The Best New Photo Books of 2025
Each year brings a fresh crop of photography books that unveil new stories, perspectives, and aesthetics. From cinematic visions of utopia to intimate meditations on grief, here are a dozen titles that deserve a place on your shelf this season—rich, diverse, and quietly indispensable. For those who collect photography volumes — objects that are both visual feasts and cultural markers — 2025 has been particularly rich, and the feast continues through the end of the year.
Here are twelve essential new photo books of 2025 — spanning fashion, history, jazz, and twilight — each one a meditation on how we see.
Twelve notable photo books of 2025
1. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
Publisher: Yale University Press – April 1, 2025
This extensively illustrated volume explores the astonishing expansiveness of Asawa’s work, from the abstract looped-wire sculptures for which she garnered national attention in the 1950s to her nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints.
2. Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real
Publisher: Aperture — September 23, 2025
Mitchell’s luminous career survey reframes American utopia through dreamlike images of Black life. Uplifting and deeply stylish, it bridges fashion and fine art in a way that only Mitchell can.
3. David Alekhuogie: A Reprise
Publisher: Aperture — August 12, 2025
Alekhuogie interrogates the legacies of Walker Evans and African art through remixed photo-sculptural works. His first monograph is layered, incisive, and thrillingly new.
4. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter
Publisher: Aperture / Allemandi — April 15, 2025
Weems’s capacious vision — love, spirituality, justice — takes center stage in this beautifully produced book. One of America’s most important artists at her most expansive.
5. Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules
Publisher: Aperture — November 11, 2025
Published to coincide with Cartagena’s SFMOMA survey, this monograph explores the structures — physical and social — that govern daily life. Both a critique and an elegy.
6. Danielle McKinney: Beyond the Brushstroke
Publisher: Monacelli (Phaidon) — October 29, 2025
McKinney’s intimate paintings of Black women at rest are paired with reflective text by her mother. It’s a volume of tenderness, quiet power, and deep poise.
7. Mix & Match: Fashion Photography Meets Contemporary Art
Publisher: Phaidon — September 3, 2025
Drawn from the Nicola Erni Collection, this glossy, glamorous book places Avedon and Leibovitz in conversation with contemporary artists. A playful, high-voltage look at fashion as fine art.
8. Pamela Thomas-Graham: When Words Fail
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag — April 8, 2025
This debut photo book is a twilight meditation on grief, resilience, and the city that never stops shimmering. When Words Fail captures New York at its most liminal hour, turning loss into light.
9. Richard Avedon: Immortal — Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004
Publisher: Phaidon — October 8, 2025
Avedon’s unflinching portraits of luminaries in their later years are gathered here, with essays by Adam Gopnik and Vince Aletti. Mortality has never looked so magnetic.
10. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985
Publisher: Yale University Press — September 16, 2025
An essential history, spotlighting the photographers who shaped the Black Arts Movement over three transformative decades. Rich with images and context, this is a foundational text.
11. Antony Penrose – Surrealist Lee Miller
Publisher: Yale University Press — September 30, 2025
A lavishly illustrated monograph reframing Miller’s career — Surrealist muse, war photographer, modernist pioneer. With contributions from Deborah Levy, this is the Miller book we’ve been waiting for.
12. Robert Frank – Mary’s Book
Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – June 24, 2025
While he was living in Paris in 1949, Frank produced a seminal volume: a rare, personal photobook made for his then-girlfriend, artist Mary Frank (née Lockspeiser). In it, the photographer chronicled his time in the city with his poetic, insightful and inquisitive eye, and experimented for the first time with combining text and image.
notable photo books of 2025
Photography books are more than images bound between covers. They are artifacts, time capsules, works of art in their own right. This year’s crop is particularly resonant — asking us to consider what we preserve, what we reveal, and what we let fade into twilight. For collectors, these are not just purchases — they are commitments to seeing differently.
