{"id":571564,"date":"2025-11-15T07:35:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T07:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/571564\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T07:35:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T07:35:35","slug":"announcing-the-winners-of-the-2025-photobook-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/571564\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the Winners of the 2025 PhotoBook Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Paris Photo\u2013Aperture PhotoBook Awards\u2014an annual celebration of the photobook\u2019s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. A jury met in Paris on November 13, 2025, to select this year\u2019s winners. The jury included\u00a0Coralie Gauthier<\/strong>, director of programming, communications, and events, Librairie 7L; Shanay Jhaveri<\/strong>, head of visual arts, Barbican Centre; Manuel Krebs<\/strong>, designer and publisher, NORM; Emily LaBarge<\/strong>, contributing writer, The New York Times; and Guinevere Ras<\/strong>, curator, Nederlands Fotomuseum.<\/p>\n

\u201cAcross the thirty-seven books that we had the incredible opportunity to spend time with and deliberate on, some things that surfaced were a sense of investigating the archive and intergenerational conversations,\u201d says juror Shanay Jhaveri. \u201cThe shortlist and the winners show the vitality of the form of the book itself, one that is essential today in a culture where images have been dematerialized.\u201d<\/p>\n

A presentation of the thirty-seven books shortlisted for the 2025 PhotoBook Awards, including the winners, is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 16 and will travel to Printed Matter, New York, in January 2026, and then to the Leipzig Photobook Festival, with additional venues to be announced.<\/p>\n

Below, read about this year\u2019s winning titles.<\/p>\n

Photography Catalog of the Year<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements<\/a>, Edited by Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer
ATLAS, Lisbon, Design by Teo Furtado and Ana Schefer<\/p>\n

\u201cThe history of photobooks looks different from the vantage point of the African continent,\u201d Drew Thompson writes in Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements, a vigorous anthology about the links between photography and anticolonial politics from the 1960s to the 1980s, when Portugal\u2019s former colonies in Africa fought for independence. The product of a research initiative begun in 2018\u2014with texts in English, French, and Portuguese\u2014this book spotlights organizations such as the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which was instrumental in producing photobooks wielded by activists to inspire international solidarity. Covers and spreads from rare publications are reproduced throughout, displaying an immense range of visual communication strategies that often put a premium on dramatic, high-impact images, and showing how politically motivated publishers in Maputo, Mozambique, as well as Amsterdam, Moscow, San Francisco, and Tokyo, envisioned Africa\u2019s freedom and self-determination.<\/p>\n

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Augusta Conchiglia, from Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements, 2025<\/p>\n

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First PhotoBook Award<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A Study on Waitressing<\/a> by Eleonora Agostini
Witty Books, Turin, Italy, Design by Massimiliano Pace<\/p>\n

Eleonora Agostini\u2019s A Study on Waitressing is a timely, multilayered interrogation of the roles that women are asked to play within the regime of self-presentation in the labor market. Agostini approaches this conceptual study by making fictionalized images of a waitress, played by her own mother. The book is divided into six chapters, each featuring a series of staccato-like sequences that layer upon one another ingeniously, narrowing in on mundane details of gesture, movement, and behavior. These visuals are mixed in with semitransparent pages to mark the transition between sections, featuring small, handwritten notes in her mother\u2019s native Italian. Midway through a sequence of cropped close-ups of a woman\u2019s smile, the book shifts to a manual-like text describing how a waitress is to appear, dress, speak, and maintain herself. The phrase \u201cAlways Smile While Speaking\u201d is punctuated throughout\u2014a stern reminder that the customer is always right.<\/p>\n

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Eleonora Agostini, from A Study on Waitressing, 2025<\/p>\n

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PhotoBook of the Year<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Classroom<\/a> by Hicham Benohoud
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France \/ London, Design by Loose Joints Studio<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, Hicham Benohoud was a jaded high school art teacher in Marrakech. Like his students, who came from underprivileged backgrounds, he felt trapped by the stultifyingly rigid power structures of postcolonial Morocco. So he started to improvise photoshoots to pass the time, transforming his four-hour class into a site of joyful photographic ingenuity and hands-on learning. Made between 1992 and 2002, the black-and-white photographs of The Classroom show Benohoud\u2019s pupils posing against makeshift backdrops and behind paper cages, at desks stacked atop other desks, with Hula-Hoops and in surreal outfits crafted with long cardboard tubes or plastic bags, their faces often playfully obscured. \u201cThis book stopped me in my tracks,\u201d says juror Florian Koenigsberger. \u201cAbove all, I\u2019m attracted to the resourcefulness of the work. I think it\u2019s a model for creativity in a lot of ways, of making the most of what you have. It offers a beautiful perspective on imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"10_28<\/p>\n

Hicham Benohoud, from The Classroom, 2025<\/p>\n

\"17_04<\/p>\n

Jurors\u2019 Special Mention<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Flowers Drink the River<\/a> by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth
STANLEY\/BARKER, London, Design by ramel\u00b7luzoir<\/p>\n

Under the moonlight, in the dark cover of the night, Pia-Paulina Guilmoth guides us into a nocturnal dreamscape that reveals the beauty and resilience born from transformation. Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Guilmoth\u2019s gender transition, when she began photographing her community in rural Maine, exploring both the joy and terror of life as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Using a large-format camera and a heavy flash, Guilmoth oscillates between the mystical and ominous, and each frame feels as if it\u2019s a small moment captured mid-ritual, leaving us to imagine what transpires outside the frame. Spiderwebs and moths sparkle against darkness; mud-drenched bodies intertwine in fields; and landscapes shimmer with an almost ethereal haze. Flowers Drink the River blends Guilmoth\u2019s mystical yet exacting view upon her own search for resistance, magic, and safety in a world often devoid of it.<\/p>\n

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Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, from Flowers Drink the River, 2025<\/p>\n

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An exhibition of 2025 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo through November 16 and will travel to Printed Matter, New York, in January 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Paris Photo\u2013Aperture PhotoBook Awards\u2014an annual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":571565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,3252,156267,156266,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-571564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-immersive","13":"tag-paris-photo-aperture-photobook-awards","14":"tag-photobooks","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115552566810978531","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/571565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}