Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2024

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 2024 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark, with words from Editorial Assistant, Thomas King.


Tim Clark and Thomas King | Top 10 photobooks of 2024 | 05 Dec 2024 | In association with MPB

1. Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape
MACK

Studied witnesses to the State of Israel’s attempt to erase a people and their history, Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez present a quiet yet forceful declaration of Palestinian resilience in Anchor in the Landscape. This striking series of 8×10 black-and-white photographs of olive trees, accompanied by a text from legal scholar and ethnographer Dr. Irus Braverman, made a bold statement at the 60th La Biennale di Venezia earlier this year. Each page of the book pairs a photograph with its precise geographical coordinates, where the olive tree – facing destruction and theft by settlers – anchors livelihoods, culture, and presence in a relentlessly seized and ravaged landscape. The result is a haunting yet beautiful rekindling of connection to Palestinian land in the occupied territories.

2. Karolina Spolniewski, Hotel of Eternal Light
BLOW UP Press

Winner of the 2022 BUP Book Award, Spolniewski’s seven-year multimedia project-turned-book – replete with holographic foil cover – details the psychological and physical scars of detention, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and isolation. At its heart is Hohenschönhausen, the notorious Stasi prison in East Berlin, dubbed the “Hotel of Eternal Light,” where unrelenting artificial lighting twisted inmates’ sense of time. Documentary photography, scans of physical traces, inmates’ belongings, portraits, X-rays, archival imagery, and fragments of memories from conversations with former prisoners are combined through the book’s design approach to enhance meaning, one that also speaks through the inmates: one page repeats ‘everlasting interrogations,’ while another chillingly declares, ‘Every three minutes you get… blinded by the lights.’

3. Agnieszka Sosnowska, För
Trespasser

Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För (meaning journey in Icelandic), takes readers on a raw, poetic journey through the artist’s life on a beautiful stretch of unmistable wilderness. Originally from Poland, she immigrated to the United States as a child, then as a young adult spontaneously visited Iceland, met her partner and built a life there. Where nature is both a solace and an ever-present force, Sosnowska’s photography – especially self-portraiture – charts the ongoing journey of self-discovery and belonging. Against the pulse of land and community, her images invite a deeper reading, culminating in a confident yet vulnerable self-portrait of the artist. But to what end? Sosnowska doesn’t just capture her subjects and surroundings; as SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes recently writes in her review, Sosnowska invites us to reconsider how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian shape our idea of home.

4. Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion
Self Publish, Be Happy

Since the re-election of the man who played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade, Carmen Winant’s sobering photo album-style work – winner of the Author Book Award at the 2024 Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards – feels more urgent than ever. Published by SPBH Editions and MACK and designed with a bold spiral binding, Winant’s contemplative exploration of care resists the relentless efforts of anti-abortion movements and the far right to control women’s bodies. Featuring images of health clinics, Planned Parenthood locations, and abortion clinic staff whose tireless commitment sustains this fight, the book spans 50 years – from 1973, when abortion rights were federally protected, to 2022, following their dissolution. Winant reframes the struggle for care and autonomy as a testament to courage, resistance, and hope – urgently needed qualities. Read Gem Fletcher’s review here.

5. Carla Williams, Tender
TBW Books

It’s often a posthumous exercise to uncover a hidden trove of photographs, but for Carla Williams, her artistic debut has thankfully arrived during her lifetime—adding a new chapter to her distinguished career as a photo historian. At 18, while studying photography at Princeton, Williams began creating black-and-white and colour portraits using Polaroid 35mm and 4×5 Type 55 film formats. Now published by TBW Books, Tender spans photographs taken between 1984 and 1999. The collection collapses time through a body of unapologetically vivid work – playful, provocative, and present. The intimate self-portraits reveal the evolution of her gaze, reclaiming, redefining, and becoming, charting her coming-of-age as an artist and a queer Black woman. Winner of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First Photobook Prize and celebrated with a solo exhibition at Higher Pictures, Carla Williams: Circa 1985 marks the first time much of this work has been published or exhibited.

