The 7 Best Photography Books of 2024
Here at WIRED, we love good writing. It’s kind of our thing. That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t also love incredible visuals. WIRED is all about stunning photography, both in what we publish and what we seek out.
This year, after looking at all sorts of images from all over the world, the WIRED Photo team collected their favorite photography books of the year so that our readers (that’s you!) could check them out. Yes, these are books of images, but they also tell stories—from near-close encounters with serial killers to the history of modern queer life. Phone booths even feature prominently. Scroll down, and feast your eyes.
Photography—A Queer History
by Flora Dunster and Theo GordonAmbitious and insightful, Photography: A Queer History explores the many ways photography has shaped, reflected, and expanded queer identities over time. Spanning historical and global contexts, the book brings together the work of 84 artists—from iconic figures like Robert Mapplethorpe to contemporary photographers like Deborah Bright—offering a rich look at queer imagery.
Drawing from their backgrounds as art historians, the editors examine how portraiture, landscape, and documentary photography have all been reimagined through a queer lens. As Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon note, the book resists rigid categorization, allowing photographers like Peter Hujar, predominantly known for his portraits, to appear in unexpected places—highlighting the fluidity and resistance to categorization inherent in both photography and queerness.
Photography—A Queer History also interrogates photography’s role in larger cultural struggles, from fighting LGBTQ+ discrimination to creating spaces for queer desire and solidarity across geographic borders. Through a mix of thematic essays and artist-focused texts, the book connects the past and present, offering readers a deeper understanding of how photography has not only documented queer lives but also actively shaped them.
The book strikes a balance between being critically engaging and accessible, making it just as relevant for students of art history as it is for anyone encountering the subject matter for the first time. Photography: A Queer History is an essential resource for anyone interested in art, identity, and politics—or the intersection of all three. —Skye Battles
Pay Phone
by Daniel WeissMona Lisa rides shotgun in a black Jeep. She’s backlit, pasted on the side of a pay phone, smiling back to the viewer through her luminous reflection in the passenger window. Elsewhere, a man leans in as he makes a call, a little girl plays pretend with the receiver, a bloodied guy speaks to cops, a smoking leather cowboy poses with a root beer in hand (straw included). Within each frame sits a pillar: a public pay phone, acting as both the supporting character and the connective tissue.
For just over two decades, Daniel Weiss has been meticulously documenting the vibrancy and decay of NYC streets. In his first book, Pay Phone, he shows the disappearance of public call boxes in NYC from 2008 to 2020. (The last pay phone was removed in 2022.)
Weiss approaches his subjects with both curiosity and empathy, conscientiously representing the marginalized without objectification. People stand at ease in his posed portraits. He shows us graffiti and carvings with the reverence of a cave drawing, the dates marked by tagged advertisements. The booth acts as a magnetic public stage, a shelter, and a still gathering point within the vastness of an ever-changing city.
The eventual disconnection of the pay phone is an apt metaphor for society’s shift away from intentionality and personal human connection. There once was a time before cell phones, a time where people had to articulate their feelings without emojis. Weiss’ photographs bring us back there for one last goodbye. —Ali Cherkis
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Bumps
by Lola & PaniIn Bumps, photographers Lola & Pani deliver a raw and visually striking exploration of the "tumultuous and euphoric facets inherent in the experience of youth.” With their unfiltered approach, the duo captures young adulthood as a continuous cycle of uncertainty, renewal, and fragility.
Portraits of broken skin and blank stares reveal a quiet vulnerability while scenes of nature and landscapes show beauty and stillness. Bumps balances intimacy, alienation, and belonging. The duo do an amazing job making sure the viewer feels connected while viewing each image. The contrast of black and white and color imagery heightens the honesty of the work, grounding the idealization for a more genuine portrayal of youthful experience.
Bumps is an extraordinary, and at times cinematic, work that lingers in the mind. Making it an unforgettable work depicting adolescence. —Darrell Jackson
The Cedar Lodge
by Maya MeissnerI first met Maya Meissner in 2019, during portfolio reviews at the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. It ended up being anything but a typical meeting. Meissner had a story for me and was planning on creating a book telling this story in every photography medium imaginable, like a visual diary. A very personal and ominous visual diary.
Meissner told a dark tale about her and her family narrowly escaping a serial killer in the late 1990s—The Yosemite Killer. I was captivated. I could not wait for this true-crime scrapbook to come to life. This year, she released it—a stunning and intimate collection she named The Cedar Lodge.
