As summer blurs the boundaries between time and the body, our gaze seeks refuge in visual narratives that require no words. Photography books, with their blend of documentary impulse and visual lyricism, become objects of deep contemplation, allowing us to escape the accelerated pace of the present and enter parallel universes where desire, nostalgia, identity, and nature converse without the need for translation. This is our curated selection of the 10 most seductive and stimulating photobooks of the summer.
1. Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) — La Liberté ou L’Amour
Published by Kinakaal Forlag
On the occasion of his two decades as a photographer, Lin Zhipeng—a key figure in the renewal of independent photography in China—publishes this volume with a fragmentary structure and playful spirit. “La Liberté ou L’Amour” is composed of ten booklets that can be rearranged, read in any order, or even function as standalone works. The result: an archive of erotic intimacies, free bodies, and moments bathed in an ever-sensual light, reminiscent of both magical realism and art-house cinema.
Zhipeng (also known as No. 223, in allusion to a character in Chungking Express) crafts a visual narrative here that blurs the boundaries between love, freedom, identity, and representation. An exercise in affective memory with a radically fluid layout.
2. Masahisa Fukase — Yoko
Published by Kinakaal Forlag
This new edition of Yoko, one of the most moving photography books of the 20th century, returns to the public eye after nearly fifty years of publication silence. Fukase documented his relationship with his wife Yoko over 13 years: an intense and increasingly tragic love story that unravels before the viewer’s eyes with each page.
Beyond the intimate portrait, Yoko offers a meditation on the link between art and obsession. The contemporary design brings a new emotional legibility to the images, reactivating their narrative power. The result is a book that pulses between a loving testimony and aesthetic devastation.
3. Sofia Coppola — The Virgin Suicides
Published by MACK
With her first publishing title under the Important Flowers imprint, Sofia Coppola reinterprets her iconic debut feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999), from a visual and documentary perspective. The book brings together photographs taken by Corinne Day during the filming of the film, creating a delicate, atmospheric, and profoundly feminine account of that cinematic experience.
Accompanied by texts by Coppola and novelist Jeffrey Eugenides (author of the original book), this volume becomes a time capsule. The costumes, the furtive glances between the actresses, the haze of an American summer: everything here is evocative and mythic. An essential work for understanding the sensibilities of a generation.
4. Malick Sidibé — Painted Frames
Published by Loose Joints
The legacy of Malian master Malick Sidibé receives a new editorial treatment through Painted Frames, a collaboration with framers and artists who reinterpret his iconic photographs using the traditional West African technique of reverse-painted glass.
This edition offers a renewed vision of Sidibé’s archive, uniting studio, celebration, community, and ritual in a collective narrative. The images—which portray a vibrant Bamako in the post-independence era—engage with the artisanal gesture, enhancing its symbolic character. The result is a volume that celebrates improvisation, joy, and cultural resistance.
5. Yusuke Yamatani — Revue Diapo #4
Published by Revue Diapo
Yusuke Yamatani continues his series dedicated to Japan’s wild hot springs with this installment, which transitions between documentation and sensorial experience. The images are accompanied by real analog slides, transforming the act of seeing into a small ritual.
With a design conceived by the Parisian studio Rimasùu, the book draws parallels between these hot spring communities and the subcultures of skate and punk, which Yamatani has previously portrayed. Revue Slide #4 is, ultimately, a visual essay on the connection between body and nature, between the ancestral and the contemporary.
6. Daido Moriyama — Quartet
Published by Thames & Hudson
Quartet compiles four key works by Daido Moriyama, a pivotal figure in the history of Japanese photography. From Japan, A Photo Theatre to Light and Shadow, this book traces the evolution of his radical language: high grain, pronounced shadows, and an almost tactile approach to the city as a space of desire and alienation.
The volume, beautifully bound in a green slipcase, also includes excerpts from his diaries, broadening the poetic horizon of his gaze. Moriyama doesn’t photograph reality: he interprets it as a wild, dark, and, paradoxically, intimate place.
7. Roe Ethridge — Shells
Published by Note Note Editions
In Shells, Roe Ethridge takes a seemingly banal motif—seashells—and transforms it into a universe laden with symbolic layers. Halfway between commercial aesthetics and conceptual photography, Ethridge creates a kind of visual diary in which childhood memories are transmuted into haunting and beautifully ambiguous images.
The book functions as a contemporary curiosity cabinet: minimalism, humor, and desire coexist on every page. Its atmosphere is enveloping, almost hypnotic.
8. Antonis Theodoridis — Lost Objects Found
Published by Hyper Hypo
Greek photographer Antonis Theodoridis turns his lens on the Eleonas flea market in Athens, creating a colorful, chaotic, and deeply human collage with his images. With a saturated aesthetic and intensive use of flash, Lost Objects Found is a tribute to the ordinary, the discarded, and the rediscovered.
Halfway between an archive, a zine, and an urban chronicle, this book celebrates the unexpected around every corner. Ideal for those who understand that art can also be found among forgotten objects and everyday gestures.
9. Phyllis Ma — Mushrooms & Friends #4
Self-published
The fourth installment of Phyllis Ma’s editorial project continues to explore the beauty, rarity, and symbolic power of mushrooms. This time, the focus is on Ganoderma, a species with a rich tradition in Chinese medicine and a visually compelling morphology.
With an almost painterly approach, Ma transforms these organisms into contemporary, deeply stylized still lifes. The result is a book that moves between the botanical, the pop, and the mystical, expanding the boundaries of what a portrait can be.
10. Rinko Kawauchi — M/E
Published by Torch Press and Delpire & Co.
M/E is one of the most lyrical and sophisticated books of the year. Rinko Kawauchi interweaves images of Iceland’s volcanic landscapes with intimate scenes from her home in Japan. Through this geographical and emotional duality, the artist constructs a meditation on time, memory, and the fragility of everyday life.
Kawauchi works with light as if it were a narrative material. Her seemingly simple photographs contain a poetic complexity that invites slow contemplation. This book is an act of visual care.
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