News & Features

Aperture published the shortlist for the fourteenth Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards on 8 October. There are twenty books in First PhotoBook, ten in PhotoBook of the Year and five in Photography Catalog of the Year. Aperture says entries came from fifty-six countries, a record for the prize, and names Armenia, Iran, Morocco and Venezuela among them.

The shortlist jury sat in New York from 22 to 24 September: the artist Alejandro Cartagena; Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, director of design at the Judd Foundation; Michael Famighetti, editor in chief of Aperture; Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo; and Anshika Varma, curator and founder of Offset Projects. A second jury of five picks the winners in Paris on 12 November. They are announced at Paris Photo at 3 p.m. Paris time on Friday 13 November.

The books go on view at Paris Photo from 11 to 15 November, then travel. New Yorkers can see them at Printed Matter in January 2027, after a stop at PhotoIreland in Dublin in December.

One shortlisted title is in the library. Keisha Scarville’s Passports (MACK) is her first major monograph, built on more than three hundred reworkings of her father’s passport photograph. It is up for PhotoBook of the Year. Two other artists in that category are on the shelves with earlier books. Takashi Homma, shortlisted for This Is Not My Cat, is here with Portrait of J (Dashwood Books and Session Press, 2025), Portrait (Heibonsha, 2013), Scandinavian Mushroom (limArt, 2015) and his Purple Book (2016). Sohrab Hura, shortlisted for Snow, is here with his first book, Life Is Elsewhere (Ugly Dog, 2015).

The publishers are familiar too. The library holds 48 MACK titles, 34 from Apartamento, 29 from Spector Books, and fifteen each from Art Paper Editions and Roma Publications, all of which have books on this list.

First PhotoBook

Ivan Anisimov, Pants on Top of Shoes (Kult Books, Stockholm), designed by Janne Riikonen.

Amparo Baquerizas, Gauchito Querido (Editorial RM, Mexico City and Barcelona), designed by Amparo Baquerizas.

Miranda Barnes, Social Season (Important Flowers, London), designed by Anamaria Morris.

Sara Bennett, Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg), designed by Teun van der Heijden and Heijdens Karwei.

Nata Drachinskaya, Binom (BLOW UP PRESS, Warsaw, and Rencontres d’Arles), designed by Nata Drachinskaya, Yumi Goto, Aneta Kowalczyk and Jan Rosseel.

Franco Dupuy, Cruising Diaries (Set Margins, Eindhoven), designed by Furio and Santiago Bogani.

Jakob Ganslmeier and Ana Zibelnik, If a Flower Bloomed in a Dark Room, Would You Trust It? (Spector Books, Leipzig), designed by Hamid Sallali.

Jesse Glazzard, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty (SPBH Editions, London), designed by Brian Paul Lamotte.

Ma Hailun, Üruklyn (Jiazazhi, Ningbo), designed by Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey.

Moeko Ishiguro, Notation(s) (Self-published, Tokyo), designed by Moeko Ishiguro.

Adél Koleszár, Only Have Faith (Solamente Ten Fe) (Art Paper Editions, Ghent), designed by Jurgen Maelfeyt.

Jeremy Liebman, Coincidence (Apartamento Publishing, Barcelona), designed by Apartamento Studios and Laura Delgado.

Augustin Lignier, Turning Point (Art Paper Editions, Ghent), designed by Jurgen Maelfeyt.

João Linneu, JJ VFF VV (Void, Athens), designed by Void.

Yufan Lu, Make Me Beautiful (Editorial RM, Mexico City and Barcelona; Ediciones Posibles and Fundación Photographic Social Vision, Barcelona; Phree, Madrid), designed by Min Lyu.

Swan Moon, Swan Moon’s Swan Moon (TBW Books, Oakland), designed by Paul Schiek.

Peter Rauch, 2, 3 (Perimeter Editions, Melbourne), designed by Žiga Testen.

Allie Tsubota, Dead Letter Room: A Transhistorical Correspondence with Hara Tamiki (The Eriskay Connection, Breda), designed by Carel Fransen.

Joël van Houdt, Afghanistanism (Self-published, London), designed by -SYB-.

Farren van Wyk, Mixedness Is My Mythology (Fw:Books, Amsterdam, and Deadbeat Club, Los Angeles), designed by Hans Gremmen.

