Christmas is fast approaching, bringing with it the timeless search for the perfect gift — one that moves, surprises, or simply delights the people we care about. In a world dominated by screens, offering a photobook is far more than a simple present: it is an invitation to slow down, to contemplate, and to marvel at images that tell stories, reveal artistic approaches, stir emotions, and above all showcase the astonishing diversity of perspectives through which photographers observe our world.
In this comprehensive guide, Blind has brought together a selection of the finest photobooks published in 2025
Mary’s Book by Robert Frank
Robert Frank, often called the “poet with a camera” and best known for his revolutionary book The Americans — first published by Delpire in 1958 and a landmark in street photography — began his artistic journey in postwar Paris. His stays in the city between 1949 and 1953 shaped the rest of his life and work. It was in 1949 that he created Mary’s Book, a scrapbook-like chronicle of Parisian life intended for his fiancée back in the United States.Composed of interlaced pages combining cut-and-pasted photographs and handwritten notes in a subtle mix of French and English, this intimate object possesses a poetry and simplicity that deeply touch the reader. A pivotal moment in Frank’s personal life, Mary’s Book also marks the birth of his photobook practice. The distinctive way he arranges images on the page — something that would become his signature — already appears here.
Delpire & co
136 pages, €60
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L.A. Polaroids by Robby Müller
In the 1980s, the celebrated Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller spent months away from home, working with leading directors such as Wim Wenders to create some of the decade’s most memorable films, among them Repo Man, Paris – Texas, and To Live and Die in L.A. After long shooting days, Müller returned to the Kensington Motel in Santa Monica — a modest residence hotel just behind Ocean Boulevard, steps from the beach. He cherished its simple comforts: a folding ironing board, a slowly simmering coffeepot, and Garfield, the hotel cat, who kept him company. He always carried his Polaroid SX-70, photographing tender, fleeting impressions during his breaks. These images offer what William Friedkin once described as “a foreigner’s eye” on America. In these Polaroids, Müller immortalizes a vanished Los Angeles: cramped motel rooms, edges of beaches, street corners, and a city built for cars, seen by a cinematographer who preferred to walk. The pictures reveal a man far from home, seeking calm and light in the interstices of the everyday.
Stanley Barker
96 pages, £50
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The Dead Are Glad to Be Remembered by Todd Hido
Half artist’s book, half scrapbook album, The Dead Are Glad to Be Remembered — signed and numbered in an edition of 500 — invites readers on a wandering journey through Todd Hido’s work in conversation with his collection of vernacular photographs. Each page offers an open-ended narrative composed by Hido with the collaboration of his wife Marina Luz. The book brings together portraits, urban house views, and landscapes by Hido — both unpublished and iconic — interspersed with postcards, vintage book covers, film posters, amateur portraits, sketches, photobooth strips, and more. Found photography is presented in all its materiality, blurring genres to create a singular work where atmospheres shift between themes of desire, solitude, memory, and the sub- and unconscious — hallmarks of Hido’s work. These threads continue in an essay by writer Brad Zellar at the heart of the book.
Atelier EXB
144 pages, €185
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The Stillness of Life by Don McCullin
The Stillness of Life gathers new still lifes and landscapes by Sir Don McCullin, many published here for the first time. Released on the occasion of the British photographer’s 90th birthday, the book offers a contemplative rereading of an oeuvre spanning several decades. Since the early 1980s, McCullin has been creating still lifes in his garden shed in Somerset. Each composition is crafted lyrically from natural elements — cut flowers (lilies, foxgloves, gladioli), fruits, mushrooms — often paired with cherished souvenirs from his travels: an Oriental bronze dragon, a flea-market vase, a statuette of a Hindu goddess. Arranged like improvised altars, these objects pay tribute to impermanence and the passing of time. The landscapes in the book span McCullin’s entire career, from his early photographs of industrial northern England to India, Africa, and more recent views captured nearer to home.
Gost Books
112 pages, €95
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Atlantic Coast by Anastasia Samoylova
In 1954, American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document historic U.S. Route 1, foreseeing the seismic changes the rapidly expanding interstate highway system would bring to the towns and cities along its path. Spanning the original Thirteen Colonies and beyond — from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida — Route 1 was built over three centuries from sections of what was once called the Atlantic Road. Inspired by Abbott’s keen and poetic observations on life along this artery, and marking the 70th anniversary of her project, Florida-based photographer Anastasia Samoylova undertook her own journey to revisit communities forever reshaped by the highway. Working in both color and black and white, she offers an intimate perspective on an American landscape irrevocably transformed by constant industrial, commercial, and urban expansion — as well as by the displacement and resilience of both human and animal life.
