A photography book is not a portfolio. A portfolio is a collection of images arranged to impress. A book is a sequence — images placed in a specific order, at specific sizes, with specific pacing, designed to create an experience that no single image can deliver. The best photography books change the way you see before you finish the last page. The ones below, published between 2015 and 2025, did exactly that.
The Essential Monographs
Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (Aperture, 2025) — Simpson's first major publication gathers decades of portraits documenting Black cultural life in New York — luminaries like Toni Morrison and Ming Smith alongside the anonymous elegance of everyday people. The book functions as both art object and cultural archive, preserving a visual history that mainstream institutions failed to collect in real time.
Martin Parr: A Memoir (Steidl, 2025) — Published shortly before Parr's death in December 2025, this career retrospective features over 150 photographs with commentary captured by his friend Wendy Jones. Parr's eye for the absurd banality of modern life — the beach holidays, the fast food, the small vanities — produced a body of work that somehow made tenderness and satire coexist in the same frame.
2020 by Max Pinckers (Lyre Press, 2025) — Made during the pandemic, Pinckers used multiple cameras to photograph the same moment from different angles, undoing the idea of a single "decisive moment." The result is formally inventive and philosophically unsettling — a book that questions whether photography can tell the truth by showing you exactly how it lies.
Documentary & Social
Dionne Lee: Currents (Aperture, 2025) — Lee's first monograph examines histories of land, power, survival, and Black identity in the American landscape. The photographs — of fields, waters, skies — are quiet and patient, revealing how the land itself carries memory. The book treats landscape photography as a political act.
Protest Photographs 2015-2025 by Angela Christofilou (Aperture, 2025) — A decade of protest imagery spanning the full period from the 2015 refugee crisis through the pandemic and its aftermath. Christofilou's work is urgent without being manipulative — the photographs document collective action with the formal rigor of art photography and the moral clarity of photojournalism.
The Stillness of Life by Don McCullin (Jonathan Cape, 2025) — Best known for war photography, McCullin's final major publication focuses instead on still-lifes and landscapes. Produced for his 90th birthday, the black-and-white images are contemplative, austere, and quietly devastating — a lifetime of witnessing violence resolved into images of absolute peace.
The Collector's Shelf
Los Alamos by William Eggleston (Steidl, reissued 2020) — Eggleston's road-trip photographs through the American South and West, taken in the 1960s and 70s, look like the template for every indie film color palette of the last decade. His genius was seeing the transcendent in the ordinary: a tricycle, a ceiling, a woman's red hair against green wallpaper. The reissue brought these images to a new generation of photographers and filmmakers.
Sister Moon by Siri Kaur (Aperture, 2025) — Built from over 30 years of photographs, this intimate portrait of family life reveals more with each return visit. The images are tender and unguarded, capturing the private moments that most photographers either miss or won't share. A book about what it means to look at the people closest to you with honest eyes.
Synthesis by Mari Katayama (2025) — Six years of Katayama's practice, fusing self-portraiture, object-making, and the textures of lived experience. Katayama, who creates prosthetic limbs as sculptural art objects, uses her own body as both subject and medium. The book is visually stunning and conceptually rigorous.
A good photography book costs between $40 and $80 and lasts forever. It sits on your table, and you open it when you need to remember what careful looking feels like. Every book on this list rewards that kind of attention. For more on collecting and the visual arts, see our guides to starting an art collection on any budget and the best art museums in Los Angeles.
