Open a photobook and the first things you notice are a few well-made photographs. But the same photograph reads differently depending on the order it sits in, what appears on the facing page, and how large the book is in your hands. Is a good photobook decided by the quality of a single photograph alone?
This year's shortlist for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards brings the question back. On October 8, Aperture Foundation announced 35 shortlisted books across three categories. The winners will be announced on November 13, at Paris Photo and online.
Three Categories, Three Standards
The First PhotoBook award goes to an artist's first photobook. There are 20 shortlisted books, and the prize is $10,000. The PhotoBook of the Year award goes to the artist and the publisher together, which means the contribution of the people who made the book is recognized too. There are 10 candidates. The Photography Catalog of the Year is chosen from exhibition catalogs and museum publications, and there are 5 candidates.
For this piece we picked four books from the three categories. The editors have not yet seen the physical books. We write only what can be confirmed from descriptions released by the publishers and artists, retailer listings, and reviews.
Üruklyn, a First Book That Joins the Names of Two Cities
In the First PhotoBook category, Ma Hailun was born in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, and studied photography in New York. The title combines Ürümqi and Brooklyn. Begun in 2021, the project invited residents of Ürümqi and Kashgar to be photographed and recorded her hometown in the manner of fashion photography. It was published by Jiazazhi (Ningbo, China) and, according to the publisher, is a 180-page book with a silkscreened cover. The staging of fashion photography and the daily life of one region overlap within a single volume. It is a book that makes readers ask for themselves whether staged photographs can be read as a record of the place.
Also on the shortlist in the same category is Miranda Barnes's Social Season, which photographs Black debutante balls in Detroit from 2022 to 2025.
This Is Not My Cat, a Book the Size of a Palm
The PhotoBook of the Year category includes Takashi Homma's This Is Not My Cat. It was published in 2025 jointly by Nieves (Zurich) and Perimeter Editions (Melbourne). The publisher gives the format as 11.2 × 17.8 cm, a softcover of a little over 80 pages. In the cover photographs Aperture shot side by side on the same backdrop, this book is visibly the smallest. It follows a cat wandering through a modest Tokyo apartment, and parts of the photographer's body, such as a knee, a foot or half a face, occasionally enter the frame. The title recalls his earlier book Tokyo and My Daughter. The girl in that book was the daughter of an acquaintance, not Homma's own. With one small book, it asks again how a single line of words attached to a photograph changes the way we read it.
Passports, 2012–2025: One Photograph, Three Hundred Times
Keisha Scarville's book starts from a single photograph: her father’s earliest passport photograph. She reworked that image more than 300 times, adding paint, beads, gold leaf and glitter, and pasting on fragments of other photographs of Black bodies. The book also includes old photographs taken in Guyana and New York between the 1960s and the 1980s, a text transcribing conversations with her father, and an essay by the scholar Tina M. Campt. The publisher is MACK. A project in which the same face recurs hundreds of times is a set of variations when seen sheet by sheet. Once it is bound into a book, an order appears, and that order decides where our habit of seeing the passport photo as neutral proof starts to be shaken. In a book like this, the editing carries as much weight as the photographs.
L Is for Look, a History of Children's Photobooks
In the catalog category, L Is for Look: Children's Photobooks is an exhibition catalog on the history of children's photobooks. It was edited by Anne Lacoste and Rose Durr and published by Spector Books (Leipzig). It gathers more than 100 children's photobooks from many countries, from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition was organized by the Institut pour la photographie (Lille, France) and Photo Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland). It ran in Lausanne until February 1, 2026, and a tour of several European cities is planned through 2028. Because it looks again at the photobook as a form, it is the book on this year's shortlist closest to the question this award asks.
November 13
The winners will be announced at Paris Photo on November 13 at 3:00 p.m. CET (11:00 p.m. in Korea). The full list of 35 books and a description of each can be found on Aperture's announcement page. Whichever book wins, a look through the shortlist shows what shape this year's photobooks are taking.
