Paris Photo and Aperture have revealed the winners of the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, an annual competition that celebrates photobooks' significant contributions to the evolving story of contemporary photography. A distinguished international jury convened in Paris on November 13, 2025, to select this year's winners from an impressive pool of submissions.
The judging panel included Coralie Gauthier, director of programming, communications, and events at Librairie 7L; Shanay Jhaveri, head of visual arts at the Barbican Centre; Manuel Krebs, designer and publisher at NORM; Emily LaBarge, contributing writer for The New York Times; and Guinevere Ras, curator at Nederlands Fotomuseum. "Across 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," said juror Shanay Jhaveri.
The competition received remarkable international participation, with over one thousand book submissions from fifty-five countries worldwide. Notable entries came from Ecuador, Lesotho, Uruguay, and Vietnam, demonstrating the global reach and diverse perspectives in contemporary photography publishing. "The 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," Jhaveri added.
Prior to the final judging, a shortlist jury met in New York from September 17-19, 2025, for three intensive days of review and deliberation. This international team comprised Brendan Embser, senior editor at Aperture; Florian Koenigsberger, technologist and photographer; Paul Moakley, executive producer at The New Yorker; Anna Planas, artistic director at Paris Photo; and Keisha Scarville, artist.
The Photography Catalog of the Year award went to "Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements," edited by Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer and published by ATLAS in Lisbon, with design by Teo Furtado and Ana Schefer. This comprehensive anthology explores the connections between photography and anticolonial politics from the 1960s to the 1980s, focusing on Portugal's former African colonies during their independence struggles. As Drew Thompson writes in the publication, "The history of photobooks looks different from the vantage point of the African continent." The book, which emerged from a research initiative begun in 2018, features texts in English, French, and Portuguese, highlighting organizations like the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which used photobooks as tools for inspiring international solidarity.
Eleonora Agostini's "A Study on Waitressing," published by Witty Books in Turin, Italy, with design by Massimiliano Pace, claimed the First PhotoBook Award. This multilayered work examines the roles women are expected to perform within labor market self-presentation through fictionalized images of a waitress, played by Agostini's own mother. The book is structured in six chapters featuring staccato-like sequences that focus on mundane details of gesture, movement, and behavior. Semi-transparent pages with handwritten notes in Italian mark transitions between sections, while manual-like text describes how a waitress should appear, dress, speak, and maintain herself, with the phrase "Always Smile While Speaking" serving as a recurring reminder.
The PhotoBook of the Year honor was awarded to "The Classroom" by Hicham Benohoud, published by Loose Joints Publishing in Marseille, France and London, with design by Loose Joints Studio. Created between 1992 and 2002, this collection documents Benohoud's innovative approach to teaching high school art in Marrakech during the early 1990s. Feeling trapped by Morocco's rigid postcolonial power structures, like his underprivileged students, Benohoud transformed his four-hour classes into sites of photographic creativity and hands-on learning. The black-and-white photographs show students posing against makeshift backdrops, behind paper cages, with Hula-Hoops, and in surreal outfits made from cardboard tubes or plastic bags. "This book stopped me in my tracks," said juror Florian Koenigsberger. "Above all, I'm attracted to the resourcefulness of the work. I think it's a model for creativity in a lot of ways, of making the most of what you have. It offers a beautiful perspective on imagination."
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth received a Juror's Special Mention for "Flowers Drink the River," published by STANLEY/BARKER in London with design by ramelluzoir. This nocturnal dreamscape documents the first two years of Guilmoth's gender transition as she photographed 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 heavy flash, Guilmoth creates mystical yet ominous images that feel like moments captured mid-ritual. The work features spiderwebs and moths sparkling against darkness, mud-drenched bodies intertwining in fields, and landscapes shimmering with ethereal haze, blending Guilmoth's search for resistance, magic, and safety in an often hostile world.
A presentation of all thirty-seven shortlisted books, including the winners, is currently on display at Paris Photo through November 16. The exhibition will then travel to Printed Matter in New York in January 2026, followed by the Leipzig Photobook Festival, with additional venues to be announced later.
