Our Favorite Photography Books of 2023

Berlin-based photographer Nikita Teryoshin will publish his first photo book in 2024, giving the world an exclusive look into the global arms trade. For Nothing Personal, Teryoshin worked at 14 defense exhibitions from 2016 to 2023. Weapons of mass destruction are the project’s focal point. He documents large exhibitions that glamorize the machine gun. He shows us an oversize dessert table decorated with sweets arranged in the form of a missile, a drone display in front of which alcoholic beverages are being served, and a grandiose white prop wall fabricated with numerous bullet holes in a dizzying spiral pattern. —Lauryn Hill

Barbara Boissevain began documenting the San Francisco Bay area’s salt ponds in 2010. What used to be a zone of tidal marshes abundant with biodiversity quickly became a wasteland as portions of the bay were utilized as salt evaporation ponds starting around the time of the California Gold Rush. At the beginning of her project, Boissevain’s focus went from shooting mesmerizing aerial photos of the salt ponds to capturing abstract details of what’s beneath the surface, while also documenting the progression of the salt ponds back to their former ecological state. Salt of the Earth is Boissevain’s ode to San Francisco that tells a seemingly rare and hopeful story of combatting the effects of human-led climate change. —Lauryn Hill

I first discovered Sam Youkilis’ work on Instagram in 2018, where his work stood out among the endless sea of images. His carefully composed, colorful photographs looked like snapshots but felt like so much more. Two people embracing in a kiss on a sandy beach, elderly men playing chess at the park, a father and daughter holding hands in a crowded city center—Youkilis’ photographs were voyeuristic in the most delicate way, and delicate in the most voyeuristic way.

Since Youkilis photographs primarily using iPhones, sometimes multiple at a time, Instagram was the perfect place for his photographs to live, until now. Loose Joints is publishing his first monograph, Somewhere 2017—2023. It is a staggering 528-page culmination of the artist’s exploration of beauty in the mundane. By employing the fundamental principles of visual arts, including composition, color, chiaroscuro, and framing, Youkilis surpasses the constraints in both his tools and platform, resulting in every page in Somewhere feeling more beautiful and tender than the last. —Cameron Getty

When I was in college as a photography major, we were assigned to create photographs in the darkroom without a camera. I splattered darkroom chemicals and household items (coffee grounds, dyes, wine) and cast light onto photo-sensitive paper and wished for the best. The results were unsatisfactory most of the time, but every once in a while, I’d get something special. From that moment, watching the paper slowly show me something I made using only my hands and various liquids and chemicals, I was hooked on camera-less photography.

Dark Room serves as a memoir of Garry Fabian Miller's photography over the last half century, cataloging the artist’s personal account of creating pictures both in the dark and in the light. The 240-page book maps out the evolution of Fabian Miller’s practice, moving away from the camera-based photography of his early career to the abstract, camera-less method of darkroom picture-making for which he has become internationally recognized. Fabian Miller’s compositions radiate and pulsate off the page as they captivate the viewer with their sheer magnitude and bold colors. Through hands-on manipulation of light across various materials, Fabian Miller meticulously crafts camera-less exposures that manifest as abstract compositions, drawing inspiration from the familial and fantastical landscapes that define the artist. —Cameron Getty

In the summer of 2020, packages containing unnamed seeds arrived on the doorsteps of over 85,000 unsuspecting Americans. The packages had been shipped from China, but no one had ordered them. Pending an investigation by the US Department of Agriculture that would later link the shipments to a “brushing scam,” the seed conundrum became fertile ground for conservative conspiracy theories. Some incorrectly speculated that the seeds were a deliberate attempt by the Chinese at inflicting bioterrorism upon the US.

Early this year, Klaus Pichler worked with Nearest Truth Editions to self-publish A Hoax, a Prank, an Internet Scam, an Act of Agricultural Bio-terrorism. The book—which traces this story’s evolution from bizarre phenomenon to purported national security threat to everyday retailing scheme—is a display of Pichler’s sensitivity to the sensationalist potential of unassuming objects. The photographs turn plant seeds into planets, revealing their glimmering and otherworldly landscapes. By Pichler’s own description, the seeds are “a metaphor for how unsubstantiated assumptions can grow into ‘alternative facts.’” —Charis Morgan

In 2016, photographer Daniel Rampulla embarked on a series of landscapes and portraits which grappled with his early experiences as a young queer person. The resulting work culminated in Wild Place, a brooding reliving of those formative years, published with Pomegranate Press and Handshake Books in 2023.

You will be hard-pressed to meet many gazes while flipping through this book. The majority of the photographer’s subjects exist in limbo between physical presence and emotional absence. Their bodies are stark, but their faces are shielded. Interspersed amongst these anonymous portraits are what seem to be a selection of first-person memories. Shot with bright strobes, the landscapes feel like high-octane flashbacks, and the neighboring portraits read like voyeuristic reconstructions of these critical moments. We move anachronistically through time alongside Rampulla, keeping one foot in his tumultuous past and the other in his investigative present. Wild Place is a formal time warp played out over 72 pages of masterful black and white photography. —Charis Morgan