Don’t miss some of our favorite photobooks published by women, transgender, and non-binary photographers in 2021!
LAURENCE PHILOMÈNE — PUBERTY
Puberty is a self-portrait project which looks at the intimate and vital process of self-care as a non-binary transgender person undergoing hormonal replacement therapy (HRT). Shot over a period of two years, it combines surreal colours and mundane environments to document daily moments and slow, subtle physical changes occurring during Philomene's transition. Looking at HRT as a process without a fixed end goal, Puberty challenges viewers to consider identity beyond binaries.
PURCHASE: Yoffy Press
ERIKA LARSEN — MATERIA PRIMA
”This book is a collection of photographs, poems and pictoglyphs that explores ritual, time and the process of remembering we are nature.
Materia Prima is a book about remembering and attunement.
This book holds my photographs and poems created over 15 years. The work focuses throughout the Americas in communities that are deeply intertwined with the natural world. The images reflect on time, language, and ritual.
I collaborated with artist Frida Larios, a typo-graphic artist from El Salvador, Tsista Kennedy an Anishinaabe Onyota’aka artist from Beausoleil First Nation and Oneida Nation of the Thames, whose work combines traditionalism and commentary on colonialism.”
PURCHASE: Erika’s Site
NICOLA MUIRHEAD — UNSEEN
Unseen is a visual exploration of the psychological landscape of COVID-19 using polaroids and household disinfectants, distorting the present in a visual way with the very products meant to keep us safe from the virus - metaphorically 'revealing' the virus in our midst.The resulting images reflected the strangeness and unease of these last few years, and the science-fiction we have entered and will continue to navigate, for the foreseeable future.
PURCHASE: Another Place Press
ORE HUIYING — WE WERE FARMERS
“We Were Farmers is a personal project documenting their experience and resilience through photography for the past 12 years. It is also a commentary on changing agricultural practices and urban development in Singapore
We Were Farmers also explores how families are shaped and altered by economic and political forces. I examine why family-run businesses and multi-generation households, once common in Singapore, are failing now.”
PURCHASE: Ore’s Site
JEB — EYE TO EYE: PORTRAITS OF LESBIANS
In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. In a work that was revolutionary for its era, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives—working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by writings from acclaimed authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, and others. Various women pictured in the book also shared their personal stories. Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing—moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that still resonates today. This edition features additional essays from artist and writer Tee Corinne, former World Cup soccer player Lori Lindsey, and photographer Lola Flash.
PURCHASE: Anthology Editions
KIRSTY MACKAY — THE FISH THAT NEVER SWAM
In Glasgow people’s lives are cut short: male life expectancy in Possil is 66, in Penilee three young people took their own lives within the space of one week in June 2020, suicide in Glasgow is 30% higher than English cities, male life expectancy is 7 years short of the UK average and women’s is 4 years less. This is not isolated to areas of deprivation – Glaswegians across all social classes experience a 15% reduction in life expectancy.
The causes of Glasgow’s excess mortality lie in government policy - not with the individual and their lifestyle choices. Local, regional and central government policies created an environment where: segregation, alienation, mass unemployment, the generational trauma that followed, poverty and deprivation constitute a public health issue. During the 1970s and 80’s Glasgow was in a ‘managed decline’. Unbeknown at the time, the city was starved of funding from Westminster. Kirsty Mackay spent 4 years traveling across the city researching, interviewing and photographing. This work links Mackay’s own experience growing up in the city, the loss of her father and three of her male friends, the diverse experiences of the people she photographed together with the latest research from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.
PURCHASE: Kirsty’s Website
NAOMI HARRIS — HADDON HALL
South Miami Beach is a tiny gem of Art Deco architecture, warm sun and cool breezes. It was also the winter destination for many seniors throughout the 70s and 80s. During its golden age, upwards of 20,000 “snowbirds” (those who fly south for the winter to escape the cold north east) would migrate to the two and a half mile stretch of beachfront Shangri-La. After years of working hard, surviving the depression, the war and concentration camps, Jewish senior citizens made the pilgrimage south. A depressed economy and cheap rents in the crumbling Art Deco hotels made it an ideal choice for the retiree on a fixed income. The beach boardwalk overflowed with seniors, the sound of Yiddish filled the air as people spoke in their mammen loshen (mother tongue).
The Haddon Hall Hotel was the last option available to those seniors who wished to remain in South Beach. The dilapidated hotel offered the resettled seniors a place to live at a relatively reasonable price.
PURCHASE: Void
KAROLIINA PAATOS — HEROES
Shot during eight years from 2011 until 2019 in and around the International Gay Rodeo Association’s rodeos in the US.
PURCHASE: The Angry Bat
NAMSA LEUBA — CROSSED LOOKS
Accompanying the first solo exhibition of Swiss Guinean artist Namsa Leuba (born 1982) in the United States, Crossed Looks features Leuba’s major projects to date, including photography series in Guinea, South Africa, Nigeria and Benin, and the debut of a new series recently made in Tahiti.
The exhibition and publication consider how Leuba’s photographic practice explores the representation of African identity and the cultural Other in the Western imagination. Over 90 photographs inspired by the visual culture and ceremonies of West Africa, contemporary fashion and design, and the history of photography and its colonizing gaze present Leuba’s unique perspective that straddles reality and fantasy. Through the adaptation of myths attributed to the Other, Leuba’s photographs acknowledge this double act of looking, a dialogue of global cultures. The essays included in the book examine the nuanced themes of identity and representation in Leuba’s multiple bodies of work.
PURCHASE: Damiani
TESSA BUNNEY — THE FLOWER FIELDS
The Flower Fields was commissioned and published by NEPN (North East Photography Network) as part of ‘Observe Experiment Archive’.
