As an antidote to your unyielding Instagram feed, consider the photobook. In 2018, the form continued to be the most intimate way for photographers to fulfill and share their work. Here, TIME’s photography staff has selected the 25 we loved most this year.
Three explored intimate worlds particularly incisively. In Deana Lawson’s self-titled first monograph (Aperture), an elegant satin-covered book, the celebrated young artist solidified her unique sensibility within collaborative, lush portraiture. Like a painter, Lawson uses the large-format camera to craft a formal tableaux where ideas of representation, performance and power converge — elevating the everyday environments and allowing the subjects to assert themselves.
Meanwhile, Andrew Moisey designed his American Fraternity (Daylight) as an illustrated handbook filled with secret rituals and history. For eight years, he was allowed to capture the inner life of a fraternity house, which feels as if it could be from almost anywhere in America or any time since the release of the 1978 film Animal House — but was particularly powerful in a year where conversations about “toxic masculinity” circled some of the U.S. government’s most powerful men. Moisey’s book feels like a peek inside a clandestine world laughing about a joke that isn’t funny anymore. “The culture that happens in a fraternity house ends up infecting the rest of the country,” Moisey told TIME, “especially when brothers become leaders.”
And in the compilation of loopy family photographs by Michael E. Northrup in Dream Away (Stanley/Barker), the follow-up to Babe (J+L Books, selected for TIME’s 2012 list), the artist opens his archive of early work from 1976–88 and looks at his own love and marriage. In the tradition of photographers making books around their families (like Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann or Doug DuBois), Northrup balances the beauty of domestic life within the sensibility of an acid trip. Some images are touching while others are tempered with a looming anxiety about mortality. Nevertheless, the book gives the feeling that love, longing and a sense of whimsy make life in Northrup’s world feel hopeful.
Almost all of our notable books seem to test the boundaries of studied, well-hewn documentary works. For instance, Undocumented by John Moore and Upstate Girls by Brenda Ann Kenneally use the book format as the ultimate expression of the epic story. And John Edmond’s Higher, Rose Marie Cromwell’s El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, Jo Ann Walters’ Wood River/Blue Pool and many other photobooks found space to preserve the overlooked. Works like Landing Lights Park (ROMAN NVMERALS) by David Rothenberg were more illusive; its untethered sense of reality makes what may otherwise seem mundane — the area around LaGuardia Airport in Queens, N.Y. — into an incredible exercise in mindful seeing.
All of these books are attempts at seeing anew. They play with notions of sequence. They challenge our habits, increasingly defined by ceaseless scrolling. We hope they delight, transport or, perhaps most importantly, make you take a sacred moment to see the world differently.
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
Published by Aperture
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The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual
By Andrew Moisey
Published by Daylight
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Dream Away
By Michael Northrup
Published by STANLEY/BARKER
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Lars Tunbjörk
Published by Max Ström
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Vivian Maier: The Color Work
Published by Harper Design
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On Abortion: And the repercussions of lack of access
By Laia Abril
Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing
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American Interiors
By M L Casteel
Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing
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Of Love and War
By Lynsey Addario
Published by Penguin Press
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Liberty Theater
By Rosalind Fox Solomon
Published by Mack
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Kagerou
By Yusuke Takagi
Published by Akina Books
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Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City
By Brenda Ann Kenneally
Published by Regan Arts.
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Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply
Published by University of Texas Press
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Jo Ann Walters: Wood River Blue Pool
Published by Image Text Ithaca
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Higher
By John Edmonds
Published by Capricious
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Undocumented: Immigration and the Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border
By John Moore
Published by powerHouse Books
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Landing Lights Park
By David Rothenberg
Published by Roman Nvmerals
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El Libro Supremo de la Suerte
By Rose Marie Cromwell
Published by TIS Books/Light Work
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Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
By Zanele Muholi
Published by Aperture
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In My Room
By Saul Leiter
Published by Steidl
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My Birth
By Carmen Winant
Published by Image Text Ithaca/SPBH Editions
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The Parallel State
By Guy Martin
Published by GOST Books
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Experimental Relationship Vol. 1
By Pixy Liao
Published by Jiazazhi Press
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Christopher Street 1976
By Sunil Gupta
Published by STANLEY/BARKER
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Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes: The Sweet Flypaper of Life
Published by First Print Press/David Zwirner Books
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Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop
By Vikki Tobak
Published by Clarkson Potter
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