own photographs and text, Hassan creates a triptych of inheritance, dialogue and in his own words – a ‘room,’ his and his father’s, as a shared space of return. In a candid conversation with Irene Alison, he reflected that, in photographing, he sometimes feels himself drawing nearer, meeting his father again.

8. Ying Ang, Fruiting Bodies
Perimeter Editions

Jane Simon wrote earlier this year in 1000 Words that Ying Ang’s latest offering (the artist’s third major book and her first with Perimeter Editions) arrives as ‘a provocation to think about abundance beyond the frame of the reproductive body.’ Taking a somewhat more declarative tone than Ang’s previous works, which are notable in their own right, Fruiting Bodies takes us to the unseen networks of mycelium, where ecology and feminist thought intertwine. Neither allegory nor anthropomorphism, it proposes another kind of vitality, subterranean poetics of reciprocity, where decay and regeneration are inseparable. Simon writes, ‘The perspective here is born from the personal, but this is also about a collective experience of how women’s bodies are labelled, classified and devalued over a lifetime.’ The result is strikingly original and surprisingly evocative.

9. Bharat Sikka, Ripples in the Pond
Fw: Books

Fw: Books’ Hans Gremmen continues his thoughtful collaboration with photographer Bharat Sikka, whose sepia-toned studies of Makharda (a peripheral township on Kolkata’s outskirts) and its surrounding landscape form the artist’s latest book, Ripples in the Pond. The softbound volume, with its intentionally unpolished edges, comprises photographs of the area’s many ponds, gently leading the viewer toward the project’s underlying preoccupation with the site’s layered temporal and socio-cultural rhythms. This comes to light in the way that, after each journey to Makharda, Sikka subjects the photographs to an extended practice of scanning and reworking, a slow, deliberate method that mirrors the reflective logic of the ponds themselves. It is a quietly powerful exploration of the ‘semi-rural imaginary’ that leans on the 1980s Indian television series Malgudi Days for inspiration, which portrayed the quiet life of a small town, and, has been described as a ‘personal act of return’.

10. Raymond Thompson Jr, It’s Hard To Stop Rebels That Time Travel
VOID

The ‘rebels’ for Raymond Thompson Jr are the maroons, the runaways, the Black people whose lives moved outside, between, beneath official historical records. Their ‘time travel’ is the movement between the visible and the invisible, the archival and the lived. The project is, in his words, ‘my portal to slip between the past, present and future,’ with focus especially on maroons, enslaved people who escaped but did not go north, instead finding refuge in the wild margin‑lands between plantations, swamps and borderlands, and how their survival practices (what he terms ‘freedom practices’) resonate with Black environmental imagination and presence in the American landscape. Fittingly, the book’s slim, rectangular form recalls a travel guide or field notebook, made to accompany a journey, including archival material such as reward advertisements, quotes, newspaper clippings and truly striking portraits.

+1 Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Small Death
MACK

Martha Naranjo Sandoval’s debut book is a tactile, iterative object – its vivid red cover encasing not only the weight and texture of a generously bound volume, but that of an artist attuned to the material language of memory and making. Spanning some 300 pages, Small Death gathers photographs from Sandoval’s early years in New York, selected from her original contact sheets and reels, a return to beginnings made urgent in a time when ICE disappears people and sanctuary feels perilous. Sandoval’s images quietly respond to this moment through an intimacy reminiscent of a family archive. Photographs of her brother, parents, husband, cat, landscapes, and nude self-portraits stitch together the smaller stories that, in turn, prompt questions around displacement, border-crossing and the violent architectures of exclusion. ♦

—
Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini, Luce Lebart and Arianna Catania. He also teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and currently undertaking an MA in Literary Studies (Critical Theory) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Images:

1-Cover of Mari Katayama, Synthesis (SPBH Editions, 2025)

2-Mari Katayama, on the way home #005, 2016

3-Phoebe Kiely, She could see herself in the darkness (2025)

4-Daniel Postaer, Shanghai, (Anting), 2016 / 2020

5-Rosie Harriet Ellis, The Boyfriend Casting (2025)

6-Mimi Mollica, Moon City (2025)

7-Katherine Hubbard, The Great Room (2025)

8-Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room (2023-ongoing)

9-Ying Ang, Fruiting Bodies (2025)

10-Bharat Sikka, Ripples in the Pond, (2025)

11-Raymond Thompson Jr, It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel (2025)

12-Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Small Death (2025)

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Ying Ang’s ecological and feminist politics

Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies, the artist’s third major book and first with Perimeter Editions, emerges from walks through inner-city parks near her Melbourne home. Thinking through the fetishisation of fertility and its impact on cultural views of womanhood, Jane Simon writes that the work offers a meditative exploration of bodies beyond reproduction, using tactile, intimate images of mushrooms to speculate on nature, personal history and ways of knowing.

Jane Simon | Book review | 31 July 2025
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Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies, published by Perimeter Editions, is a quiet, precise manifesto. It is a provocation to think about abundance beyond the frame of the reproductive body. This photobook is, in equal parts, exacting in its political and conceptual delivery while also an unhurried meditation on the promise and organic beauty of fungal forms.

