For the 2025 awards, over one thousand books were submitted from fifty-five countries. Two juries of international team members deliberate to determine the winners. For the 2025 awards, a shortlist jury met in New York, September 17 to 19, for three concentrated days of review and deliberation. The team included: Brendan Embser, senior editor, Aperture; Florian Koenigsberger, technologist and photographer; Paul Moakley, executive producer, The New Yorker; Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo; and Keisha Scarville, artist.

On November 13, a final jury, on site at Paris Photo, selected the winners from among the thirty-seven shortlisted titles. The team included Coralie Gauthier, director of programming, communications, and events, Librairie 7L; Shanay Jhaveri, head of visual arts, Barbican Centre; Manuel Krebs, designer and publisher, NORM; Emily LaBarge, contributing writer, The New York Times; and Guinevere Ras, curator, 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,” says juror Shanay Jhaveri. “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.”

Aperture exhibitions are supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Across a career that spans five decades, Carrie Mae Weems has charted a singularly influential and inspiring path, anchored in the personal but with universal impact. The Heart of the Matter is the first exhibition to center her as muse, as model, and as moral compass. Weems has noted:

I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown. Miraculously, the muse evolved out of my resistance to photographing people without permission, and in the process, I discovered an entirely new way of working and indeed discovered myself. Praise God.

Weems repeatedly returns to the self as subject, although she is more than a leitmotif in the work presented here: she is its organizing principle. Whether standing with her back turned to counter edifices of cultural and ideological power, or facing the camera to navigate complex territories of domestic life, Weems uses her likeness to probe the thorniest societal questions. From the earliest days of her practice, Weems has considered her subjectivity as an expansive construct. Nurtured through projects that combine family portraits with first-person narratives, she demonstrates that the personal is a vital means to address and dismantle inequality. She also suggests her presence more diffusely through her disembodied voice and broad legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Presented for the first time is Preach (2024), an immersive installation that connects Weems’s spirituality with the history and vitality of Black worship in the United States.

This exhibition eschews a chronological structure in favor of a framework that centers Weems as a creative form. She asks us to confront urgent political events and persistent social cycles, while her perspective, experiences, and ethics serve as a guide and a call to align with our own convictions.

Carrie Mae Weems (born in Portland, Oregon, 1953) is a widely influential artist whose work gives a voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London.

Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Brazilian modernist photographers, Dorothea Lange, and many more. 

Image credit:

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror), 1990; from the Kitchen Table Series; from Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (Aperture, 2025). © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, is a project by Gallerie d’Italia, museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in collaboration with Aperture. Aperture exhibitions are supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

I’m So Happy You Are Here offers a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon—an electrifying expansion of our understanding of Japanese photographic history, but also of photo history writ large. Over the past decade, the world of photography has made a concerted effort to fill critical gaps in its historiography. The excavation and recovery of women’s work serves as a testament to the liberating nature of self-representation and self-expression, and to the importance of photography as a medium to express and share one’s own story: to be heard and to be seen. This restorative survey presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the experiences and perspectives of women on their lives and on Japanese society, and showcases their creativity through key images, installation-based works, video, and photobooks. With a focus on material from the 1950s to now, I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a selection of intergenerational artists—many of whom have been recognized for their vital contributions, while others have developed unique and important practices without substantial public recognition. This collection of historical and contemporary works weaves together three major motifs—observations of everyday life that are both delicate and blunt; critical perspectives on the roles inhabited—and often reinterpreted—by Japanese women; as well as experiments with and extensions of the photographic form. Together, these works provide a solid foundation for a more nuanced and expansive conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography.

Featuring the work of Hara Mikiko, Hiromix, Ishikawa Mao, Ishiuchi Miyako, Katayama Mari, Kawauchi Rinko, Komatsu Hiroko, Kon Michiko, Nagashima Yurie, Narahashi Asako, Nishimura Tamiko, Noguchi Rika, Nomura Sakiko, Okabe Momo, Okanoue Toshiko, Onodera Yuki, Sawada Tomoko, Shiga Lieko, Sugiura Kunié, Tawada Yuki, Tokiwa Toyoko, Ushioda Tokuko, Watanabe Hitomi, Yamazawa Eiko, and Yanagi Miwa, among others.