6. Magdalena Wywrot, Pestka
Deadbeat Club

When I look back on photos of myself as a child, they’re worlds apart from the grainy, high-contrast black-and-white images Magdalena Wywrot created in her project about her daughter, Barbara. These are far less sanitised and reflect the otherness of the universe Wywrot creates in Pestka – a name that means seed, shell, or kernel and is Barbara’s nickname. Accompanied by essays from David Campany and Barbara Rosemary, the series brims with a delicate intimacy yet hums with a raw, almost mystical energy. What began as a spontaneous act of documentation has become a richly layered work of magical realism and gothic narrative. Fragmentary and cinematic, the images possess a haunting poeticism that we might find in the avant-garde sensibilities of Vera Chytilová or Dušan Makavejev – full of the playful, subversive potential that Campany mentions in his text.

7. Johny Pitts, Afropean: A Journal
Mörel Books

Johny Pitts, founder of afropean.com and author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Penguin, 2020), unites his expansive work in this thoughtfully curated photobook tracing a five-month journey encompassing Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Stockholm. Pitts, in his search for a different side of the continent, collates an epic travelogue that blends striking photography with personal ephemera – tickets, diary notes, maps, postcards – offers a tactile, immersive book that flies in the face of rising populism and far-right politics across the continent. New essays by Pitts deepen the conversation on the Black European experience alongside a six-part podcast, a soundtrack, and three short films shot on location – a bold, multi-layered exploration of Afropean life.

8. Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer, Ein Dorf 1950–2022
Hartmann Books

Michael Grieve writes, ‘time, of course, is the great force here,’ in Ein Dorf 1950–2022; that force brings ‘an arbitrary photographic topography brought to reason.’ The village of Berka, Germany, has been captured over seven decades by three remarkable photographers united by a family story – coincidental or not – that ties together personal history with the sweeping political shifts from state socialism to the reunification of a divided country. Alongside essays by Jenny Erpenbeck, Steffen Mau, and Gary Van Zante, the 220 black-and-white images glimpse the subtle yet seismic moments that have redefined the village, its people, and its evolving identity. Here is a rivetting perspective, as sociological as it is a documentary, on a place that has witnessed history, and its political reality unfolding in real-time. Since we published our review, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler have deservedly been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Public of Germany (2024) for services to photography.

9. Olivia Arthur, Murmurings of the Skin
VOID

After gracing festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide, Murmurings of the Skin now emerges as a striking publication from the mighty VOID. Nealy eight years ago, Olivia Arthur began her work on physicality, capturing the energy flowing through bodies and the sensation of skin on skin. Sparked by her experience of pregnancy, the work blossomed into a vivid exploration of youth, sexuality, and touch – charged moments of intimacy. In the stillness of pandemic isolation, these themes gained new urgency. The result is a tactile, sensitive work that remedies the struggle of feeling at home in our skin.

10. Máté Bartha, Anima Mundi
The Eriskay Connection

“Our world right now operates in code. So, if we’re talking about code, isn’t everything about how the universe functions?” There’s no denying that Máté Bartha’s latest work, Anima Mundi, leans into the obscure. If we begin with the title’s translation, Anima Mundi means “world spirit,” a concept rooted in Platonic thought, reflecting an ancient idea of a universal organising principle that connects all beings. Divided into chapters exploring urban phenomena ranging from the microcosmic to the cosmic, Anima Mundi composes intricate patterns, layered grid structures, and cryptic visual codes. Its poetic and philosophical approach to the desperate act of seeking structure and meaning invites us to return to the question: how do we make sense of the universe and its code? How do we find sense in arbitrariness?

+1 Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950-Present
10×10 Photobooks

What is the relationship between visual culture and protest? Flashpoint!, both a powerful survey of activism and visual tour de force, is a meticulously curated, global collection of protest photography, zines, posters, pamphlets, and independent publications from the 1950s to the present. The latest offering from 10×10 Photobooks is born from the 2017 project AWAKE: Protest, Liberty, and Resistance collection, which organised protest photobooks by themes through an open call. Flashpoint! builds on this with seven expansive chapters, each containing multiple sub-themes. Across 500 pages, 750+ images, and a series of thought-provoking essays, the endlessly evocative collection reflects Arthur Fournier’s ‘aesthetic of urgency,’ contrasting the polished, institutional protest imagery with the raw, time-sensitive visuals of grassroots movements.♦

