Don’t miss some of our favorite photobooks published by women, transgender, and non-binary photographers in 2022!
JESS T. DUGAN — LOOK AT ME LIKE YOU LOVE ME
In Look at me like you love me, Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, companionship, and the ways our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic writings reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a life. Dugan has long used photography to understand their own identity and to connect with others on a deeper level. Their process of working slowly and collaboratively discloses moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, engaging with what it means to know oneself alongside and through others. Using medium-format cameras and natural lighting, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that both evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Brought together here, these photographs function as an extended, oblique self-portrait as much as a catalogue of friends and loved ones. Through a diffuse but studied sequence of image and text, Look at me like you love me brings our attention to one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy – that of seeing and being seen.
PURCHASE: MACK Books
GABRIELLA N BÁEZ — LA GENTE DEPRIMIDA TIENE SEXO SUCIO Y GANAS DE MORIR
La gente deprimida tiene sexo sucio y ganas de morir is a diary transformed into a book. Using Polaroid photography, drawings, and texts, the book explores the complex relationship between sex, depression, and identity. This diary-book-object brings together the crudeness, the chaos, and the beauty of two years of 150mg of Zoloft use, non-monogamous relationships, mourning and pleasure.
PURCHASE: Gabriella’s Site
SARAH STACKE — LOVE FROM MANENBERG
“Love from Manenberg looks at life in Manenberg, South Africa, in particular the experiences of women and their children. The work makes room for complex narratives pushed aside by the media and shows the ways families look to the future and carry the joy, grief, and everyday realities of life in a community plagued by gang violence. Through fortitude and faith, they persevere and prosper.
I first photographed Manenberg, a neighborhood of Cape Town, in June 2011. For over a decade, the women of the Lottering, Pietersen, and Adams families have shared their lives, showing the texture, unity, and comfort of Manenberg – their home. The title of the book reflects the love these women embody, but also describes the relationships I have formed with them. We have become a part of the fabric of each other’s lives.”
PURCHASE: Sarah’s Site
SMITA SHARMA — WE CRY IN SILENCE
“'We Cry In Silence' is my seven-year long investigation on cross-border trafficking of minor girls across India, Bangladesh and Nepal for sex work. I have also included a chapter on the under-reported issue of trafficking of indigenous girls for domestic servitude. The project unveils the vulnerability of these girls and highlights the reasons of what make them easy preys to the designs of the traffickers. The goal is to scrutinize and try to understand this complex global issue and to open a dialogue that would hopefully galvanize more people to work towards some solutions.”
PURCHASE: Smita’s Site
CAROLINA ARANTES — FIRST GÉNÉRATION
First Generation is an on-going project about the first generation of Afro-French women of France.
In African immigration’s history of France, familiar reunifications happened between 1975 and 1980, making the young African descendants born in the country, the first Afro-French generation.
The project aims to speak about this national identity under construction through the life of these women and tries to understand how they are dealing with the incipient reference of their mixed origins while under a culture deeply anchored in its historical tradition.
PURCHASE: FishEye
GABRIELA HASBUN — THE NEW BLACK WEST
Featuring stunning full-color photographs by Gabriela Hasbun, The New Black West celebrates the modern Black cowboys of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo and the community that comes together to witness their achievements year after year.
A powerful symbol of self-reliance, strength, and determination, the Black cowboy is a figure commonly overlooked in the histories of the American West. Held annually in cities across the United States, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo (BPIR) honors the historic accomplishments of Black cowboys and fosters a vibrant community dedicated to continuing that legacy. Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun has spent more than a decade photographing this beloved event in the Oakland hills. Her images capture the joy and excitement of performers and audience members, showcasing the daring feats, spectacular outfits, and welcoming atmosphere that make the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo an unmissable experience. In addition to Hasbun's photographs, The New Black West features quotes and stories from the cowboys themselves and a foreword from the Oakland rodeo's regional manager, Jeff Douvel.
