Our favourite photo graphy books of the past 135 years

Apparently it was musician and composer Frank Zappa who once declared, ‘so many books, so little time’, and despite the arrival of eReaders and the internet our passion for the printed page shows no signs of abating. In fact, our love of photography books, in particular, is now so great that a festival dedicated to the subject is being hosted by the Martin Parr Foundation and The Royal Photographic Society (19-20 October). We’ve taken the opportunity to study our shelves and pick our favourite photography titles, and we’ve asked some carefully selected individuals – including Parr himself – to do the same. Read on and enjoy.

Workers Sebastião Salgado

Aperture ISBN 978-0893815509

PICKING just one photography book as my favourite is an almost impossible task, but I can easily name the book that has had the greatest influence on my life. When Salgado published it was accompanied by a major exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, which I went to see. I was still in my twenties and up to that point had never really given much thought to how so many of the things I took for granted – the tea and sugar on my breakfast table, the tuna in my sandwich, the sulphur in dozens of the things I use every day – were dependent upon the suffering and exploitation of some of the world's poorest people, labouring in harsh,, revealed to me for the first time the true nature of the relationship between the developed and developing nations, and Salgado did so through the most powerful, moving documentary photography I had ever seen. Epic, beautiful, empathetic and often biblical in scale. I consider Salgado to be the world's greatest living photographer, not just for his work but for the way he lives his life and what he does with his money, and his work influences my own documentary photography to this day.