I’m So Happy You Are Here is organized by Aperture in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles, with support from Kering | Women In Motion, Ishibashi Foundation, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, 1970 Japan World’s Exposition Memorial Fund, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. We wish to thank Sato Masako, Contact, Tokyo who oversaw production of the show in Japan. Aperture exhibitions are supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Pauline Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum. Previously, she served as the cultural director of Magnum Photos in New York, and curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Takeuchi Mariko is a photography critic, curator, and professor at Kyoto University of the Arts. Previously, she served as visiting researcher at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and at the National Museum of Art, Osaka.

Lesley A. Martin is executive director of Printed Matter. Formerly, she was the creative director of Aperture, where she served as editor on more than one hundred books on photography, and founding publisher of The PhotoBook Review.

Image credit: Okabe Momo, Untitled, 2020; from the series Ilmatar. Courtesy the
artist and Aperture

For the 2025 awards, over one thousand books were submitted from fifty-five countries. Two juries of international team members deliberate to determine the winners. For the 2025 awards, a shortlist jury met in New York, September 17 to 19, for three concentrated days of review and deliberation. The team included: Brendan Embser, senior editor, Aperture; Florian Koenigsberger, technologist and photographer; Paul Moakley, executive producer, The New Yorker; Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo; and Keisha Scarville, artist.

On November 13, a final jury, on site at Paris Photo, selected the winners from among the thirty-seven shortlisted titles. The team included Coralie Gauthier, director of programming, communications, and events, Librairie 7L; Shanay Jhaveri, head of visual arts, Barbican Centre; Manuel Krebs, designer and publisher, NORM; Emily LaBarge, contributing writer, The New York Times; and Guinevere Ras, curator, 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,” says juror Shanay Jhaveri. “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.”

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—

Image: Photograph by Daniel Salemi

I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown. Miraculously, the muse evolved out of my resistance to photographing people without permission, and in the process, I discovered an entirely new way of working and indeed discovered myself. Praise God.

Weems repeatedly returns to the self as subject, although she is more than a leitmotif in the work presented here: she is its organizing principle. Whether standing with her back turned to counter edifices of cultural and ideological power, or facing the camera to navigate complex territories of domestic life, Weems uses her likeness to probe the thorniest societal questions. From the earliest days of her practice, Weems has considered her subjectivity as an expansive construct. Nurtured through projects that combine family portraits with first-person narratives, she demonstrates that the personal is a vital means to address and dismantle inequality. She also suggests her presence more diffusely through her disembodied voice and broad legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Presented for the first time is Preach (2024), an immersive installation that connects Weems’s spirituality with the history and vitality of Black worship in the United States.

This exhibition eschews a chronological structure in favor of a framework that centers Weems as a creative form. She asks us to confront urgent political events and persistent social cycles, while her perspective, experiences, and ethics serve as a guide and a call to align with our own convictions.

Carrie Mae Weems (born in Portland, Oregon, 1953) is a widely influential artist whose work gives a voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London.

Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Brazilian modernist photographers, Dorothea Lange, and many more. 

Image credit: Carrie Mae Weems, Welcome Home, 1978–84, Credit: © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. 

The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, is a project by Gallerie d’Italia, museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in collaboration with Aperture. Aperture exhibitions are supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Featuring the work of Fujioka Aya, Hara Mikiko, Imai Hisae, Ishikawa Mao, Ishiuchi Miyako,  Iwane Ai, Katayama Mari, Kawauchi Rinko, Komatsu Hiroko, Kon Michiko, Nagashima Yurie, Narahashi Asako, Nishimura Tamiko, Noguchi Rika, Nomura Sakiko, Okabe Momo, Okanoue Toshiko, Onodera Yuki, Sawada Tomoko, Shiga Lieko, Sugiura Kunié, Tawada Yuki, Tokiwa Toyoko, Ushioda Tokuko, Watanabe Hitomi, Yamazawa Eiko, Yanagi Miwa, Yoneda Tomoko, among others.