PURCHASE: Green Apple Books
JOHIS ALARCÓN — I AM BLACK BECAUSE THE SUN LOOKED AT ME
This book is the result of five years portraying stories of maroon sisters and African-descent women, who, from their spirituality, opened paths of freedom for all humanity. The publication includes a Fanzine that is a collective creation between black women of different generations who narrate their personal and community stories reflecting on racism and female maroon struggle in the region. This project is supported by National Geographic Society
PURCHASE: Johis’ Site
GABRIELLA ANGOTTI-JONES — I JUST WANNA SURF
I Just Wanna Surf captures the friction of finding one’s identity and community during the pandemic and post-George Floyd era in a sport dominated by white men. Growing up in one of the only mixed-race Black families in a small Orange County beach town, Angotti-Jones reflects on how her early relationship with the ocean and Californian surf culture became intertwined with her identity as a Black woman. In a mix of photo book, zine, and diary, Angotti-Jones challenges the traditional surfing narrative by documenting Black women and non-binary surfers living the surfing lifestyle inspired by 1990s and early 2000s surf culture, while making it their own. The images juxtapose the joy of friendship and the refuge found in the the ocean’s wilderness with the underlying racial tensions at the core of the Black American experience. With sensitivity and vulnerability, her text explores her experience with depression and the sense of peace brought by riding waves.
I Just Wanna Surf is a joyous, raw, complex and unique expansion of the visual history of the Black American experience and its place in a rapidly changing American surf community.
PURCHASE: Mass Books
QIANE MATATA-SIPU — NUKU: STORIES OF 100 INDIGENOUS WOMEN
NUKU: Stories of 100 Indigenous women is a powerful and important snapshot of Indigenous wāhine today. Through wide-ranging voices this ambitious social documentary showcases diverse representations of leadership, systems change and success. You will obtain authentic insight into life as an Indigenous wahine in a way like never before.
The 100 stories recorded in this legacy publication are of incredible wāhine who seek to influence the world around them. Each offer significance to the story of mana wāhine. From Oscar-nominated filmmakers and award-winning musicians, to scientists, entrepreneurs, tribal leaders, artists, environmental champions, knowledge holders, mothers and more.
PURCHASE: Qiane’s Site
LUJÁN AGUSTI — FIBRAS DEL FIN DEL MUNDO
Around 2013, as a result of a series of activities to disseminate associative experiences in the province of Río Negro, based on the Mercado de la Estepa model founded by the social referent Roberto Killmeate, a group of women organized around the possibility of being able to produce in an associative way under the principles of social and solidarity economy, making the activity visible and reinforcing the value of artisanal work made with local raw materials.
After almost ten years, this group of women continues working on this project under the name of "Fibras de Fin del Mundo". Norma, Esther, Rosita, Margarita and Patricia have come a long way and are still committed to this project, which is based on environmentally responsible practices and retaking traditions of our Latin American culture. This book is a small tribute to their work.
PURCHASE: Luján’s Site
CARLA YOVANE PÉREZ — TIEMPO DE VALS
The publication Tiempo de Vals by Carla Yovane Pérez is the result of a documentary project on the sex workers of the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, which began in 2018 while talking with women sex workers from the same square with whom the photographer already had a relationship. From there began the first ties on the benches in the square, which became complicities and tours of motels near kilometer zero with Víctor, Héctor, Claudio, Andrés, Pato, Gerson, Eduardo, Gonzalo and Alex.
PURCHASE: Haikén Ediciones
STACY KRANITZ — AS IT WAS GIVE(N) TO ME
For the past twelve years, Stacy Kranitz has been making photographs in the Appalachian region of the United States in order to explore how photography can solidify or demystify stereotypes, and interpret memory and history in a region where the medium has failed to provide an equitable depiction of its people. Rather than reinforcing conventional views of Appalachia as a poverty-ridden region, or by selectively dwelling on positive aspects of the place and its people to offset problematic stereotypes, this work insists that each of these options are equally problematic ways of looking at place.
This work does not attempt to illustrate a certain type of injustice in the hope of remedying it. Instead, Kranitz has come to Appalachia to open up a new kind of narrative, one that examines our understanding of culture and place in a manner that is poised between notions of right and wrong.
As the narrative of As it Was Give(n) To Me unfolds, the book provides an intimate perspective on a region forced to transition away from coal extraction as its dominant source of economic stability, an opioid epidemic that has wreaked havoc on communities, and the role of Appalachia in a politically divided nation.