Aperture
144 pages, $65
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The Great Acceleration by Edward Burtynsky
A sweeping retrospective of Edward Burtynsky’s four-decade career, The Great Acceleration reveals the depth of his exploration of human-altered landscapes around the globe. The book highlights both the fragility of these environments and their enduring beauty.
From North American open-pit mines to Azerbaijani oil fields, from China’s terraced rice paddies to oil bunkering in Nigeria, Burtynsky has traveled the world with an unrelenting desire to document how organized human activity has reshaped the Earth. Bringing together many of his most iconic images — alongside previously unpublished prints — this volume serves as an urgent call to action, inviting us to contemplate the grandeur that remains in nature and to better understand the challenges and responsibilities that lie before us.
Steidl
136 pages, €45
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The Heart of the Matter by Carrie Mae Weems
Transcending the limits of medium, chronology, and geography, The Heart of the Matter places the artist — along with her spiritual and philosophical journeys — at the center of the dialogue. Carrie Mae Weems is an essential figure in contemporary art, known for her work exploring history, identity, and power. This comprehensive monograph presents substantial selections from her major series, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–1982) to her most recent works on the Black Church. Throughout the book, Weems’s spiritual reflections provide crucial insight into the thinking of an artist whose vision resonates across generations. New essays and contributions from renowned scholars underline the singular power of her perspective in confronting the complexities and injustices of our world. The book accompanies an exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, opening in April 2025.
Aperture
264 pages, €75
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The classroom de Hicham Benohoud
The Classroom explores themes of control and discipline within postcolonial Moroccan identity through staged classroom images created between 1994 and 2002. Frustrated by the rigidity of the Moroccan education system in the 1990s, art teacher Hicham Benohoud began using photography as a teaching tool. He set up an improvised darkroom in his classroom to encourage collaborative, hands-on learning, inviting students to explore their creativity and sense of identity. The resulting images, produced with his students, carry tension and alienation. They blend absurdity, humor, and unease in compositions that are both meticulously framed and subtly disarming. By juxtaposing the monotony of the classroom with visual explorations of freedom and control, The Classroom becomes a playful yet existential critique of postcolonial identity, where childlike gestures merge with a more ambiguous aesthetic evoking oppression, violence, and isolation.
This book received the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook of the Year Award.
Loose Joints
144 pages, €47
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The Ramble, NYC 1969 by Arthur Tress
In 1969, Arthur Tress began taking his camera with him during walks in the Ramble, a wild, overgrown corner of Central Park that had become New York’s most famous outdoor meeting spot for gay men. Designed in the 19th century as a picturesque woodland, the area grew increasingly untamed by the late 1960s and became a hidden, nearly forgotten enclave at the center of the city. For a little over a year, Tress returned regularly, capturing the daily choreography of encounters and creating what is now considered the earliest known photographic documentation of this phenomenon in a natural setting. His images portray the flow of men through the Ramble — some photographed from afar, others posing or gently staged. Tress views these photographs not only as documents but also as a form of homosexual still life, both allegory and dream.
Stanley Barker
112 pages, £60
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You Are What You Do by Daniel Arnold
Over the past 15 years, Daniel Arnold has become a cult figure in New York’s visual landscape, known for his raw and authentic encounters with its inhabitants. Working in the lineage of classic New York street photography, he captures the city’s chaos, boldness, humor, and vitality. Yet You Are What You Do reveals something deeper: a tenderness present in every frame. The book brings together moments of genuine sadness and grief, mixed with joy, alongside spontaneous street-cinema scenes, as well as images shot during fashion sessions and film sets.
Loose Joints
184 pages, €54
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Sônia by Claudia Andujar
In 1971, Claudia Andujar met young aspiring model Sônia Carvalho in São Paulo. Through colored filters and unexpected framing, Andujar transformed their single photo session into a bold X-ray of the female body — one of her earliest experimental works, both psychedelic and sensual. This book is the first dedicated to this pivotal series, created long before Andujar’s now-celebrated work with the Yanomami people.
Textuel
64 pages, €49
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Shima No Ama by Kusukazu Uraguchi
For centuries, Japan’s ama — free-diving fisherwomen — have fascinated the nation’s imagination. Diving without oxygen tanks, they gather abalone, shellfish, and seaweed, providing financial independence within their households. From the mid-1950s for more than three decades, Kusukazu Uraguchi (1922–1988) photographed the ama in the Shima region along Japan’s Pacific coast. Drawn from more than 40,000 mostly unpublished negatives, this remarkable archive of landscapes, portraits, and underwater scenes recounts both the everyday life and the unique place these women hold in Japanese society. Uraguchi’s photographic language — the sculptural strength of his contrasty black-and-whites, his off-kilter framing, and his spontaneous gesture-based approach — celebrates freedom of movement, solidarity, and independence. These images speak of cultural heritage as much as of modernity, documenting communities that underwent profound changes as Japan urbanized after the war.
