Buying Guides

Our Favorite Photography Books of 2023

From historical studies to psychedelic darkroom experiments, these are the photo books that best document the WIRED world.
Collage of various book covers
Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; GOST BOOKS; Klaus Pichler; POMEGRANATE PRESS; BODLEIAN LIBRARY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; LOOSE JOINTS; ABRAMS BOOKS; KEHRER VERLAG; NIKITA TERYOSHIN

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Featured in this article

Remember Me
by Preston Gannaway (GOST Books)
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$65 $60 at Bookshop.org

Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne
by Christopher Payne (Abrams Books)
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$85 $79 at Bookshop.org

Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War
by Nikita Teryoshin (GOST Books)
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$57 at GOST Books

Salt of the Earth: A Visual Odyssey of a Transforming Landscape
by Barbara Boissevain (Kehrer Verlag)
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$56 $52 at Bookshop.org
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It's not all words here at WIRED. Every one of our stories is brought to eye-popping life on the web and in print by our newsroom's photo desk. Each year, this award-winning team of photo editors compiles a list of their favorite photography books. What follows is a selection of their picks from 2023. (Most were released this year; there are one or two you can preorder for delivery in early 2024.)

The list covers everything from intimate portraiture and human storytelling to the harsh and industrial environments of modern factories and defense-tech trade shows. We know photography books can be pricey, but they’re worth the investment. If you’re someone who can’t find the time to commit to a novel but still craves that sublime experience of being transported to a faraway country or taken on a trippy voyage filled with abstract colors and shapes, then a book of gorgeous photos might be the perfect way to treat yourself.

Be sure to see our other buying guides for books, like our summer reading list, our gift guide for technology books, and our list of the best cookbooks of 2023.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

  • Courtesy of GOST Books

    Remember Me

    by Preston Gannaway (GOST Books)

    For the past 18 years, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Preston Gannaway has been documenting a young man's journey following the death of his mother. The young man, EJ, was just 3 years old when Gannaway began covering his story. This project started out as an assignment for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, but she couldn’t leave it once the initial assignment ended; she had to continue with the family to see what paths this boy took. Her new book, Remember Me, chronicles EJ as he develops into a human despite the loss of his mother, all the while exploring themes of pain, loss, and virility. Color tones tell much of the story. Dark and textured shadows signal deep emotions and feelings of personal intimacy—moments when EJ’s mother should have been there, what she missed, as well as moments that she would have disapproved of. Preston captured many father-and-son scenes to show that EJ is not missing parental love and guidance. It is obvious that this boy and his father consider Preston a part of the family. I can’t imagine the 18 years' worth of work and what lies on the editing floor. We’re going to need another eight chapters, please Preston. —Anna Goldwater Alexander

    $65 $60 at Bookshop.org
    $65 at GOST Books
  • Courtesy of Abrams Books

    Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne

    by Christopher Payne (Abrams Books)

    Anyone want to capture the ultimate factory photographs? Please hire Christopher Payne. It’s his thing, and he has the market cornered. Look around at every single thing in your view right now. You might see a golf ball, a pencil, a cigar, perhaps a piano? They all originated from some kind of process with some kind of machinery in some kind of factory. Payne’s Made in America is a glorious photography book that compiles his many photographs of industrial spaces. He includes vast over-all factory shots for every production as well as delicate and intimate details, especially when it comes to machines that require help from human hands. Payne tends to keep to an asymmetrical style, much like the film director Wes Anderson. He also is repetitive with circles, which is not surprising for documenting a factory with all the gears, but it helps distinguish his style amongst other interior photography. —Anna Goldwater Alexander

    $85 $79 at Bookshop.org
    $85 $32 at Amazon
    $85 at Abrams Books
  • Courtesy of GOST Books

    Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War

    by Nikita Teryoshin (GOST Books)

    Berlin-based photographer Nikita Teryoshin will publish his first photo book in 2024, giving the world an exclusive look into the global arms trade. For Nothing Personal, Teryoshin worked at 14 defense exhibitions from 2016 to 2023. Weapons of mass destruction are the project’s focal point. He documents large exhibitions that glamorize the machine gun. He shows us an oversize dessert table decorated with sweets arranged in the form of a missile, a drone display in front of which alcoholic beverages are being served, and a grandiose white prop wall fabricated with numerous bullet holes in a dizzying spiral pattern. —Lauryn Hill

    $57 at GOST Books
  • Courtesy of Kehrer Verlag

    Salt of the Earth: A Visual Odyssey of a Transforming Landscape

    by Barbara Boissevain (Kehrer Verlag)

    Barbara Boissevain began documenting the San Francisco Bay area’s salt ponds in 2010. What used to be a zone of tidal marshes abundant with biodiversity quickly became a wasteland as portions of the bay were utilized as salt evaporation ponds starting around the time of the California Gold Rush. At the beginning of her project, Boissevain’s focus went from shooting mesmerizing aerial photos of the salt ponds to capturing abstract details of what’s beneath the surface, while also documenting the progression of the salt ponds back to their former ecological state. Salt of the Earth is Boissevain’s ode to San Francisco that tells a seemingly rare and hopeful story of combatting the effects of human-led climate change. —Lauryn Hill