PURCHASE: Twin Palms
GRETA RICO — URBAN MIDWIVES
Urban Midwives is a documentary photography project that portrays the almost unknown work of Midwives who provide attention in one of the biggest cities in Latin America, Mexico City. In the Metropolitan Area, a place where more than 20 million people live, there is a single midwifery house and approximately 8 Midwives who attend home births.
In Mexico, being born or not in a hospital is a matter of status. The misinformation and discrimination women face in clinics creates the perfect environment for them to come in fear of what might happen to them or their babies in hospitals. Urban Midwives is the result of four years of documentary work and makes it visible that midwifery houses are spaces of resistance, spaces won by Midwives for the benefit of women, and makes it clear that giving birth at home is a political act.
PURCHASE: Contact Greta
LAYLAH AMATULLAH BARRAYN — WE ARE PRESENT
We Are Present: 2020 in Portraits is a year-long visual account of love, grief, vulnerability, creativity, isolation, communion, determination and faith braided within its narrative. Taking us through one of the most dynamic years in recent history, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn has assembled a series of tender yet confrontational portraits from her assignment work as a photojournalist and off-duty encounters. Photographed on location in New York, Minneapolis and Louisville, the images are linked chronologically, beginning in the unassuming winter months, transitioning into the devastating onset of a global pandemic in the spring, pivoting into a summer of spirited Black Lives Matter demonstrations, before meandering into a volatile fall election season. The portraits in We Are Present distill the intimacy at play between sitter and photographer echoing the quieter stories adjacent to the main event of 2020.
PURCHASE: Laylah’s Site
AMANDA GREENE — PEACH
“For nearly 10 years at The Bitter Southerner, we've told stories, posted endless photos, eaten a million cobblers, and recently, published an entire podcast episode on peaches. Along the way, our friend Amanda Greene has photographed it all. From peach farms to peach roadside stands to peach queens, her images take us back in time and fill our hearts with joy.
Inside our new book, PEACH, you'll find a collection of Amanda's incredible peach photos along with peach recipes from some culinary superstars. Shane Mitchell writes the foreword, and there's a poem by Li-Young Lee. It's true, we love peaches, and our new book, PEACH, is (as they say) very on brand.
PURCHASE: The Bitter Southerner
ISABELLA LANAVE — TAKE HER SERIOUSLY
Over the years, the current brought to Isabella Lanave a warning: "Does not take what she says seriously." At a certain point, the observer that there is inside the artist gave this command a countermand: "Listen to, in what she says, what many are saying".
And, like that, Take Her Seriously was created as a chorus of images to be heard. The book welcomes visual and textual fragments of experiences (possibly, among the most sensible and, certainly, among the most serious of those who lived them) worked in complicity by the photographed and the artist.
Given back to the current of the days, the images invite us to relinquish any inflexibility and welcome the inevitable mobility of the roles; who is sane, who is insane; who speaks, who listens. Take her seriously is an invitation, but also, (and perhaps this is the most touching thing about the initiative of this work), a sensitive opportunity to listen again.
– Text by Maria Helena Bernardes, summer 2022
PURCHASE: Lovely House
SVETLANA BULATOVA — A WILD ANIMAL NEVER ATTACKS FIRST. HUMAN DOES
The photobook "A Wild Animal Never Attacks First. Human does" by documentary photographer Svetlana Bulatova was self-published in 2022. The title of the photobook is a quote from a Chechen forest ranger. The Chechen Wars of the 1990s and 2000s had a devastating effect on natural beauty. Chechnya’s forests and mountains suffered a drastic decline. Animals migrated to escape the constant shelling. Some species of animals and plants are now endangered. Though not immediately obvious from the photographs, human violence lies in the background of this story, hidden in the first snowfall across the plain. The two chapters of the photobook dedicate to the daily life in the mountain village. These photographs talk about healing, and harmony with nature; it’s also about the importance of care in the aftermath of conflict.
PURCHASE: [Sold out!]
CHRISTINA SIMONS — RUNNING TO NOWHERE
The severity of the Central American Refugee Crisis is escalating within the current political climate. Christina Simons uses documentary story telling to convey and explain the ‘why’ of this major humanitarian crisis, visually humanizing an issue many find difficult to connect with.
PURCHASE: Blurb