 

 

 

 


Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and a student on BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

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

Images:

1-Cover of Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape (MACK, 2024). Courtesy MACK

2-Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape (MACK, 2024). Courtesy MACK

3-Karolina Spolniewski, Hotel of Eternal Light (BLOW UP Press, 2024). Courtesy BLOW UP Press

4-Agnieszka Sosnowska, För (Trespasser, 2024). Courtesy Trespasser

5-Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (Self Publish, Be Happy, 2024). Courtesy Self Publish, Be Happy

6-Carla Williams, Tender (TBW Books, 2024). Courtesy TBW Books

7-Magdalena Wywrot, Pestka (Deadbeat Club, 2024). Courtesy Deadbeat Club

8-Johny Pitts, Afropean: A Journal (Mörel Books, 2024). Courtesy Mörel Books

9-Werner Mahler, Ein Dorf, 1977-78 in Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer, Ein Dorf 1950–2022 (Hartmann Books, 2024). Courtesy Hartmann Books

10-Olivia Arthur, Murmurings of the Skin (VOID, 2024). Courtesy VOID

11-Máté Bartha, Anima Mundi (The Eriskay Collection, 2024). Courtesy The Eriskay Collection

12-Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950-Present, edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich (10×10 Photobooks, 2024). Courtesy 10×10 Photobooks


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Agnieszka Sosnowska

För

Book review by Shana Lopes

Published by Trespasser, Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För, is a coming-of-age story about relocating a remote corner of Iceland, which introduces us to her students, showcases her farm, and captures the passage of time as she and her husband age over two decades. As SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes writes, Sosnowska invites us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home.


Shana Lopes | Book review | 18 July 2024

A reindeer decomposing on the ground; white sheets hanging outside to dry; a man bathing in an outdoor tub: moments of quiet flow through Agnieszka Sosnowska’s pictures in her sumptuous first book, För, recently published by Trespasser. By virtue of their objecthood, all photographs are inherently silent, yet many evoke the sounds of whoever or whatever is pictured. Sosnowska’s vision offers a distinctive sonic experience of blustery winds careening through a rural landscape, bitterly cold water pouring down a cliff face, hushed conversations between people who have known each other for decades. And while many of her photographs point to stillness, the sequencing of the book, though nonlinear, is rhythmic, its cadence at once brooding and hypnotic, rapturous and meditative. Self-portraits form the chorus to this poignant ballad in black and white, bridged by stark, dramatic landscapes, unpretentious domestic still lifes, and pictures of students, friends, and family at ease. We may think we listen only with our ears and look solely with our eyes, yet we also sense with our bodies, and these Icelandic scenes exude the briskness of their unforgiving environment. Even the book’s exterior adds to the overall experience. It is bound in a cool bluish-gray cloth, the colour I imagine Iceland’s sky and water look like. It depicts a world of raw beauty that asks us to be present and attuned with all our senses.

Much of the power of Sosnowska’s photographs, the majority taken with a large-format film camera, resides in their uncluttered simplicity. Clean lines guide our eye, but the scenes are neither immaculate nor pristine. They are lived in, revealing signs of aging, even decay: a rusted car door, the well-worn cushions of a couch, a pile of old, used tires. Every one was captured near the artist’s home in eastern Iceland, where she has lived and worked as an elementary school teacher for more than two decades. Originally from Poland, she immigrated to the United States as a child, then as a young adult visited Iceland on a whim and fell in love there.

The book’s title – För – translates as “trip” in Icelandic, and so signifies a journey and the physical imprints one leaves behind. The word also connotes a vessel that delivers things from one location to another. So, what are these photographs transporting? What kind of trip is Sosnowska taking us on, and what traces has she left behind for us to follow?