Atelier EXB
168 pages, €49
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Place de la République by Thomas Boivin
At the heart of Paris stands the Place de la République, a crossroads where lives intersect briefly. Since the 19th century, it has hosted demonstrations, strikes, vigils, and celebrations — a place where Paris sees itself reflected. Today, it remains a symbolic space of gathering and daily life, where young people come to linger, talk, wait, and observe. For five years, Thomas Boivin photographed the young Parisians who passed through it, capturing the city’s fleeting harmonies. His portraits offer a discreet record of a generation coming of age in a city in constant transformation. His lens lingers on small details — fashion, posture, gestures — that reveal how these young people construct their identity and the image they wish to project. Together, the portraits reflect how youth finds its place in the urban center, claiming space, crossing paths, and sketching new perspectives on identity, gender, and belonging. “I began frequenting the Place de la République in 2018, a vast square in the heart of Paris,” Boivin says. “On warm sunny mornings I went back, drawn by the opportunity to portray the people gathering there.”
Stanley Barker
84 pages, £46
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Les rêveries d’Agnès by Agnès Varda
This book, accompanying the exhibition at the Musée Soulages in Rodez (France), invites readers to (re)discover the enchanted world of Agnès Varda. From the beaches of her childhood in Sète to her formative encounter with the Schlegel family and Linou (Valentine Schlegel), nicknamed “Linou-blivable”… all the way to Noirmoutier, the island of choice where Varda, Jacques Demy, and their children spent their vacations. Along the way appear huts, circuses, dreamers — the universe of Varda in all its tenderness and eccentricity.
Delpire & co
160 pages, €29
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One-Way Ticket to Vietnam 1966–1968 by Catherine Leroy
Catherine Leroy was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal for courage and independence in reporting, and one of the very few female photographers to cover the Vietnam War between 1966 and 1968. She was just 21 when she flew to Saigon on a one-way ticket with only a Leica and a hundred dollars. She quickly befriended American soldiers, sharing their daily lives — they were of the same generation. For three years she covered the conflict from the front lines. She followed patrols on missions, shared rations and makeshift sleeping quarters with Marines. Her tight framing and physical proximity captured faces and bodies caught in the turmoil of gunfire. In Vietnam’s heat and mud, Leroy recorded moments of courage, fear, tension, and also friendship, solidarity, and the anguish of young men overwhelmed by violence.Her lens also revealed the despair of Vietnamese civilians and the devastation on both sides. Captured during the Tet Offensive in Huế by North Vietnamese troops, she produced a remarkable report that appeared on the cover of Life. Her photographs traveled the world.
Atelier EXB
240 pages, €49
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The Spanish by Luis Baylón
All his life, Baylón tried, in his words, to “depict reality naturally. Without composing or altering the scene… Photographing people as they are, as they present themselves to the world, and not as the photographer wishes them to be.” At 26, his father gave him a Rolleiflex he would never part with, using it to capture people’s soul. He photographed children, beggars, sex workers, and outsiders. Stray dogs and cats, street musicians, fleeting lovers — nothing escaped his attentive gaze. His friend Quico Rivas described the “Baylón recipe” as a mix of “great sincerity, a touch of cunning, a certain cheekiness, and excellent reflexes.” This book presents his universe through a selection of black-and-white images taken between 1982 and 2014 across various Spanish cities (mainly Madrid, but also Barcelona, Benidorm, Murcia, Valencia, and Zamora). Texts by novelist Andrés Barba and photographer Bernard Plossu, both close to Baylón, offer sensitive reflections on his singular approach and vision.
Delpire
184 pages, €42
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Konkursas by Francesca Allen
In Konkursas, Francesca Allen photographs participants in Lithuania’s annual Konkursas Pasaulio Ilgaplaukės, a competition celebrating the world’s longest hair. Hundreds of girls and women with hair stretching for meters walk the runway, their carefully groomed locks measured by gloved judges before being shaken out in a final ceremony. Fascinated by ritual and coming-of-age, Allen used this event to explore the symbolic role of hair in femininity. “Hair affects how others perceive us — our professional image, our identity, our religion, and our culture. It plays a central role in constructing the self, but also shapes how we judge others.” The resulting images — unsettling, humorous, and slightly surreal — examine the tension between modernity and tradition, obsession and aspiration, and the shifting notions of femininity and girlhood.