The best part about this book? It’s just photographs, then a wee insert at the very end with all the words you need to know to understand Meissner’s historic incident. The photography and design is so eerie, anyone would know that this isn’t your normal collection of photographs—it’s definitely a documentary of something personal and sinister.
In 1999, the Cedar Lodge’s handyman, Cary Stayner, killed a woman and two children at the motel near Yosemite National Park (authorities later found another female victim). Months prior to this horrific crime, Maya and her parents and sister were guests at the Cedar Lodge where, in the middle of the night, a man tried to break into their hotel room. Her father yelled at the intruder and scared him off.
Meissner and her sister were kept in the dark about this almost-fateful night until her mother finally revealed the family secret to her in 2014. Since then, she’s been collecting articles and archival film her parents captured from the 1999 trip. She’s also been capturing original photography of current Yosemite landscapes, the chilling forest surrounding the crime scene.
More than 10 years later, Meissner’s The Cedar Lodge serves as a visual compendium of that work, its imagery and design carefully considered in order to be sensitive to the victims and their surviving families.
Meissner’s dedication in the beginning of the book speaks to all of them: “For my mom for sharing her demons with me and bravely letting me share them with the world. For my dad, for being our protector and encouraging my adventures. For my sister, for being by my side through it all. And most of all, for Carole, Juli, Silvina, and Joie.” —Anna Goldwater Alexander
Sons of the Living
by Bryan SchutmaatOver the past 10 years, photographer Bryan Schutmaat spent 154 days traveling the western terrain of America, documenting the land and people of the desert.
His images are far from a typical postcard. Every photograph is black-and-white—and there are no captions. There is no artist statement or foreword, only a small blurb of Schutmaat’s personal acknowledgements on the back page. The simplicity of the design coincides perfectly with the barren desert visuals.
My family settled in the Arizona Territory in the 1860s, so every single archival family photo has the desert as the backdrop. Thumbing through Sons of the Living brought me back to those American desert roots, knowing the strife and endurance it takes to survive in that desolate space.
Schutmaat captured the true grit and durability of all the people he encountered—living life in that arid, unforgiving place, perhaps never adventuring beyond the land they were born in. This desolate yet intensely beautiful homeland is all they’ve known. It’s evident on their faces. —Anna Goldwater Alexander
I’m So Happy You’re Here: Japanese Women Photographers From the 1950s to Now
edited by Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. MartinEdited by Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, with essays by scholars like Takeuchi Mariko and Kelly McCormick, I’m So Happy You’re Here highlights the work, careers, and impact of Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to today.
While Vermare and Martin’s book doesn’t claim to be exhaustive, it serves as an essential starting point for anyone interested in the ways in which gender, politics, and personal experiences have shaped photography. It’s not so much a historical survey as it is a critical examination of how the lived experiences of photographers in a gendered society influence their artistic output. The essays, along with an illustrated bibliography, provide valuable context for understanding how these women navigated—and in many cases, subverted—the patriarchal structures of their industry.
This beautifully illustrated book is both a critical resource and a must-read for anyone looking to broaden their understanding of Japanese photographic history and its gendered dimensions. —Skye Battles
Afropean: A Journal
by Johny PittsIn Afropean: A Journal, Johny Pitts fuses documentary photography with reflective prose to create a deeply personal chronicle of identity, culture, and transformation in a shifting Europe. Pitts created this work as a way of accepting that “the multicultural ambience I'd taken for granted as a so-called ‘Xennial’ growing up in the late ’80s and ’90s was in tatters.” The ’00s, he feels, was a “haunted decade bookended by September the 11th and the global financial crisis.”
Mostly shot during a six-month span in late 2010 and early 2011, Afropean is supplemented by additional research, notes, and imagery from 2004 through 2024. The photographs—candid, atmospheric, and intimate—reflect the complexities of Black European identities. Portraits, street scenes, and text layered throughout make the book feel as if you’re reading through an exhibit. This journalistic approach blends the personal with the political, giving voice to histories often overlooked. The result is a nuanced exploration of diaspora, memory, and the cultural threads that hold—or fray—within an ever-changing Europe.
Afropean: A Journal is an essential work: a testament to identity, a snapshot of a continent, and a meditation on what it means to belong in turbulent times. —Darrell Jackson