Organized by Bunkamura
Curated by Takeuchi Mariko with Lesley A. Martin and Pauline Vermare
Originated by Aperture
Curatorial cooperation: CONTACT, Tokyo

Takeuchi Mariko is a photography critic, curator, and professor at Kyoto University of the Arts. Previously, she served as visiting researcher at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and at the National Museum of Art, Osaka.

Lesley A. Martin is executive director of Printed Matter. Formerly, she was the creative director of Aperture, where she served as editor on more than one hundred books on photography, and founding publisher of The PhotoBook Review.

Pauline Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum. Previously, she served as the cultural director of Magnum Photos in New York, and curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Image credit: Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2004; from the series the eyes, the ears

This year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards received 940 books from fifty-nine countries around the world, including standout entries from Argentina, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. On September 18–20, the 2024 shortlist jury met in New York for three concentrated days of review and deliberation by an international team: Negar Azimi, editor in chief, Bidoun; Jacqueline Bates, photography director, Opinion, New York Times; Michael Famighetti, editor in chief, Aperture; Nontsikelelo Mutiti, director of graduate studies in graphic design, Yale School of Art; and Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo.

The shortlist represents more than just the most highly produced, classically beautiful books—it is also an expression of the possibilities of bookmaking across a broad spectrum of resources, intentions, and storytelling techniques. As jury member Michael Famighetti stated, “It was exciting to see such a range of ideas, topics, processes, and forms explored through the photobook. I’m grateful to the jury for dedicating so much time and care to reviewing the submissions, and to our community of dedicated bookmakers, photographers, and scholars for producing and submitting such a powerful selection of work.”

“Serving on the jury offered an intensive and rewarding view into the past year’s publications,” juror Jacqueline Bates observed. “Reviewing books from fifty-nine countries was an extraordinary task. Even among shared themes, each project took a different approach. Of the 940 entries, every single book was unique.”

Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo, and Florence Bourgeois, director of Paris Photo, commented: “The presentation of the shortlisted books at Paris Photo is one of the highlights of the event. The selections chosen for the PhotoBook Awards share an international vision of the production of photography books, and with the pulse of contemporary creativity, they embody the vitality of publishing today.”

A final jury met at Paris Photo to select the winners for all three prizes. From there, the shortlisted books were exhibited in Paris, followed by an international tour, including New York at Printed Matter, Leipzig Photobook Festival, and San Francisco Art Book Fair.

Please, see the thirty-five selected titles for the 2024 PhotoBook Awards shortlist.

The 26-year-old, Black, South African photojournalist had just spent “nearly seven tense, danger-filled years” documenting Black lives under the brutal system of racial segregation known as apartheid. He risked his freedom to publish House of Bondage, which showed audiences around the world—in depth, rage, and poignant clarity—the daily indignities that Black people endured in South Africa. Now, living in exile, Cole embarked on a new project to document Black lives in America.

Starting in New York, Cole carefully attended to the rhythms and revolutionary energy of his neighborhood of Harlem and the many worlds that converge in the streets, parks, and subways of Midtown Manhattan. With support from the Ford Foundation, he traveled across the country, visiting cities during major historic events such as protests in Memphis, the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr in Atlanta, and the aftermath of uprisings in Detroit and Washington, DC. He also recorded quieter moments focused on family life in rural areas of the South and Southwest. 

While Cole centered Black people in this project, he ultimately turned his camera on a wider range of people and places as he sought to document “the true America.” Along the way, he reckoned with his preconceptions of this country as he confronted its myths and realities, its contradictions and possibilities firsthand. 

Cole’s precise timeline, itinerary, and means of travel remain elusive, but The True America offers an opportunity to begin to better understand the scope of Cole’s sensitive record of American life during pivotal years of the Civil Rights struggle and his own effort to find a place for himself in this country.

