The Enduring Nature Of Black-And-White Photography Books

If you search Google for the “best photography books of all time,” you come up with quite a few black-and-white photography books, some of which have influenced countless photographers: The Americans by Robert Frank, The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph by Diane Arbus, American Photographs by Walker Evans and Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail by Ansel Adams, to name a few.

Of course, many of those are from photographers working in the era of analog black-and-white photography, but you’ll find many black-and-white books being published today, as well. For example, the Aperture and Paris Photo 2018 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist, which celebrates the evolving narrative of photography in book form, had quite a few black-and-white fine-art photo book winners. And in a casual web search through various lists of best photography books of 2018, I came across some powerful examples: by Mitch, which includes many black-and-white photos from Bey’s long career; the powerful and disturbing images in by master documentary photographer Eugene Richards, who explores the inhuman conditions suffered by the mentally ill and disabled in many countries; and the masterful work by Matthew Genitempo in his debut book, , which depicts recluses living in the Ozarks and the world surrounding them.