The fruiting bodies of the title refer to the mushrooms that Ang photographed in Melbourne’s parks. Ang’s mushrooms are earthy, found sculptures. These are small growths we may not notice at our feet: bodies with expanses of folds, wrinkles and yearnings for darkness and light. They have stems, caps, gills, and an unseen underground pulse. Ang gives them her full attention, harnessing the close-up’s ability to experiment with scale and reorganise hierarchies of attention.

Fruiting Bodies is, in part, about the possibilities of bodies in states of transition. It is about change that is neither loss nor gain, but something vital and not-yet named. Ang generates this post-menopausal narrative without relying on the human figure. Instead, she has a singular focus on the erupting blooms of mushrooms: growths sustained from below through mycelium, that hidden system of collective exchange.

Descriptions of non-reproductive bodies often invoke the language of loss or failure. Ang gifts us another vocabulary through her detailed portraits of mushrooms and their cycles of growth, decay and regeneration. Ang pulls her viewers to the ground, holding her camera at grass level to show us the arch of the stems, the wonder of cups, these tiny architectural yet fleshy wonders. She displays their cracks, dissolves, their tears, their delicacy and brute strength. In a deliberate engagement with the links between questions of ecology and feminist politics, Ang reveals how proximity (in this case, to soil, organic matter, imperfect fungi) can recalibrate what we know and value about bodies, community and connection.

Fruiting Bodies has a slower rhythm than Ang’s last photobook The Quickening: A memoir on matrescence (2021), and her first major photobook, Gold Coast (2014). The Quickening reckons with the joys and seismic shifts of motherhood and post-partum anxiety. The photographs in The Quickening are like gasps for air: visceral fragments of life with an infant. Gold Coast reckons with the contradictions of a city marbled with racism, crime and bodies at leisure. Fruiting Bodies is a different type of book. This book is not a reckoning but a proposition, a firm insistence that the realm beyond fertility has paths to other possibilities, other generative modes, ones that are vital, creative, meaningful, crucial.

Ang’s fruiting bodies are sometimes ruffled and plump, others are slender and reaching. A notebook held at ground level becomes an in-situ studio, a backdrop to highlight the dirt clinging to a stem or the impressive force of a mushroom that has pushed through earth and risen with a wood chip delicately balanced on its cap.

Photography has played a fundamental role in valuing some bodies more than others, in rendering some invisible, unnoticed, and others too closely surveyed. This awareness is embedded in Fruiting Bodies. Ang’s studies of foraged mushrooms photographed simply on a white background are reminders of how photography has been used to collect, identify and fetishise, but this is not Ang’s project.

Ang’s visual language relies on seeing the mushrooms in a variety of ways. Ang mostly photographs the mushrooms in black and white. But the photobook has bursts of warm, earthy colour amongst its black and white pages. Some pages of the book reveal red eruptions, and bees forage near some of these fleshy forms. Others are fragile, almost transparent. Sometimes Ang’s mushrooms are at home in a tangle of woodchips, grass and dew. Other times, the mushrooms have been plucked and photographed later. Some of these mushrooms are dried and shrivelled. Some are palpably full and fleshy.

Ang’s mushrooms make me think about Simryn Gill’s series, Weeds in my Parents’ Garden (2018). In that series, Gill also photographs down near the ground, focusing on weeds in detail. Like Ang’s mushrooms, Gill’s weeds are personal (it is her parents’ garden) but also about a wider politics of attention to the unwanted or the devalued. Both Ang and Gill share a respect for the anti-monumental, and a speculative approach to thinking about nature, personal history and ways of knowing.

Ang’s curious eyes show us growth, decomposition, repair, and wonder. These are photographs to pore over. I recognise one mushroom as a shaggy mane mushroom, I look it up and learn that it matures fast, and as it does so, its gills liquify into an inky disintegration: a dissolving that releases and spreads spores. These fruiting bodies sometimes echo the human form. A pair of caps looks like breasts; the ruptures, splits and openings of several mushrooms are equally suggestive. But the point is not to anthropomorphise the fungal world, but rather to place those bodies in conversation with our own.

The figures of women are evoked directly in Fruiting Bodies through Ang’s exacting use of text. Ang is a photographer, but also a deft writer. The perspective here is born from the personal, but this is also about a collective experience of how women’s bodies are labelled, classified and devalued over a lifetime. Some things, Ang and her mushrooms tell us, are beyond the material body, outside anatomy. One page of text begins a list with mood and cognition and ends with hair and bones. Uterus sits in the middle of the list. I read the word and think of medical drawings and the persistent cultural imaginings of the uterus as a void or receptacle rather than the dense, powerful muscle it is. Just one misrecognition among many.

Opposite the list, a full page is dedicated to just two words: Kin Keeper. This role, so often undertaken by women, is, like the mushroom’s underground mycelium, part of a collective chain of reciprocity and care, shared stories, advice and memories. Ang references this type of work earlier in the book: ‘The quiet labour of what holds the world together.’