This is certainly a journey of belonging, of making a home, and it is raw, authentic, and unpretentious. Sometimes intensely intimate. Consider, for example, the photographs of the artist and her husband. In one, he stands behind her, his hand inside her button-front dress, as she stares unabashedly at the camera. In another sublime moment, they pose before a misty waterscape like a modern Caspar David Friedrich painting, the view so awe-inspiring and powerful that their presence becomes secondary to the terrain. These pictures are not about tourism. Rather, they take us on an expedition of Sosnowska’s life. We meet her students; we see her farm; we watch her and her husband, whom she calls her Viking in the acknowledgments, age over the course of 20 years. I find myself wondering why she is publishing her first photobook now, if she has been shooting for this long and her photographs are this incredible. Indeed, her training harks back to the 1990s, when she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art with professors such as Barbara Bosworth, Nicholas Nixon, Frank Gohlke, and Abe Morell. But that is a story for another time. För centers the artist’s Icelandic journey and asks us to reflect on our own paths and the imprints we leave.

A spellbinding landscape framed by a jigsaw-puzzle web of trees opens the book. Soft grasses line the foreground, and beyond the arboreal lattice we see a seemingly boundless terrain. The photograph is a literal and metaphorical entrance to our trip as well as a portal into Sosnowska’s mind. It is also a landscape shaped by humans, which seems to be a key theme running through the publication: human versus nature, or perhaps more aptly, with nature. The photographs in För often depict coexistence and interaction between humans and the natural environment, highlighting the beauty and fragility of this relationship.

What truly stands out in this beautifully edited grouping (a hallmark of Trespasser’s publications) are the self-portraits. Vulnerable and unapologetically authentic, they function like punctuation, little reminders to pause and remember whose journey this is. Sometimes Sosnowska is alone, other times she is accompanied by her husband. In watching them grow older, we witness them undergoing life’s most humbling experience. The artist’s face and body change, as does her relationship with the camera, as she moves from performing for it to collaborating with it. These self-portraits are a testament to the artist’s personal evolution and its reflection in her work.

Together, the pictures show us what home means to Sosnowska: the people, the place, the architecture, the small details. She notes, ‘By taking these pictures, I belong. I am part of something greater than myself. These photographs are both my myths and truth. They are my love, hopes, fears, and strength.’ Home, for her, is not singular or fixed. We sometimes have the privilege of choosing a new home, and that place changes us. A trip to Iceland more than 20 years ago forever changed Sosnowska’s path, bringing with it a new language, an intense love, a teaching career, and a rural way of life. Ultimately, this book is a vessel detailing one artist’s search for a sense of belonging, inviting us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home. It is a journey that resonates with our own quests for connection. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Trespasser. © Agnieszka Sosnowska

För is published by Trespasser.


Shana Lopes is an Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Born and raised in San Francisco, she earned her doctorate in art history from Rutgers University with a focus on the history of photography. Over the past fifteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as 
Constellations: Photographs in DialogueSightlines: Photographs from the CollectionA Living for Us All: Artists and the WPASea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award.  


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique, and activism.

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Bryan Schutmaat

Good Goddamn

Book review by Gerry Badger

I think I am beginning to see a trend amongst a certain group of American photographers, not exactly a runaway trend but at least a tendency. I thought this when I saw Tim Carpenter’s book, Local Objects, which was deservedly praised by John Gossage and also Ron Jude, who is himself part of this tendency, while Gossage is one of its big inspirations. Carpenter’s book was small, shot in black-and-white, restrained in design, and concentrated upon the photography. And crucially, it dealt with non-metropolitan America, the huge heartlands of the country that are so different, and almost diametrically opposed to the coastal conurbations.

Photographers like Ron Jude, Christian Patterson, Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks and others, most of them originally from the heartlands themselves, have been examining America’s interior myths and realities for a number of years, and can be said to constitute the latest generation of photographers, beginning with of course Walker Evans, who have gone in search of – as the French might put it – America profond.

Bryan Schutmaat first came to the photo-world’s attention with a classic of the genre. His Grays the Mountain Sends (2014) was a superb book, a series of portraits and landscapes of small, almost forgotten communities in the Rocky Mountains. It was a lavish, superbly produced book, shot in sumptuous colour, which demonstrated that Schutmaat was not simply a photographer of rare ability – especially in his haunting portraits – but someone who could use photography effectively to build a narrative.