    $56 $52 at Bookshop.org
    $54 $36 at Amazon
    $48 at Kehrer Verlag
  • Courtesy of Loose Joints

    Somewhere 2017—2023

    by Sam Youkilis (Loose Joints)

    I first discovered Sam Youkilis’ work on Instagram in 2018, where his work stood out among the endless sea of images. His carefully composed, colorful photographs looked like snapshots but felt like so much more. Two people embracing in a kiss on a sandy beach, elderly men playing chess at the park, a father and daughter holding hands in a crowded city center—Youkilis’ photographs were voyeuristic in the most delicate way, and delicate in the most voyeuristic way.

    Since Youkilis photographs primarily using iPhones, sometimes multiple at a time, Instagram was the perfect place for his photographs to live, until now. Loose Joints is publishing his first monograph, Somewhere 2017—2023. It is a staggering 528-page culmination of the artist’s exploration of beauty in the mundane. By employing the fundamental principles of visual arts, including composition, color, chiaroscuro, and framing, Youkilis surpasses the constraints in both his tools and platform, resulting in every page in Somewhere feeling more beautiful and tender than the last. —Cameron Getty

    $49 at Loose Joints
    $42 at Photobookstore
  • Courtesy of Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford

    Dark Room

    by Garry Fabian Miller (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

    When I was in college as a photography major, we were assigned to create photographs in the darkroom without a camera. I splattered darkroom chemicals and household items (coffee grounds, dyes, wine) and cast light onto photo-sensitive paper and wished for the best. The results were unsatisfactory most of the time, but every once in a while, I’d get something special. From that moment, watching the paper slowly show me something I made using only my hands and various liquids and chemicals, I was hooked on camera-less photography.

    Dark Room serves as a memoir of Garry Fabian Miller's photography over the last half century, cataloging the artist’s personal account of creating pictures both in the dark and in the light. The 240-page book maps out the evolution of Fabian Miller’s practice, moving away from the camera-based photography of his early career to the abstract, camera-less method of darkroom picture-making for which he has become internationally recognized. Fabian Miller’s compositions radiate and pulsate off the page as they captivate the viewer with their sheer magnitude and bold colors. Through hands-on manipulation of light across various materials, Fabian Miller meticulously crafts camera-less exposures that manifest as abstract compositions, drawing inspiration from the familial and fantastical landscapes that define the artist. —Cameron Getty

    $75 at Bookshop.org
    $65 $48 at Amazon
  • Courtesy of Klaus Pichler

    A Hoax, a Prank, an Internet Scam, an Act of Agricultural Bio-Terrorism

    by Klaus Pichler (Self-published, Klaus Pichler)

    In the summer of 2020, packages containing unnamed seeds arrived on the doorsteps of over 85,000 unsuspecting Americans. The packages had been shipped from China, but no one had ordered them. Pending an investigation by the US Department of Agriculture that would later link the shipments to a “brushing scam,” the seed conundrum became fertile ground for conservative conspiracy theories. Some incorrectly speculated that the seeds were a deliberate attempt by the Chinese at inflicting bioterrorism upon the US.

    Early this year, Klaus Pichler worked with Nearest Truth Editions to self-publish A Hoax, a Prank, an Internet Scam, an Act of Agricultural Bio-terrorism. The book—which traces this story’s evolution from bizarre phenomenon to purported national security threat to everyday retailing scheme—is a display of Pichler’s sensitivity to the sensationalist potential of unassuming objects. The photographs turn plant seeds into planets, revealing their glimmering and otherworldly landscapes. By Pichler’s own description, the seeds are “a metaphor for how unsubstantiated assumptions can grow into ‘alternative facts.’” —Charis Morgan

    $71 at Klaus Pichler
    $60 at Photo-Eye Bookstore
  • Courtesy of Pomegranate Press

    Wild Place

    by Daniel Rampulla (Pomegranate Press)

    In 2016, photographer Daniel Rampulla embarked on a series of landscapes and portraits which grappled with his early experiences as a young queer person. The resulting work culminated in Wild Place, a brooding reliving of those formative years, published with Pomegranate Press and Handshake Books in 2023.

    You will be hard-pressed to meet many gazes while flipping through this book. The majority of the photographer’s subjects exist in limbo between physical presence and emotional absence. Their bodies are stark, but their faces are shielded. Interspersed amongst these anonymous portraits are what seem to be a selection of first-person memories. Shot with bright strobes, the landscapes feel like high-octane flashbacks, and the neighboring portraits read like voyeuristic reconstructions of these critical moments. We move anachronistically through time alongside Rampulla, keeping one foot in his tumultuous past and the other in his investigative present. Wild Place is a formal time warp played out over 72 pages of masterful black and white photography. —Charis Morgan

    $30 at Pomegranate Press
    $30 at Printed Matter
Written by WIRED Staff
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