PhotoBook of the Year

Michele Borzoni and Rocco Rorandelli, Silent Springs (Loose Joints, Marseille and London), designed by Tommaso Tanini.

Bieke Depoorter, The Beds I Slept In (Hannibal Books, Antwerp), designed by Armand Mevis and Bieke Depoorter.

Bérangère Fromont, République (Chose Commune, Marseille), designed by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Perrine Serre.

Roger Grasas, WALLS: A Visual Study on Border Geographies (Institut de les Desigualtats, Barcelona), designed by Studio Carles Murillo.

Nick Haymes, Chronograph (SPBH Editions, London), designed by Lina Kutsovskaya and Brian Paul Lamotte.

Takashi Homma, This Is Not My Cat (Nieves, Zurich, and Perimeter Editions, Melbourne), designed by Benjamin Sommerhalder.

Sohrab Hura, Snow (MACK, London), designed by Sohrab Hura.

Zhu Mo, Undercurrents (JZZP, Ningbo), designed by PAY2PLAY.

Keisha Scarville, Passports, 2012–2025 (MACK, London), designed by Keisha Scarville and Morgan Crowcroft-Brown. In the library

Newsha Tavakolian, And They Laughed at Me (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg), designed by Kehrer Design, Laura Pecoroni.

Photography Catalog of the Year

Nanina Guyer, A Kind of Paradise: Artistic Counter-Narratives to Colonial-Era Photography (Spector Books, Leipzig), designed by NODE Berlin Oslo.

Marta Martín Núñez, Ecos de la Memoria (Echoes of Memory) (Editorial RM, Mexico City and Barcelona, and Campgràfic Editors, Valencia), designed by Underbau.

Damarice Amao, Ghana! Rêver l’indépendance, 1957–1976 (Atelier EXB, Paris), designed by Line Célo.

Anne Lacoste and Rose Durr, L Is for Look: Children’s Photobooks (Spector Books, Leipzig), designed by Ina Kwon and Helmut Völter.

Anuschka Blommers, Niels Schumm and Julie Peeters, More (Blommers & Schumm and Roma Publications, Amsterdam), designed by Julie Peeters.

Two of the season's large museum surveys opened in New York in the last two weeks, and two more open by 11 October. All four artists are on the library's shelves, and the books are listed under each show.

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony

New Museum, third and fourth floors. Open now, through early January 2027.

The New Museum calls this the first US museum survey to cover the full breadth of Jafa's practice. It takes two floors of the expanded building on the Bowery and is named for the jazz drummer Tony Williams. The films Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and The White Album (2019), which won the Golden Lion in Venice, are shown with new work, recent paintings, video and film installations, and sculptural and photographic objects. Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari curated the show with Calvin Wang.

In the library: the exhibition catalogue, Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony (Phaidon, 2026), A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions (2017) and Helter Skelter (Fondazione Prada, 2026), made with Richard Prince.

Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, rotunda. 18 September 2026 to 14 March 2027.

Simon's new work follows the life of one unnamed federal agent across 42 multipart chapters of photographs, text, video and sculpture. It fills the whole rotunda. The Guggenheim says it is the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist to be shown there. Nat Trotman organized the exhibition, and the museum and Hatje Cantz are publishing an artist's book with it.

In the library: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (Steidl, 2007), Contraband (Steidl, 2010) and Paperwork and the Will of Capital (Hatje Cantz and Gagosian, 2016), among seven Simon titles.

Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue. 4 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.

The Met sets the careers of Lee Krasner (1908–1984) and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) side by side from start to finish, with more than 120 works from over 80 lenders. The two met in New York in 1942, married in 1945 and moved to Springs, on Long Island. The museum describes the show as the first major New York presentation of either artist in more than twenty years. Pollock's Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 and Krasner's Combat (1965) come from the Met's own collection. Loans include Guardians of the Secret (1943) from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In the library: Jackson Pollock, the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

Whitney Museum of American Art. 11 October 2026 to 10 May 2027.

The Whitney brings together about 130 works made between the early 1940s and the 1990s, among them Look Mickey (1961), Masterpiece (1962) and Drowning Girl (1963). For the first time, every work from Lichtenstein's 1962 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery is back in one place. Three murals are recreated, including a version of Greene Street Mural (1983) nearly 96 feet long. Works by Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant hang alongside. Meg Onli organized the show with the artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator. The catalogue, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, is now in the library.