Fruiting Bodies has a line about a woman in the kitchen ‘peeling an orange, considering the weight of her own survival.’ Ang reminds us that ‘This, too, is a kind of freedom.’ It is the certainty of this felt freedom that knits together Ang’s beautiful, detailed mushroom portraits in this quiet force of a photobook. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Perimeter Editions. © Ying Ang

—
Jane Simon is an academic and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, where she researches and teaches in the areas of photography, screen media and visual culture. She is the author of The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2024). Her research examines photography’s role in the imagination and construction of housing and intimate home life.

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Photobook Conversations #5 | Daniel Boetker-Smith: “The best photobooks of the next 25 years will not come from Europe or North America”

Photobook Conversations is edited by Ana Casas Broda (Hydra + Fotografía), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and Duncan Wooldridge (Manchester Metropolitan University). Sitting alongside the earlier Writer Conversations (1000 Words, 2023), edited by Lucy Soutter and Duncan Wooldridge, and Curator Conversations (1000 Words, 2021), edited by Tim Clark, it completes the series exploring the ways our understanding and experience of photography is mediated through exhibitions, writing and publishing.

Daniel Boetker-Smith | Photobook Conversations #5 | 16 Jan 2025

Daniel Boetker-Smith is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, Australia, and a curator, educator, writer, publisher, and photographer. He is the Founder of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive and regularly speaks at festivals and symposia internationally on the subject of photobooks, photographic publishing and self-publishing in the Asia-Pacific area. Boetker-Smith has previously taught and guest lectured for nearly 20 years at universities and institutions in Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK and US.

What were the encounters which started your relationship with photobooks?

In my last year of high school, I had a photography teacher who was a bit of a loose cannon pedagogically speaking, and also fancied himself as a jazz aficionado. He had shelves stuffed full of photography books in his office – classics by Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but also obscure Japanese photobooks he’d collected on his travels. I don’t recall ever having any formal classes, but just remember looking at photobooks for hours. The teacher would smoke his pipe and play a Charles Mingus cassette tape loudly over and over again whilst I ransacked his shelves. He would shout over the music about structure, rhythm, tempo, and pattern in images and music, though I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying I trace my 30-year photobook obsession back to those days.

The second important encounter happened over a decade later, in 2001, when W.G. Sebald’s book Austerltiz was released. I was in my final year at university, and I had already read Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995) a couple of years earlier. I had been enthralled by Sebald’s weaving of interconnected stories and meandering reflections that placed me in the middle of his experiences rather than just as a “reader”. I had read Rings of Saturn when I had been travelling in Australia and had been on a personal quest to meet my father for the first time. So, for obvious reasons, I felt a strong connection to Sebald’s interspersing of photographs and text as a way of dealing with the past, memories and their fragmentary and non-linear nature. I became magnetically drawn to books that used digression as a mode of storytelling. Sebald created a space for me to embrace disjointedness as a valid way to construct and explore narrative, and to see the world. Since then I have sought out photobooks that utilise such strategies in order to present their tales. I enjoy their disruptiveness, poetic and anarchic quality, and essentially that is all I ever write about.

At this time, around 2001, I was looking at photobooks like Droit de Regards (originally published in 1985 in French, and later in English) by Belgian photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, the seminal In Flagrante by Chris Killip (1988) and Rinko Kawauchi’s two books published by Little More, titled Hanabi and Utatane (both 2001). It seems now, on reflection, that 2001 was a perfect storm in which a tsunami of elements from literature and photobooks coalesced in front of me in the very moment in which I was ready to absorb them. These photobooks all seemed to apply (in visual form) the very concepts I had found enthralling in Sebald – an ability to resist and deviate from a traditional model of storytelling; to eschew neat, teleological narratives. These publications cemented my obsession with photobooks, formed the basis of my MA thesis that I completed the following year and represented the starting point of my photobook collection/obsession.

How do you like to work with people?

I find it hard to categorise what I do, and therefore how I work with people is difficult to explain. I have published books but don’t consider myself a publisher; I have helped hundreds of people with their photographic projects and their books but don’t consider myself an editor or designer; I have curated exhibitions large and small but don’t consider myself a curator; I have taught photography and art for 20 years but don’t consider myself a teacher; and I often write about photography but don’t consider myself a writer.

I still actually think of myself as a photographer, though I rarely make photographs anymore. I think I unconsciously approach everything I do as a photographer – one who also writes, publishes, curates, and teaches. So, to dig into that and return to the question, I would suppose that this base informs how I work with people. I come at any collaboration I do with a photographer with a sense of being “one of them”, not as someone who sits in a position of power as the Dean of a College, a Gallery Director or publisher.

This background is evident when I’m working with photographers, mostly students or in workshops and masterclasses. It’s very easy for me to pick out the images that are working – to identify the photographs that are benefiting or progressing the broader narrative or theme, and the ones that aren’t good enough. It’s simply a case, for me, of getting a sense of the background, the intent and the aspirations of the photographer (and the images) and then putting myself in the position of the photographer, as if it were my own project, to make decisions about the direction I think it needs to go, and how best it could be manifested as a book or exhibition.