Between March 2019 and February 2020 I worked with commercial flower growers around Spalding in Lincolnshire, one of the UK’s major cut flower growing regions, to explore how technology is changing how we grow flowers in this country. This included traditional Lincolnshire mixed rotation family farms and larger commercial growers who mainly grow a limited range of flowers under glass and are pioneering the use of various technologies including hydroponics and optical graders.
This new work is located in South Holland, a rural district in the South East of Lincolnshire where man drained, reclaimed and enclosed nearly three quarters of a million acres of fenland and by the late 1800s flower bulbs produced both for cut flowers and for sale as a dried bulb were a well-established crop in the Spalding area.
PURCHASE: Tessa’s Website
ANITA POUCHARD SERRA — ESPERA(NZA)
Photozine about the election nights in Argentina surrounding the abortion law of December 2020.
PURCHASE: Anita’s Site
WOMEN STREET PHOTOGRAPHERS
With a rising number of women throughout the world picking up their cameras and capturing their surroundings, this book explores the work of 100 women and the experiences behind their greatest images.
Traditionally a male-dominated field, street photography is increasingly becoming the domain of women. This fantastic collection of images reflects that shift, showcasing 100 contemporary women street photographers working around the world today, accompanied by personal statements about their work. Variously joyful, unsettling and unexpected, the photographs capture a wide range of extraordinary moments. The volume is curated by Gulnara Samoilova, founder of the Women Street Photographers project: a website, social media platform and annual exhibition. Photographer Melissa Breyer’s introductory essay explores how the genre has intersected with gender throughout history, looking at how cultural changes in gender roles have overlapped with technological developments in the camera to allow key historical figures to emerge. Her text is complemented by a foreword by renowned photojournalist Ami Vitale, whose career as a war photographer and, later, global travels with National Geographic have allowed a unique insight into the realities of working as a woman photographer in different countries. In turns intimate and candid, the photographs featured in this book offer a kaleidoscopic glimpse of what happens when women across the world are behind the camera.
PURCHASE: Prestel
SARAH PABST — MORNING SONG
Morning Song is a very personal project about motherhood, love, life and also about dealing with a loss - and therefore about healing.
PURCHASE: Sarah’s Site
PRISCILLA MARS — ENTERTAINMENT WORLD
A 42-page photography book containing 35 photographs are paired with haikus written by Dakota Blue and when in sequence, take you on a day in the life journey between residential Beverly Hills and the Universal Studios backlot from a psycho-geography perspective. Focusing on the architecture, landscape, bright light, and dark shadows in the mundane and fantastic places of LA, Entertainment World constructs a surreal Los Angeles, where it’s hard to determine what’s real and what’s fake.
PURCHASE: Blurb
LIZ TASA — KÁPAR
Kápar is the name of the photobook of Peruvian photographer Liz Tasa, referring to the forced sterilizations — crimes against humanity — that affect thousands of peasant women of the Peruvian highlands and descendants of Indigenous peoples, during the government of the questioned former President Alberto Fujimori between 1990 and 2000.
This event was a systematized program where medical personnel in charge had to comply with sterilization quotas and direct reports to the president. Given the urgency of reaching the goals, negligence was rampant, from bypassing medical examinations to operating on and sending women home without any kind of observation or aftercare. Due to malpractice, many have died and others have uterine cancer or strong infections in the womb that prevent them from working. "They are reproducing like rabbits" are some of the phrases doctors used to say to women before operating on them.
Kápar explores the physical and emotional consequences these women have suffered to date.
PURCHASE: Ediciones Challa
VIOLETTA CAPASSO — QUÉ QUEDA DESPUÉS
“Pude tomar fotografías un segundo antes del desastre, también de lo que queda después.”
PURCHASE: Suki
BONNIE BRIANT — LUMP SUM LOTTERY
Over the course of a decade New York photographer Bonnie Briant (born 1986) has extensively cataloged her daily life through photographs. Part diary and part storytelling tool, the cache of images collected in Lump Sum Lottery represent idiosyncratic, intimate moments that photographs are uniquely able to record.
PURCHASE: Artbook
NYDIA BLAS — REVIVAL
Nydia uses photography, collage, video, and books to address matters of sexuality, intimacy, and her lived experience as a girl, woman, and mother. She delicately weaves stories concerning circumstance, value, and power and uses her work to create a physical and allegorical space presented through a Black feminine lens. The result is an environment that is dependent upon the belief that in order to maintain resiliency, a magical outlook is necessary. In this space, props function as extensions of the body, costumes as markers of identity, and gestures/actions reveal the performance, celebration, discovery and confrontation involved in reclaiming one's body for their own exploration, discovery and understanding.
PURCHASE: Kris Graves Projects
DARO SULAKAURI — I WAS DREAMING WHEN I WROTE THIS
“My three month diary of the pandemic.”
PURCHASE: Daro’s Website
LUO YANG — GIRLS
This publication compiles two photographic series by Chinese photographer Luo Yang (born 1984) exploring emerging youth culture, femininity and changing social landscape in China.
Girls comprises intimate portraits of women born in the 1980s who challenge Chinese gender norms and expectations. Whether against the backdrop of Chinese megacities or in intimate settings, the young women present themselves as both confident and independent, vulnerable and fragile.
In the series Youth Yang documents Generation Z’s search for individual expression between creative staging and authentic feeling, with an attention to gender fluidity and queer culture. Luo Yang paints a sensitive picture of urban Chinese youth in search of orientation and identity. Ai Weiwei described Yang as one of the “rising stars of Chinese photography.”
PURCHASE: Artbook