These Are the Greatest Photography Books of 2021

Encampment Wyoming by Lora Webb Nichols, an amazing documentation of life in a US frontier settlement in the early twentieth century, was the photographic book I returned to more than any other this year. It has a profound feeling of place, thanks to images by Nichols and other local amateur photographers.

The portraits, which vary from the haunting – a hazy and ghostly adult plaiting the hair of a small child – to the fashionable – a smart, besuited lady peeking through a window – are punctuated by domestic interiors and still lifes. A calm, personal depiction of a time, a place, and a budding community.

I was also attracted to modern literature that dealt with silent thought, maybe because of the curiously suspended aspect of our times. Languor was made by Donavon Smallwood while wandering in the woods in the somewhat remote north-west corner of New York’s Central Park during the lockdown spring and summer of 2020.

Smallwood’s photos of glades, streams, and ravines imply serenity in the midst of the city’s clamor, and are broken by beautifully composed portraits of the people who were attracted there on a frequent basis throughout the epidemic. The book’s subtext is about Central Park’s tumultuous past, a site that has frequently mirrored the city’s racial conflicts.

In this quietly striking debut, Smallwood wonders, “What is it like to be a black person in nature?”

In Plain Air, a project by Russian-born photographer Irina Rozovsky, focused on another idyllic New York landscape: Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which, in the summer, is a microcosm of the city’s multicultural dynamic.

The epidemic is once again lurking in the background of these observations of individuals in man-made environments: strolling, relaxing, working, playing, and interacting with one another and their surroundings. A superb study in mood, atmosphere, and scenery that is beautifully maintained.

Speak the Wind, another remarkable debut by Iranian-born photographer Hoda Afshar, is situated in a far more ethereal terrain. She was lured to the islands of Qeshm, Hormuz, and Hengam in the Persian Gulf’s strait of Hormuz by a long-held local belief that the wind that sculpted the stunning scenery is also the cause of disease and spirit possession.

Her intensely evocative portraits and landscapes convey the islands’ otherness, but they also allude to the intangible and intangible forces, both historical and community, that have molded this in-between region and influenced its traditions and beliefs. An big, multidimensional drama that rewards thorough scrutiny for its gliding approach to myth, ritual, geography, and the colonial past’s long shadow.

Tereza Zelenkova’s The Essential Solitude, originally self-published in a now-rare limited edition, is an entirely different creative reaction to a mystery area. The location in this case is the dingy interior of a Grade II listed house in London’s East End that belonged to the late Dennis Severs, an eccentric who designed it like his imagined vision of an 18th-century Huguenot home.

Zelenkova’s work is rich in symbolism and suggestion, her singular gaze capturing the disorienting atmosphere and fading grander of a house haunted by the extravagant imagination of its creator. Zelenkova’s work is rich in symbolism and suggestion, her singular gaze capturing the disorienting atmosphere and fading grander of a house haunted by the extravagant imagination of its creator.

Another ambitiously evocative study on location and community, American photographer Carolyn Drake’s enigmatic Knit Club, evokes a feeling of gloom. The book is a clever play on the southern gothic tradition with a subversive feminist undertone, framed as a collaboration between the photographer and an unnamed group of women, part sisterhood, half hidden cult.

Drake’s moving narrative is inspired by William Faulkner’s work As I Lay Dying, and her expertly composed pictures allude to hidden rites and the contentious history of the United States south.

Matt Black’s epic American Geography, which took six years in the creation and had the photographer crossing the nation by van and Greyhound bus to visit places with a poverty rate of more than 20%, reveals a tremendously unseen US. He was fascinated in “the psychology of poverty,” he told me back in 2016, and he has succeeded in capturing that complicated interplay in monochrome photos that are both austere and unsettling.

His personal observations, snippets of overheard dialogue, and daily items discovered at bus terminals, truck stops, and roadside cafés weave their way through the visual tale. A modern documentary classic.

The long-awaited release of Gilles Peress’s Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, a two-volume epic of his pictures from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was perhaps the photographic book event of the year. The book is possibly the most visceral, and definitely the most ambitious, representation of what it was like to live through the upheaval of those terrible times, since it is structured across 22 semi-fictional days.

Peress’s amazing ability to capture particular dramatic moments – of violence, sadness, resistance, cruelty – that are repeated throughout the film like little variants on a larger subject of tribal and political divide, stands out above all. The story is overpowering, as it should be, and Annals of the North, a companion book, gives much-needed background.

An very significant book, but one that is outrageously expensive, geared firmly at photo-book collectors.

James Barnor’s Accra/London: a Retrospective, which followed the Ghanaian-born photographer’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, and Stephen Gill’s survey show at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, were two exhibition catalogues that stood out for me this year.

The first demonstrated how Barnor, who is now 91, worked fluidly across genres – portraiture, photography, and fashion – while also establishing a colorful record of everyday Africans in Ghana and the diaspora in the United Kingdom. The second was an exploration of one of Britain’s most unique contemporary photographers, tracing Gill’s mischievously subversive lens from inner city Hackney to rural Sweden.

Both are strongly suggested.

I was particularly intrigued to Nancy Floyd’s epic of self-portraiture, Weathering Time, which she defines as “my visual diary, personal archive, and record of my changing body and my environment over the past 30-plus years” in a good year for books by female photographers.

Floyd has been photographing herself every day since 1982, generally standing impassively on her alone and sometimes performing things with a dog or a family member in attendance. The book is made up of almost 2,500 photographs, many of which are rather commonplace yet have a powerful resonance when arranged chronologically.

Finally, Odd Time by Mirjana Vrbaski is possibly the most quietly evocative photo-book I got this year, in which a collection of austerely gorgeous portraits that hint to the Dutch old masters give way to almost ghostly photographs of the Dalmatian coast’s deep woodland vistas. Both sequences have a weird purity to them, but the images of the young ladies, with their elegance and inscrutable looks, linger in the mind.

The quiet in Vrbaski’s pictures betrays a strong commitment with her subjects, imbuing her photos with an almost frightening presence that is difficult to pin down yet very perceptible. The photographs speak for themselves in this little, nicely crafted book.

Thanks to Sean O’Hagan at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.