One of the key elements of making an edit of a book is retaining a physicality to the process – printing out all the images, at all different sizes, sticking them in books or on the wall, printing and binding a dummy, and sitting with these various incarnations always leads to good decisions. The other important element is spending time with the photographer in my library of books. At the early stages of thinking about a book, there’s nothing more useful than sitting in a room of thousands of photobooks. This process starts with aimless looking, random conversations and is then followed by frenzied trains of connected thought, which leads to refinement, inspiration, clarity, and purpose for the book yet to be made.

I get the most enjoyment out of working with emerging photographers. After 20 years of teaching, I never became tired or lost the passion for looking at new work. Inevitably, most of my teaching focused around photobooks, and I always found collaborating with students on making their photobooks thoroughly enjoyable. Now, as Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), I get the chance to work in a more informal way with emerging photographers, without my teacher’s hat on. I am constantly reaching out to people to ask them to show me their work. Spending time talking through an emerging photographer’s work in-depth, and discussing how they can improve and move forward and getting excited about how it could look in book or exhibition form is a perfect day for me.

What is the public for a photobook? Who do you think of as your audience?

As most of my interactions with photobooks is as a collector, a writer and an educator, I would like to approach this question differently. I think the audience is the one with the responsibility, and here I am referring specifically to US and European audiences. Given that the focus of the photobook ecosystem in North America and Europe, it is easy for those audiences to be complacent, and only engage with the books that are placed “in front of them”. One only needs to look at the ‘Best of’ booklists in PhotoEye or LensCulture or The Guardian etc., it is essentially a closed circle. There is an urgent need to turn the attention to Asia, to Africa and to South America. Some European publishers and collectors are already doing this to a small degree, however having a small number of gatekeepers isn’t enough. The photobook world needs to recognise and reflect on its biases and inclinations. The best photobooks of the next 25 years will not come from Europe or North America, they will come from places like Indonesia, Nigeria and Brazil. And they will come from photographers who have vital and important stories to tell.

For someone publishing a book in 2025, the best way to think about photobooks is that the audience is entirely different for each book, and that you have to almost start from zero each time. An audience can’t be conceived of until the final book is done and in your hands. Make a book as best you can within your budget, and as close to what you imagined at the start – as close to the idea of the book that got you excited enough about to want to make a book in the first place. Then once the book is done, and you understand what it is you’ve made, start thinking laterally about who the audience could be. For your first photobook, trying to make something with a preconceived audience in mind is a recipe for disaster.

Part of my work here in Australia over the past 15 years has been to build a community of photobook makers and to work with others to grow the audience of those who buy photobooks. When I became the Dean at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, I made sure that photobooks were a central part of the curriculum for both BA and MA students. Now, the students that I taught 10-15 years ago are themselves teaching, so inevitably the “bug” has spread. Most colleges in Australia now have some sort of photobook course. I also ran (with Heidi Romano) the Photobook Melbourne festival in 2015, and have been involved with organising and curating major photobook events at festivals and in national art institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

I have also on many occasions ran events large and small with Justine Ellis and Dan Rule from Perimeter Books, Australia’s unofficial epicentre of photobook publishing. Perimeter produce up to 15 books per year, distribute a long list of international publishers to book shops all over Australia and New Zealand, attend fairs across the world and regularly organise photo and art book events, launches and fairs. Their passion and friendship have been a big influence for me over the last decade, and they have built up a massive community here through their commitment and energy.

In 2021, I co-curated a major exhibition here at the Museum of Australian Photography, and it featured a number of internationally recognised “photobook” names, including Mathieu Asselin, Broomberg & Chanarin, Cristina De Middel, Laura El-Tantawy, Yoshikatsu Fujii, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Zhang Kechun, Dana Lixenberg, Max Pinckers and Alec Soth, alongside Australian photographers Ashley Gilbertson, Raphaela Rosella, and James Tylor. Though this exhibition wasn’t about photobooks per se, it was, for me, an added bonus to create a platform to introduce an Australian audience to some of the most important international photobooks of the past decade or so.

How important is it for photobooks to reach other continents?

Of course, it’s vital to the future of the photobook that we push for and embrace diversity and access. I would again rephrase the question however, given that this book of conversations and responses will, I imagine, have a predominance of European readers. I would instead ask how important is it for you (the reader) to seek out books from other continents? I would say that it is your absolute responsibility.

European photobooks, though publishers will admit times are tough, at least have a readymade market on their doorstep, with a glut of festivals, galleries and fairs, and geographic accessibility. The issue for photobook makers and publishers from the Asia-Pacific region (and the same is true for South America and Africa) is getting their books in front of a European or American audience, where most of the buying happens, where most of the “hype” is, via competitions, awards and prizes. A small European bookshop, for example, will not survive through charitable gestures supporting smaller publishers located in Manila or Taipei or Auckland. A healthy and profitable bookshop needs to stock books by photographers people already know; as a result most of the bookshops in Europe sell the same or similar titles. Therefore, it is the audience that needs to educate themselves about photographers, photobooks and publishers from other regions.

