Photography Books

Every era has its monuments. What architectural legacy has the Industrial Revolution left behind? Jeff Brouws is a photographer whose work explores the American cultural landscape through a typological lens. His latest book, Silent Monoliths: The Coaling Tower Project, documents concrete coaling towers that once fueled steam locomotives across North America. He talks us through five essential books on industrial photography—from the Bechers' rigorous documentation to intimate portraits of displaced steelworkers—and explores what we preserve when structures themselves vanish.

'People learn how to read critically and think critically, but I don’t believe we learn how to see critically.'

The award-winning Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam tells us about the power of images and offers some striking examples of the photographer as artist, witness or activist.

One of the world's leading garden photographers talks us through the many different styles employed in his field

We live in an age obsessed with self-image. Technology has made the ‘selfie’ a ubiquitous form of social currency. Renaissance means may have been very different, but celebrity artists in Medici Florence dealt with many of the issues relating to identity and authorship that we grapple with today. Maria Loh, author of Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master, talks to Five Books about the curated self.

The biographer and editor of John Berger reveals how Berger's self-characterisation as a storyteller is visible across the numerous genres he writes in.

Good writing about visual experience allows us to see things we otherwise wouldn't, says Rachel Cohen. The author picks some of her own favourite books about art.

The arts books publisher chooses a book about Rembrandt’s representation of his own nose, and tells the bigger story is about the way in which Rembrandt renders sense of flesh in his prints and his oil paintings

Photographers Beth and Thom Atkinson, authors of the acclaimed photobook Missing Buildings, discuss five books that explore the mythology of war.