Ernest Cole (born in Transvaal, South Africa, 1940; died in New York, 1990) is best known for House of Bondage, a photobook published in 1967 that chronicles the horrors of apartheid. After fleeing South Africa in 1966, he became a “banned person,” settling in New York. He was associated with Magnum Photos and received funding from the Ford Foundation to undertake a project looking at Black communities and cultures in the United States. Cole spent an extensive time in Sweden and became involved with the Tiofoto collective. He died at age forty-nine of cancer. In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives—missing for more than forty years—resurfaced in Sweden.

Leslie M. Wilson is Academic Curator and Director of Research Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research, teaching, and curatorial endeavors focus on the history of photography, the arts of Africa and the African diaspora, modern and contemporary American art, and museum studies. Her current and forthcoming projects include not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art where she was a curatorial fellow from 2019 to 2021, and David Goldblatt: No ulterior motive at the Art Institute of Chicago with co-curators Matthew Witkovsky (AIC) and Judy Ditner (Yale). She has recently written for publications including Dear Dave, FOAM Magazine, and Manual, and interviewed Larry W. Cook for Weiss Berlin. From 2017-2021, she was Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and a BA in International Relations from Wellesley College. 

Organized by Aperture and the Ernest Cole Family Trust. Curated by Leslie M. Wilson, PhD. This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. All images © Ernest Cole Family Trust.

Image credit: Ernest Cole, Midtown, c. 1970–1972. Courtesy the Ernest Cole Family Trust

Alana Perino was born in 1988 and grew up in New York City, the North Fork of Long Island, and the stretch of highway between the two. They studied European intellectual history and photography at Wesleyan University. Perino lived in California for eight years, crisscrossing the country to photograph heritage sites. In the summer of 2021, they returned to the East Coast to photograph “the people and places that raised them” and to complete the MFA Photography program at RISD. They currently live in Rhode Island, where they are an assistant professor at Johnson & Wales University.

About the Prize:

Founded in 2006, the annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography—identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, over one thousand artists from sixty-five countries submitted entries to the Prize competition. The shortlisted artists are Sara Abbaspour, Alana Perino, Emma Ressel, Hashem Shakeri, and Daria Svertilova.

Aperture invited a jury of cross-disciplinary creatives to judge the 2025 prize: Noelle Flores Théard, senior digital photo-editor, The New Yorker; Lucy Gallun, curator, Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Zack Hatfield, managing editor, Aperture magazine; and Mark Armijo McKnight, artist and 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize winner.

The 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize is supported by MPB.

Click here more information about the prize.

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I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown. Miraculously, the muse evolved out of my resistance to photographing people without permission, and in the process, I discovered an entirely new way of working and indeed discovered myself. Praise God.

Weems repeatedly returns to the self as subject, although she is more than a leitmotif in the work presented here: she is its organizing principle. Whether standing with her back turned to counter edifices of cultural and ideological power, or facing the camera to navigate complex territories of domestic life, Weems uses her likeness to probe the thorniest societal questions. From the earliest days of her practice, Weems has considered her subjectivity as an expansive construct. Nurtured through projects that combine family portraits with first-person narratives, she demonstrates that the personal is a vital means to address and dismantle inequality. She also suggests her presence more diffusely through her disembodied voice and broad legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Presented for the first time is Preach (2024), an immersive installation that connects Weems’s spirituality with the history and vitality of Black worship in the United States.

This exhibition eschews a chronological structure in favor of a framework that centers Weems as a creative form. She asks us to confront urgent political events and persistent social cycles, while her perspective, experiences, and ethics serve as a guide and a call to align with our own convictions.

Carrie Mae Weems (born in Portland, Oregon, 1953) is a widely influential artist whose work gives a voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London.

Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Brazilian modernist photographers, Dorothea Lange, and many more. 

Image credit: Carrie Mae Weems, Road Sign, 1991–92; from Leave Now! Credit: © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. 

The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, is a project by Gallerie d’Italia, museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in collaboration with Aperture. Aperture exhibitions are supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.