The opportunity to address this is threefold. At fairs and festivals, prior to their visit, audiences should research which publishers are present from other continents and support them if they can by buying a book. The cost of freighting books across the globe means the margins for these publishers are tiny. The more they can offload and not cart back home, the better. Another way for photobook buyers and collectors to assist is to use the internet smarter, follow smaller independent publishers, festivals and fairs in other countries, and be aware of newly released books that way. The final way is, when traveling, to find and approach the local photobook shops, events and networks, and see who is doing what. Often, if you seek people out and meet with them, they will point you in the right direction to get a sense of what’s happening in photography in that country. These three things mean more exposure for lesser-known publishers and photographers, and eventually this can lead to a more sustainable market internationally for those from Asia-Pacific, South America and Africa.

I try to do my part through my writing, in that whenever I am asked to feature or review new photobooks by a European or American magazine or website, I will only ever write about photographers and photobooks from the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing attention to these photobooks on an international platform might not translate directly to sales, but the hope is that a reader takes note and is made aware of other things happening elsewhere in the world, and uses this information to start to explore further.

How do you attempt to address sustainability in publishing?

I am not sure the sector can talk about sustainability in a cohesive way, as it’s so different in each country. In our little corner of the world, we do what we can, but, in the broader scheme, we are at the whim of larger, cut-throat industries and costs controlling import, export, paper, printing, freight and taxes that are all connected to the larger global economy and currencies. Most publishers print overseas (in Asia and Europe), making it pretty difficult to claim any sort of “green” practices.

Paper is no longer made in Australia at all (the last mill closed in 2023) so we have a huge logging industry that produces material that gets sent overseas, and then all the paper for book printing needs to be imported back into the country. This convoluted process is incredibly expensive, making it practically impossible to produce offset printed photobooks here at any reasonable price. The reality is that printing books in conservative edition sizes, ensuring that there is a market for each book, and working in collaboration with other publishers and distributors is the best that can be done currently.

What is the place of language and writing in a book of photographs?

I am firm believer that photobooks and literature are interconnected. As I mentioned, in response to the first question, my obsession with photobooks came from a kind-of literary realisation. Over years of teaching, I have often tried to make it clear to students that literature can be a source of inspiration and ideas for photographers, and that the best writers can provide road signs for how to think differently about how we deal with visual narratives.

Because of this, I often see and look for literary influences in photobooks, not just in their subject matter, but in the way they are constructed or use storytelling devices. I think photographers can learn so much from literature, not just classics by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust or Sebald, but more recently Rachel Cusk, Maria Stepanova and Karl Ove Knausgård, as well as others who tell stories in a way that connect with images, and can perhaps inspire photographers to take risks with their storytelling.

I would recommend all photographers be playful and experiment with text and writing. It doesn’t necessarily need to end up in their photobook, and maybe no one else ever sees it, but the routine and the frustration and the pain of writing down what you are thinking is an immensely valuable one. I have learnt so much about photography from writing. It’s the only way I am able to clarify my responses to images.

Who have been the models or templates for your own activities?

My activities regarding photobooks have developed organically and simply out of a love and passion for the medium. My starting point for a more professional and community-oriented engagement with photobooks was when I established the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive in 2013. I had been back in Australia for three years and was decidedly frustrated at the focus on European and American photography and photobooks that I found here. I was so much more interested to see what was happening in this region. Having visited a few photography festivals in Asia, I had seen first-hand the energy and talent evident in the work being presented. From this came the desire to grow and push the awareness of the photographic community in this part of the world, and to nurture young talent. I wanted to play my part.

The idea for the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive came out of seeing the brilliant work that Larissa Leclair was doing in the US (Indie Photobook Library) and Bruno Ceschel was doing in UK (Self Publish, Be Happy), and wanting to take it one step further, not just by collecting books but actively and physically sharing them with new audiences. Different to the Indie Photobook Library or Self Publish, Be Happy, the Archive was never intended to be static. The goal from the outset was to get the books seen by audiences in different locations, so I was very clear in our manifesto that any books submitted to the Archive would travel to festivals around Asia and the world. With this promise, in 2013 I started attending more festivals and events, taking submissions and buying books. I would take a suitcase or two of books from the Archive, and set up a space provided by the festival to show these books. It was a condition from the start that we didn’t sell books, as the Archive was never set up as a “business”. Often photographers at these festivals (in India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and more) were not in a position to donate a copy of their book to the Archive, so I would buy it instead. The Archive is probably 60% donated books and 40% books purchased by me.

At the start in 2013, there were very few photography festivals and absolutely no photobook related events in the Asia Pacific region. Chobi Mela and Angkor were the only two main festivals, and didn’t have a photobook element at this stage. But this soon began to change, and now there are photography festivals in most countries in Asia, and most have a photobook fair included. Alongside this, there are many collectives and spaces for photography communities to come together to share and support each other across the Asia-Pacific region. As I said, Isabella Capezio (who runs the Archive with me) and I attended festivals all over Asia between 2013-18, we would curate a display of books that were simply for browsing, and we provided photographer contact information for people to then go buy the books directly from the artists. We attended events in different places in Asia, and early on we were also invited to manage the photobook activities of a few festivals in the region, running reviews, book-making workshops, talks and so on.

