Who doesn’t love a good photo book? To flick through the pages, be enlightened, educated, distracted and absorbed into another world through another’s eyes? Totally fantastic!
We’re here to share our Photobook Favourites – a selection of our favourite photography books recommended by the Shutter Hub community, an archive of titles we’ve enjoyed, and a reference point for you to explore.
Big Fence / Pitcairn Island by Rhiannon Adam, Blow Up Press
In 2015, Rhiannon Adam, inspired by a childhood gift of The Mutiny on The Bounty and a desire to capture the island’s fragility on expiring analogue film, made the long journey to Pitcairn Island. Due to the quarterly shipping schedule, she remained trapped on the island for 96 nights. Naturally suspicious of ‘journalists’, Pitcairners were, on the whole, reluctant to be involved in Adam’s project. Throughout the book, subjects mostly appear alone, photographed in solitude and away from prying eyes.
Designed to be as impenetrable and complex as the island itself, the book is comprised of two parts: Adam’s own experience of the island as related through her captions and personal stories, and a volume of photographs and related archive. The latter charts the development of the particular characteristics that led to community breakdown, from both a contemporary and historical perspective. Throughout, Adam encourages us to consider the dangers of romanticism and to reflect on our collective culpability for female subjugation.
20.5 x 25.5cm, 312 pages, 124 colour photographs / Hardcover.
Find out more and buy Big Fence / Pitcairn Island here.
How Can It Still Be Home? by Ghaleb Cabbabé, Kehrer Verlag
How can you feel safe and secure in a place marked by war and disillusionment?
Ghaleb Cabbabé explores this question in How Can It Still Be Home?, a highly intimate, emotional, and multilayered documentary about his native Lebanon. Created over a period of more than five years, his work questions the perception and ambivalent notion of home, ties, and belonging.
Ghaleb Cabbabé was born in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. He trained as an architect and studied photography. His work was among the best entries in the LensCulture and Magnum Photography Awards and has been featured in internationally renowned publications such as Fotofilmic and National Geographic.
21 x 24cm, 120 pages, 80 colour photographs / Hardcover.
Find out more and buy How Can It Still Be Home? here.
The Bateau Ivre, Paris 2019–2023 by Martin Essl, Kehrer Verlag
The title Le bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) refers to the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud, in which he uses the image of a boat to represent a man’s journey through life. In a poetic photographic essay structured like a play in five acts, Martin Essl redraws the outline of a city in transformation and composes an abstract and contemporary map of Paris.
22.5 x 30cm, 240 pages, 149 colour photographs / Cloth Hardcover.
Find out more and buy The Bateau Ivre, Paris 2019-2023 here.
The Light of Day by Tony O’Shea, RRB Photobooks
The Light of Day by Tony O’Shea is a retrospective of O’Shea’s work, spanning 4 decades from 1979 to 2019. It was published to coincide with an exhibition of his work at the Gallery of Photography Ireland.
The edition includes 100 copies with a signed and limited 10×8″ silver-gelatin print of ‘Welcoming home the Irish team after reaching the quarter-finals of Italia ’90, Dublin’.
112 pages / Special Edition of 100 copies / Hardcover
Find out more and buy The Light of Day here.
Big Hearts, Strong Hands by Anne Helene Gjelstad, Dewi Lewis
Big heart, Strong hands is the story of the women on the Estonian islands Kihnu and Manija in the Baltic Sea. Geographically isolated, over centuries a strong sense of community spirit and a steadfast attachment to their ancestor’s customs has developed. Often viewed as the last matriarchal society in Europe, the older women here take care of almost everything on land as their husbands travel the seas.
29 x 23.5cm, 256 pages, 148 colour photographs / Cloth Hardcover.
Find out more and buy Big Hearts, Strong Hands here.
A Typology of British Cherry Blossom by Sam Vale, GOST
This photographic typology presents all 323 varieties of cherry blossom in the UK in the style of a pomological book. Pomology is the study and science of fruit trees, with the aim of improving and developing attributes such as taste, longevity and yield of popular fruits. Seldom is a comprehensive range of cherry blossom represented in books on the subject as the delicate flowers are considered too uniform for traditional illustration to capture the nuances of difference between varieties. Artist Sam Vale, has utilised the camera which can capture more subtle differences between blossoms, to address this void and record a complete taxonomy of British cherry blossom.
Each book will include a unique pressed, dried cherry blossom petal.
13 x 18.5cm, 256 pages, Special Edition of 323 copies / Cloth Hardcover.
Find out more and by A Typology of British Cherry Blossom here.
BODY COPY by Mitchell Moreno, GOST
BODY COPY is a photo-text series by artist Mitchell Moreno (they/them) exploring the performance of queer masculinities in digital culture. Moreno began the project by collating a thousand lines of text from apps and websites where men (mostly) were looking to meet other men (mostly) for sex or dates. From these texts Moreno selected 43 adverts and created ‘ideal’ visual responses in the form of self-portraits to the desires expressed in each.
21.5 x 29.4cm, 196 pages, 44 colour photographs / Hardcover.
Find out more and buy BODY COPY here.
The Leopard Print Portraits by Gemma Taylor, Shutter Hub Editions
In The Leopard Print Portraits, Gemma has captured a unique and joyful series of street portraits, focusing on people (and sometimes their four-legged friends!) proudly wearing leopard print. The result is a captivating collection of 100 portraits – a heartfelt tribute to self-expression, everyday style, and the bold spirit of this iconic pattern.
From busy city streets to quiet corners, The Leopard Print Portraits is a love letter to leopard print and the people who wear it with pride.
14.8 x 21cm, 116 pages, 100 colour photographs / Softcover.
Find out more and buy The Leopard Print Portraits here.
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