The Best Photography Books Every Serious Photographer Should Read (2026 Reading List)
How This Reading Guide Is Organised Whether you’re studying for a BA, MA, MFA or PhD, or simply want to deepen your understanding of photography, this guide… These books will change the way you think about photography, not simply how you make photographs. One of the questions I’m asked most often by photographers preparing for postgraduate study is surprisingly simple: What should I be reading? Photography is one of those rare disciplines where the most influential books often have very little to say about cameras. Instead, they challenge how we think about images, memory, ethics, representation, politics and ultimately ourselves. Over the past few years, as I’ve developed my own…
From My Bookshelves: 10 Photography Books That Continue to Influence My Practice
Looking back through almost two decades of writing for TheAppWhisperer, reviewing photobooks, interviewing photographers and studying photography myself, I recently realised I had reached a rather practical problem: I had run out of room for my photobook collection. The solution was the installation of yet another set of bookcases, a reminder not only of how many photography books I have accumulated over the years, but also of how frequently I return to them. As I was unpacking and reorganising the shelves, I found myself revisiting old favourites and rediscovering books that had influenced my thinking at different stages of my photographic journey. The titles included here represent only a small…
Photo Book Review – Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan
Photo Book Review – Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan The work was “about family history and the American dream, and how those two intersect,” Larry Sultan told The Times in 1989. “My father bought a one-way ticket from New York in 1949 and ended up in a dream house in Sherman Oaks. It was part of the cultural myth of the ‘50s about going west.” Larry Sultan was born in Brooklyn on 13 July 1946, but he primarily grew up in Los Angeles, California and graduated college with a degree in Political Science at UCLA and UCSB. He began photographing in 1968, for the Chicago Seed and the Good…
Book Review – Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan
The work was “about family history and the American dream, and how those two intersect,” Larry Sultan told The Times in 1989. “My father bought a one-way ticket from New York in 1949 and ended up in a dream house in Sherman Oaks. It was part of the cultural myth of the ‘50s about going west.” Larry Sultan was born in Brooklyn on 13 July 1946, but he primarily grew up in Los Angeles, California and graduated college with a degree in Political Science at UCLA and UCSB. He began photographing in 1968, for the Chicago Seed and the Good Times. “It was the psychedelic culture and photographing rallies and…