As the reputation of the Archive grew we started doing pop-up events of Asia-Pacific photobooks even more broadly, in the UK (at The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop), and at photography festivals in Europe (Latvia, Dublin and Landskrona), and all over the US. The books that people submitted certainly clocked up a lot of miles.

As time passed a lot more festivals had emerged across the Asia-Pacific region, and a lot of these events started running their own photobook fairs and developing their own collections and libraries, so the need for the Archive to actively travel became reduced, and the number of submissions we were getting also dropped off. Just before Covid-19, I stopped needing to collaborate with festivals and fairs as most of them now had their own photobook events and spaces to house their own collections. The Archive served its purpose at the time, and I am happy that we played a small part in the early days of turning the focus on to photobooks in this part of the world.

From the beginning we had a physical space for the Archive in Melbourne that was open to the public and managed by volunteers. This was a very important part of the jigsaw in the early days. Not only were the books travelling all over the world, they also were on display here in Melbourne. The Archive still has a public-facing space, is still open and we still have photographers, student groups and international visitors accessing the Archive, doing research and looking for inspiration. It’s still a free and accessible resource.

What would make a better photobook ecosystem?

I would like to think that in the coming decade the attention of the photobook and photography world will move away from North America and Europe and will recentre itself in other places – in Asia, South America and Africa. As I previously started to discuss, the photobook network in the Asia-Pacific region has developed over the last 15 years, and today there are dozens of events of all sizes across a range of countries. It has become a positive space, though not without challenges and limitations. With the rise in art fairs, photobook fairs and photography festivals in the Asia-Pacific region, European publishers are becoming more aware of the wealth of talent here. There are, each year, more and more books being published featuring non-European and non-American photographers. The difficulty and challenges for the ecosystem is at the ground level and is simple economics; this is where people like Jessica Lim (Angkor Photo Festival), Shahidul Alam (Chobi Mela), Gwen Lee (Singapore International Photography Festival), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and other even smaller organisations and collectives in other countries come in and are doing amazing work. These sort of initiatives and organisations need the support of the broader international photobook world. This is true also for South America and Africa. There are smaller groups, collectives and organisations that need the support of their European and North American counterparts.

With what is happening politically, it’s pretty clear the world global economy is going to struggle in the coming years, so I do fear for book sales, especially for smaller publishers who work with tight margins, and with emerging artists without an established following. I firmly believe North American and European audiences need to keep pushing themselves to look outside of the photographers and publishers in their own countries. There are such rich and amazing stories being told in all parts of the world, and they need to be sought out beyond the shelves of their local book shop or book fair.

I find it a conundrum that the connectivity of the art world and the photobook community seems to keep expanding and improving, while at the same time, our political leaders and the majority of our voting populations become more insular and xenophobic. It feels like photography and photobooks, and the diversity of stories they tell, will become even more vital in coming years.♦

Further interviews in the Photobook Conversations series can be read here

Click here to order your copy of the book

Images:

2>3-Cover and spread from Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits (Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, 2024)

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Top 10

Photobooks of 2023

Selected by Alessandro Merola

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases of 2023 – selected by Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.

1. Masahisa Fukase, Private Scenes
Prestel

Obsession is carried out to the limits in both content and production in Prestel’s enthralling entry into Masahisa Fukase’s archive. Again, we find that the art the Japanese photographer produced towards the tail-end of his working life bears an intense and burning experimentalism that surpasses even his greatest opus. Private Scenes is off the charts brilliant, with its wild and enticing cover, glossy black pages and cinematic format through which we enter Fukase’s inner-theatre. It brings together “Letters from Journeys” – consisting mostly of Fukase’s street “selfies” taken across Europe and India in 1989 – and the more sprawling “Private Scenes ’92”. Uninhibitedly brush-stroked with colourful inks, the latter offers an amped-up and fevered tenor to Fukase’s mundane, sometimes surreal, street scenes. Each feels world-containing, condensing elements of documentary, performance and autobiography, with the artist an ever-lurking, unresolvable shadow-presence. Not only does this title contribute new insights into Fukase’s eccentric ways of seeing, but adds a new dimension to his boundary-pushing ideas around subject and object. Indeed, few artists have so ingeniously lent expression to the medium-old cliché that you photograph yourself in the other.

2. Chloé Jafé, SAKASA
the(M) éditions and IBASHO

Up until now, the books which make up Chloé Jafé’s trilogy have only been available in pricy limited editions, so this trade release is very much welcomed, not least for the fact it will, in turn, broaden the audience for, and appreciation of, this most creative and tenacious documentary photographer. SAKASA – which appropriately translates to ‘upside down’ – consists of three extremely elegant titles in which Jafé narrates her experiences across the Japanese archipelago, photographing, respectively, the women of Yakuza, the shadows of Okinawa and the fallen of Osaka. Housed within a stunning slipcase embossed by a black dragon, they stand shoulder to shoulder as technically accomplished and ambitious works. Through a mix of photography, hand-written notes, diary entries and ephemera, Jafé seamlessly stitches together underworlds, but in a way that is ambiguous and incomplete, implying events which unfold between the pages. Continuously feeling out the fine line between outsider and interloper, Jafé situates collaboration at the centre of her practice, seeking to stimulate and interweave the contributions of her subjects to constitute a common narrative. Jafé was clearly always in it for the long haul, so it is fitting that the(M) éditions and IBASHO have taken no shortcuts in their production of her very special project.