That is the point about Schutmmat and what someone has called – whether kindly or unkindly I’m not sure – the ‘lumberjack’ school of photography. John Gossage recently said that he took up photography because it “allowed me to understand things that were not spoken.” Looking around a lot of today’s photography, it would seem that its makers are suspicious of this dictum, and are distrustful of photography without the crutch of words – or overelaborate design, which can amount to the same thing.

Not so Ron Jude, or Tim Carpenter, or Bryan Schutmaat. Grays the Mountain Sends did not suffer from a surfeit of words, and neither does Good Goddamn, which is modest in size but displays both an assuredness and a quiet ambition. Interestingly, Schutmaat has switched to black and white for this project, which seems to be making a claim for the work’s seriousness. Similarly, the restrained, classical design, like that of many American photobooks, states a certain respect for the integrity of the photographs themselves.

Good Goddamn, published by Trespassertells a nominally simple story. Shot over a period of a few days in February 2017, in Leon County, Texas, Good Goddamn documents, in only twenty-seven photographs, the last few days of freedom of Schutmaat’s friend Kris before he went into prison. As this is a book of hints and half-lights, the spaces between the pictures being as important, so to speak, as the pictures themselves, we are not informed of the crime that led to Kris’s incarceration, nor the duration of the sentence. But the fact he was not in custody possibly suggests that the misdemeanour was not serious, although the psychological weight of the book perhaps points to the opposite.

The cast of characters, besides Kris himself and the bleak mid-winter Texan landscape, are an old pickup truck and a hunting rifle with a very business-like telescopic sight. And there is an enigmatic blurred figure in two images at the end who might be Bryan Schutmaat, or a deputy sheriff come to escort Kris to his fate. Kris’ final days of freedom seem to be spent drinking Coors Lite or shooting his gun. So far this is a typically male Texan as we imagine them, tough guys who never cry, but the macho surface image is thoroughly undercut by the book’s elegiac tone and complex emotional mood. There is a general aura of wistfulness, not to say sadness, but also encompassing moments of reflection, uncertainty, loneliness, and bitter reflection, making for a concerto of shifting emotions in which the bare, gloomy landscape pulls the strings. The constant background is the expectation that what will follow will be a life changing experience for Kris, and not, at least in the short term, a good one.

All this is suggested by Schutmaat’s exceedingly well judged photographs – the somewhat indeterminate portraits of Kris drinking, smoking, or cradling his rifle, in nagging juxtaposition with the bleak but beautiful February landscape. One can almost feel the damp. Yet even a bleak, damp landscape will be a great loss when you are behind bars. I call the portraits indeterminate, not because they are soft in focus, but because they have an unsettling quality, which may come from nothing more than the sight of Kris in a short-sleeved tee shirt in a winter landscape – even though we are told that the weather was unseasonably warm during the shoot. Of course, it is more than that, Schutmaat has conveyed the psychology of this moment in Kris’ life unerringly, and makes us feel it too. Little wonder we are disturbed and unsettled.

In the end, Good Goddamn is about the photographs, which is not always the case with photobooks. As he demonstrated in Grays the Mountain Sends, Bryan Schutammt is a photographer with a rare sensibility, the pictures in Good Goddamn are so finely calculated and balanced. I can only compare his talent to that of a superior musician. There are many calling themselves ‘musicians’, but the difference between an ordinary musician and a great one is vast, and yet tiny – a matter of subtlety, the right emphasis, and nuance. It is like this with Schutmaat’s photographs. His images sing, like a well-played piece of music. They are a pleasure to contemplate, and contemplate over and over again for their felicities. They lend the book its visual delights, but also its emotional depths and bitter-sweet tone.

As always in photography, they are pictures of things we have seen before, many times. Ordinary but important things. Yet in themselves they are new, pictures we have not seen before.

All images courtesy of the artist and Trespasser. © Bryan Schutmaat


Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and photography critic of more than 40 years. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and monographs on John Gossage and Stephen Shore, as well as Phaidon’s 55s on Chris Killip (2001) and Eugene Atget (2001). In 2007 he published The Genius of Photography, the book of the BBC television series of the same name, and in 2010 The Pleasures of Good Photographs, an anthology of essays that was awarded the 2011 Infinity Writers’ Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He also co-authored The Photobook: A History, Vol I, II and III with Martin Parr.