Why Photo Books Are Important

I love photo books, I have an ever growing collection of them and have just asked from some more as birthday gifts. I think that they are a great thing to own, make fantastic points, I love to receive them as gifts and they serve as a great way to find inspiration, locations and ideas.

This blog is also a bit of a precursor to a series that I am going to start to add to the page where I take a look at some of my favourites, whilst explaining what they deserve a space on my bookshelf and maybe suggesting why they deserve a place on yours.

If you’re someone who doesn’t own any photo books yet, then my blog “10 Photo Books You Should Own” is a great place to start to look for inspiration.

Over the last 15 years, since the launch of Instagram, the way that we view and consume photography has changed in a huge way, much like the Instagram platform itself. Social media presents images to us in such a way, that we look at it for a couple of seconds, decide whether we like it or not, we might double tap it and then we swipe away. A lot of the time, unless it’s something that goes viral, we won’t see it again. These are fleeting moments with images, we’re making a quick decision about them and then we rarely see them again. Everything is rushed.

Imagine doing this in gallery. You’d soon be out of breath and you wouldn’t really appreciate anything that you saw in any sort of meaningful way.

Photobooks, for me at least, are the antitheses to the way we consume images on social media. They force us to slow down when we’re looking through them, we’ve paid for them and we should enjoy them. But please don’t just buy them to allow them to sit on the shelf, make time for them and spend time with them!

It’s useful to think of the different ways we view photography in another way. Imagine that posing your images online is like making a boiled egg, having an image in a gallery exhibition is like making a roast dinner without having to look at the instructions and a photobook is like making a Michelin star level Soufflé and being able to do it consistently. All three of these involve work with ingredients (your photos) but each one is a step up, until you reach the pinnacle.

They also all have different barriers to entry/success. Anyone can pick up their phone and post on social media - you have control over this, it’s your account and you can post whatever you want on it. A gallery exhibition means that someone/some people have to like your work enough and think that it is credible enough to be on a wall somewhere that people want to come and see it.

A photo book on the other hand requires not only a publisher to take a chance on you, it’s going to involve multiple people making decisions along the way and it also needs you to have a large, credible body of work that people will be willing to part with money to look at. It’s the highest barrier to entry and when you buy one, you can usually rest assured that what we’re getting is really the cream of the crop - it’s going to be something that we want to spend time with to enjoy and digest, to relax and maybe, just maybe, be inspired by.

Unfortunately, buying photo books isn’t always cheap, especially if you want a good, well produced one, but for me, that is always offset by the fact that I have something tangible, which is mine, feels good in the hands and looks great on my bookcase, or in some cases on the coffee table.

For many photographers, a dream is to have their own photo book, some are in the fortunate position that they are able to design, develop and publish their own, but this comes with a further barrier to entry in terms of the financial risk involved. If you can’t sell them, they’re yours, but you can only look at one copy of it at time. If this is something that you intend to do at some point, do your research and make sure that you know exactly what the risks involved are.

Photobooks are one of the most powerful ways to experience photography, whether you’re looking for inspiration, ideas, or simply a deeper connection with the images you see

But Why are Photo Books Important?

For me, this is about several things, which include, but are not limited to quality, intention, permanence and control.

There is not doubt that social media is an easy, quick and largely free way to enjoy photography that is being shared by other people, no matter how good we think the stuff that we see is - we’ve not paid for it, so we don’t mind skipping a few dozen images before find something that we like and that we want to engage with. If you sat with a photo book for 20 minutes and only found one image that you liked in the whole thing, you wouldn’t be very happy, right?

Granted, you’re unlikely to spend money on a photo book by a photographer whose style or subject matter you don’t enjoy — but sometimes you take a chance, and it doesn’t pay off.

The good thing about most photobooks is that they’re created by credible, well-known photographers. We’re buying into their work and their style, so more often than not, we know what we’re getting.

I’m going to talk about quality and intention together, because they’re intrinsically linked. When you get your hands on a well-produced photobook, one of the first things you notice is that the images are presented exactly as the photographer intended. This extends right down to the paper the images are printed on. Some books even use multiple paper types within the same volume, ensuring each image is shown at its best.

A great example of this — even though it’s technically a magazine — is the British Journal of Photography’s quarterly publication. The first thing I noticed when I opened my first copy was the variation in paper stock, and how much that influences the way the images are presented.

TO:KY:OO by Liam Wong is another excellent example of intentional design. I know I mention this book a lot, but it illustrates the point perfectly. The book is filled with vibrant, low-light images of Tokyo and is printed on smooth, glossy paper, which allows the colours to really pop and gives the images a striking presence. These same images wouldn’t have the same impact on the matte paper used towards the back of the book, where colour palettes and contact sheets are presented. They’re still strong images — but the presentation changes how we experience them.

Then there’s layout and sequencing. The order of images helps to tell a story, and the layout supports that narrative. On social media, we’re constrained by the platform. On our websites, we’re limited by design structures. But in a book, there’s far more freedom. We can use full-bleed spreads, pair images across pages, or group multiple images together. We can add text exactly where we want it — not where a platform dictates.

Finally, control. While this overlaps with quality and intention, it goes a step further. Control is about the finer details — particularly colour. When we share images online, we have very little control over how they’re viewed. Screens vary in brightness, colour temperature, and calibration. There are countless variables.

With a printed photobook, however, and with the right workflow, we can calibrate images to the printer and fine-tune every detail so that the final result matches our vision as closely as possible.

In TO:KY:OO, Wong takes this even further with fold-out pages that extend across four panels, allowing for stunning panoramic images to be presented in a way that simply isn’t possible on social media — and rarely practical on a website. It adds both impact and a sense of occasion to the viewing experience.

And then there’s permanence.

There’s something inherently fleeting about social media. Once we scroll past an image, we rarely see it again. Even viral content has a short lifespan. Platforms now prioritise video, and even when still images are promoted, they tend to favour unpolished, behind-the-scenes content over carefully crafted work.

Photobooks sit at the opposite end of that spectrum. They bring together considered, intentional, often highly polished work in one place. They live on our shelves, within reach, ready to be revisited whenever we want — whether for inspiration, study, or simply the enjoyment of engaging with photography at a slower pace.

They’ll be here long after we’re not.

Conclusion

Photobooks ask more of us as viewers. They ask us to slow down, to look properly, and to engage with images in a way that social media rarely allows. But in return, they give us something far more meaningful — a deeper connection to the work, a clearer sense of the photographer’s intent, and a lasting source of inspiration that we can return to time and time again. That’s why photo books are important.

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