3. Tommaso Protti, Terra Vermelha
Void

The opening of Tommaso Protti’s remarkable book, Terra Vermelha, invokes a sense of saudade, depicting dystopic scenes from the end of the world. This is the Brazilian Amazon today, where indigenous communities are fighting for survival in the face of rampant deforestation. What follows is a dense, disorientating and elliptical reportage that riddles through a conflict-stricken hinterland, unravelling – in the dead of night – stories about savage land-grabs, forest fires and brutal gang murders. Humanitarian crises intersect and confound; forthright and full-bleed, Protti’s photographs demand our undivided attention in order that we can even begin to understand what we are looking at, not to mention what is at stake. The book culminates with a reflexive reference to the photojournalistic thrust of Protti’s practice, with mocked-up newspaper clippings collaged to captivating effect. Lending context to his otherwise captionless photographs, they bring home the harrowing realities and wrought complexities of the rainforest. Needless to say, few publishers could have taken us into the Amazon’s heart of chaos as nightmarishly as Void have.

4. Jungjin Lee, Voice
Nazraeli Press

Jungjin Lee’s sublime, immersive and utterly hypnotic entry begins with Pablo Neruda’s ‘La poesía’, in which the poet recalls the night his craft called out to him, amongst raging fires, without a face. This epiphanic image propels Voice, which is, at its core, a meditation on making, resolving and speaking to things. Lee has divided her large-scale book into four stanza-like sections which are punctuated by black spreads. Whilst each is not easily thematised, throughout one finds the alliteration of forms, which spin out stories of the desert – as concept and idea. This is not the first time Nazraeli Press have done exacting justice to the lush materiality of Lee’s photographs, rendered here in quadratones. Collectively, they absent themselves from context; unburdened by identifiable landscapes or linear narrative, they are beholden to no time or place but their own. And even where there is emptiness – stretching sands and lost horizons — there are storms of grain, of noise. Herein lies this book’s transcendent power: transforming landscapes and photographic effects into an aural, bodily and spiritual experience which pierces us with infinite emotional textures, and voices.

5. Robert Cumming, Very Pictorial Conceptual Art
Stanley/Barker

Out with Stanley/Barker, Very Pictorial Conceptual Art is both enlightened and enlightening, building significantly on Aperture’s earlier entry into the astonishing archive of Robert Cumming. The body of work the late American artist produced in the 1970s – the decade he settled on, and began his serious engagement with, photography – has been savvily composed by editor David Campany, whose essay makes the convincing case for Cumming’s range and daring experimentation with the medium that was well ahead of its time. Repetition is employed throughout this handsome book, with its gatefolds filled with multiple views of the same subject-objects, revealing the unique ways Cumming looked, thought and sketched with his large-format camera. Entered swiftly together, one finds that you can always stumble upon something new or intriguing, even if Cumming’s camera models, motorised shark or “0 + 0 = 0” donut equation deliberately defy any utilitarian function. Whether these are images of elements of sculpture or the artist’s idea of sculpture might be beside the point. Let us revel in the incisive eye of Cumming the beholder.

6. Ruben Lundgren, Dream Machine
Jiazazhi

This marvellous and amusing album tells the story of China’s craving for the new through a very specific sub-genre of 20^th century studio portrait photography. As testified by Ruben Lungdren’s Dream Machine – and contra to popular assumptions – ordinary Chinese folk up and down the country embraced “exotic” commodities, including the automobiles and aeroplanes – or gas-guzzling “fart-carts” – that appear in these pictures as kitschy cardboard cut-outs. One can only imagine how painstaking Lungren’s research was in order to source these gems, which fundamentally speak to the power of seeing as not only dreaming, but believing. Jiazazhi’s design is simply delightful, from the spiral-binding which lends a scrapbook feel to the windows which invoke the sensation of entering other worlds, new worlds. And, yet, the old world remains an ever-present too, with quaint visions of the banks of the West Lake embroidered on the cloth cover, details of which are scattered throughout the pages, reverberating in the imaginary. This is a book of rare quality; a real labour of love by Lundgren.

7. Bindi Vora, Mountain of Salt
Perimeter Editions

Another noteworthy vernacular contribution comes from Bindi Vora, whose lyrical pandemic piece winds up as a cacophonous reflection on recent times. Published by Perimeter Editions, Mountain of Salt is small but densely layered, containing hundreds of cleverly juxtaposed archival photographs in concert with appropriated buzz-phrases, idioms, jokes and pledges which the artist pulled from news articles, press conferences and social media in the wake of Brexit and the Black Lives Matter protests. The loose intercourse of text and image delivers a series of thought-provoking moments and emotional triggers, accumulatively resonating for the ways in which eras are formed and form us, both subconsciously and violently. Whilst the digitally overlaid shapes are light and subtle interventions, they do just enough to disturb the syntax of the images, making history peculiar and alive. Vora’s is one of those books that feels both specific and sweeping at the same time; her era-encapsulating vision of a spectred isle.