Steidl
72 pages, €75
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Un désir absolu de mémoire by Pauline Vermare
For nearly 30 years, Northern Ireland was torn apart by one of the most violent European conflicts of the 20th century: the Troubles (1969–1998), which claimed almost 4,000 lives. These years of extreme tension produced an extraordinary body of images by photographers from around the world. The seventh title in the TXT collection — created in 2018 and directed by Agnès Sire — examines how this conflict generated new photographic approaches. The singularity and geography of the Troubles transformed the practice of those who witnessed them. Pauline Vermare details the range of methods, from photojournalism to more artistic explorations, from documentation to remembrance, that shaped an “Irish photographic archive.” Focusing on key historical moments — the Battle of the Bogside (1969), Bloody Sunday (1972), the death of Bobby Sands (1981) — the author weaves parallel histories: that of photography and that of Ireland. Photographers such as Gilles Caron, Don McCullin, and Gilles Peress would make Northern Ireland central to their work. Lesser-known or unexpected perspectives also emerge, including those of Akihiko Okamura, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Frankie Quinn. The book highlights the emergence of new visual forms that move beyond traditional journalistic codes to create more open, experimental languages.
Atelier EXB
384 pages, €24
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Fashion by Mark Power
The photographs in Fashion were taken by Mark Power over 27 years and across 23 countries. Shot on construction sites, in factories, quarries, shipyards, foundries, recycling centers, theaters, and other production spaces, many were originally commissioned assignments. Some depict recognizable architectural landmarks; others show more obscure sites. Certain images highlight minute, often overlooked details, while others display Power’s ability to capture monumental scale. Together, they reveal a sustained practice in which every photograph is composed with meticulous care. Notably, the book contains no captions, descriptions, or dates. As a result, the images are not organized by place or chronology but by visual affinities of color, form, and light. Subtle humor surfaces in the details — a hole in a shoe, rows of white gloves drying, or a neatly arranged broom closet. Freed from their commercial or industrial context, the photographs become enigmatic and poetic.
Gost Books
520 pages, €90
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Far from the sky by Laurent Ballesta
In Loin du ciel (Far from the sky), underwater photographer and diver Laurent Ballesta reveals images of discoveries made over the past 15 years. Faced with this rich abundance of surprises, he turned to his longtime diving companion Pierre Descamp to help sort through memories and recount these slices of life. Together, they lead readers into a world where the sea is a treasure chest of mysteries.
Andromède Editions
296 pages, €70
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Blank Notes by Marshall To
Marshall To grew up in a second-generation Chinese immigrant family in rural Canada. His Taoist family ran a Chinese restaurant. To’s father believed humans lived in a supernatural world parallel to the physical one, surrounded by spirits of loved ones awaiting reincarnation or wandering restlessly. In Taoism, on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, the Gates of Hell open, allowing hungry spirits to roam the Earth in search of food. Families honor their dead during this period, praying for protection and burning Hell Bank Notes to help spirits live comfortably in the afterlife. These hungry ghosts are dangerous, taking many forms — owls, snakes, moths, birds, foxes, wolves, tigers — and sometimes even transforming into beautiful men or women to seduce and possess. This season is both a celebration and a warning: one must act carefully, avoiding offense toward those unseen. The gates are open, and the spirits are hungry.
Charcoal Press
144 pages, $75
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Radio Ballasteath by François-Xavier Gbré
Franco-Ivorian photographer François-Xavier Gbré develops an artistic practice that explores territories and revisits history, focusing particularly on architecture as a witness to memory and social change. As the first laureate of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès “Latitudes” program, he chose to follow the railway line connecting Abidjan to Niger. Built during French West Africa’s colonial era and once used to transport raw materials from Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Niger — as well as passengers — the line remains active today but serves only freight. Small stations typical of colonial modernist architecture and several railway segments have since been abandoned. In many places, lush vegetation has slowly invaded waiting rooms, warehouses, and aging ballast. For more than a year, Gbré traveled the territories along the line, photographing wagons, stations, maintenance workshops, and a diversity of landscapes. His images carry a quiet melancholy, a meditation on the passage of time etched into matter. Sun-drenched landscapes are contrasted with close-up fragments — surfaces peeled by time, textures eaten by rust. Gradually, a bygone atmosphere emerges, a sense of suspended time. The journey proposed by the photographer recounts a history that has ended, yet whose echoes linger in regions long shaped by colonial presence, where its imprint persists despite nature and human change.
Atelier EXB
104 pages, €45
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