In the library: Greene Street Mural (Gagosian, 2015), Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (2012) and History in the Making, 1948–1960 (2020).

Monique Peperkamp, Art Against the Machine: Untrapping Life from Profit-Driven Tech Dependency — ArtEZ Press

Jon Rafman, Main Stream Media — Hatje Cantz

Beni Bischof, Psychobuch 2 — Edition Patrick Frey

Doron Langberg — Phaidon

Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres — Phaidon

Elle Pérez, Devotions — Aperture

Jess T. Dugan & Charlotte Cotton, Love Pictures — Radius Books

Nan Goldin, Honey on a Razor Blade — Steidl

Gordon Parks, Diary of a Harlem Family, 1967/1968 — Steidl

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Focus Desire — Spector Books

Walter Pfeiffer, In Good Company — Mousse

Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson — Karma

Alex Da Corte, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New — Yale University Press

Antonio López Alonso, Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything — Rizzoli Electa

Pierre Huyghe — The MIT Press

Siri Engberg, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Books, Prints, and Photographic Editions, 1960–2022 — Steidl / Gagosian

Kari J. Brandtzæg, Paula Rego – Dance Among Thorns — MUNCH

Emma Lavigne, Lorna Simpson: Third Person — Marsilio Arte

COVINGTON, Ky. — Over roughly the past two months, the used and rare bookshop Conveyor Belt Books has received what it describes as a series of atypical emails from unfamiliar buyers seeking to purchase titles in bulk. The groupings, the store says, had no thematic logic connecting them, mixing genuinely rare items with merely hard-to-find ones.

One title drew two separate inquiries: a Chris Burden artist's book that the shop notes was self-published by the artist and is especially difficult to locate.

Read the report →

This is a proposal with a cost, and the window on it is closing.

A collection of collections is the only acquisition left that can't be outbid, front-run, or bought at auction next spring. It has to be built. The great private collections of the last fifty years are being broken up right now, not eventually, and what disappears in a lot sale is not the books but the argument they were arranged to make. The number is knowable: $8 million to open in contributed space, $2 million a year to run, $45 million to endow. $100 million buys the building and founds it outright.

Read the essay →

The diagram's history is rooted in the effort to institutionalize and define the "Artist Book" as a specific medium during the late 20th century.

Clive Phillpot, while serving as the Director of the Library at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), developed the original version of this diagram in 1982. His goal was to provide a rigorous taxonomic structure for librarians and curators. At the time, the term "artist book" was being applied broadly to everything from hand-painted one-offs to mass-market paperbacks.

Phillpot's diagrams were polemic tools designed to isolate "Book Art" as a distinct category where the artist uses the book's specific mechanics (sequencing, paging, and portability) as the primary medium.

The Democratic Multiple

The history of this diagram is tied to the 1960s and 70s movement of the "Democratic Multiple." Artists like Ed Ruscha and groups like Fluxus sought to bypass the gallery system by creating cheap, mass-produced books. Phillpot used the diagram to champion these "multiples" over "book objects" (sculptural, unique works). He argued that the true artist book belonged in the "Multiple" or "Large Print Run" strata because its value lay in its ability to be widely distributed, rather than its rarity.

Reshaping the Institution

Phillpot's work at MoMA shifted how the institution collected these works. By categorizing books based on their position between "Art" and "Books," he moved the acquisition of these items from the curated print departments into the museum library. This established the library as a site of active artistic engagement rather than just a repository for research materials.

The Kione Kochi Update

The version you are looking at was updated by Kione Kochi for Half Letter Press to address the collapse of traditional publishing hierarchies. While the 1982 original focused on the tension between the gallery and the bookstore, the modern update reflects the historical shift toward decentralized production. The inclusion of the "Digital" strata acknowledges that the "Democratic Multiple" has moved from the offset press to the PDF and Print-on-Demand (P.O.D.) services, effectively removing the "Gatekeeper" (the Pear side) from the equation entirely.

The diagram remains a standard reference in Art History and Library Science curricula. It serves as the primary conceptual bridge between the Fine Art tradition (centered on the unique object) and the Mass Communication tradition (centered on the disseminated idea). It is historically significant for being the first visual attempt to map the socioeconomic forces (dealers, publishers, and distributors) that dictate the life of a book-as-art.