8. Tarrah Krajnak, RePose
Fw:Books

On making history alive, RePose, Tarrah Krajnak’s deft and deceptively powerful conceptual work with Fw:Books also deserves a mention. The title presents a typology of poses by women, (re)performed by the artist – on-site and in real-time – from her personal collection of printed matter, ranging from fashion catalogues and art history books to vintage pornographic magazines and anthropological studies, even if they are never indexed here. Whilst the female body in art has historically been mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire, Krajnak inhabits the body as a visual territory, to be both critiqued and claimed. These are not so much reappropriations of poses, but, rather, reoriginations of them, with Krajnak’s cable release serving as a kind of umbilical cord which connects her to other images, other women. Although this book is stripped-back and modest in its production, it nevertheless possesses an immediate aesthetic charge, conveying the flickering intensity of a flipbook. The pages unfold and map out a literal lineage, through which Krajnak dances like a ‘snaking aggregate’, as is articulated most beautifully in the accompanying essay by Justine Kurland, who is herself no stranger to archival animations.

9. Corita Kent, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us
J&L Books and Magic Hour Press

One of the great discoveries of the year has come courtesy of J&L Books and Magic Hour Press, who have, in Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us, condensed Corita Kent’s vast trove of source slides into a graphically bold and joyful book which offers a new context to the revolutionary screen prints for which the former nun is known. Immaculately reproduced by Jason Fulford with rounded corners and a real care for colour, the jam-packed visual combinations – laid out innovatively and unpredictably – have the sister singing her way through 1960s Los Angeles, from its vernacular surfaces – a bricolage of street signs, billboards and supermarket produce – to the classrooms of the covenant where Kent taught art. What is most commendable about the edit is how it does not impose a narrative on behalf of the artist, but, instead, channels the spirit of this multi-levelled visionary and her uncanny ability to find meaning in all things modern. Whilst Kent’s language of photography might not bear the explicitly world-changing mission of her language of Pop, what it does teach us, or remind us, is how we see things not as they are, but we are.

10. Lin Zhipeng, Skinny Wave
Same Paper

With each new book, Lin Zhipeng, the Chinese photographer who goes by the name of “223”, distinguishes himself as an increasingly important voice within contemporary photography, and his latest is certainly a leap forward in terms of sophistication and subtlety. Assembled from the small aide-mémoires Zhipeng has collected on the road over the past 20 years, Skinny Wave proposes a B-side to the pop seduction for which the photographer is most celebrated, yet nevertheless retains his trademark blend of classical serenity and ornamental playfulness. It is clear that for Zhipeng, where there is beauty, there is a picture: a blossomed flower, a boy paddling in a stream, a split fruit. Same Paper’s intelligent design does well to enhance the book’s haptic dimensions – not to mention its onion-like layers of meaning – with its scratch-marked cover (which is actually one of four), heavily saturated pages and expansive gatefolds, whose shifts in attention subconsciously seep us into the memories of Zhipeng. Here is an artist who calls for a quiet, contemplative moment with photography; an intimacy that can only be bestowed by a book.♦

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Images:

1-Cover of Masahisa Fukase, Private Scenes (Prestel, 2023). Courtesy of Prestel and Masahisa Fukase Archive.

2-From ‘Private Scenes ’92’ (1991–92) in Masahisa Fukase, Private Scenes (Prestel, 2023). Courtesy of Prestel and Masahisa Fukase Archives.

3-‘Jun with her kimono’ (2016) from Chloé Jafé, SAKASA (the(M) éditions and IBASHO, 2023). Courtesy of the artist, the(M) éditions and IBASHO.

4-‘Manaus’ (2017) from Tommaso Protti, Terra Vermelha (Void, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and Void.

5-‘#29’ (2019) from Jungjin Lee, Voice (Nazraeli Press, 2023). Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery.

6-‘10 Unique Article A’s’ (1975) from Robert Cumming, Very Pictorial Conceptual Art (Stanley/Barker, 2023). Courtesy of The Robert Cumming Archive.

7-‘Untitled’ (c. 1980s) from Ruben Lundgren, Dream Machine (Jiazazhi, 2023). Courtesy of the author.

8-‘Quarantine is a stunt, they could be playing golf’ (2020–21) from Bindi Vora, Mountain of Salt (Perimeter Editions). Courtesy of the artist.

9-From Tarrah Krajnak, RePose (Fw:Books, 2023). Courtesy of the artist.

10-From Corita Kent, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us (J&L Books and Magic Hour Press, 2023). Courtesy of Corita Art Center.

11-‘We have no purity in the night’ (2021) from Lin Zhipeng, Skinny Wave (Same Paper, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and Same Paper.