From a fascinating book that traces the locations that shaped Marguerite Duras' groundbreaking literary works to Jerry Hsu's clever and humorous portrayal of California street culture, here are ten of the most engaging new photography books to discover this summer.
**Splint by Chessa Subbiondo**
Chessa Subbiondo's debut photography book presents a cold, sensual, and undeniably cinematic vision. The Los Angeles-based photographer spent two years creating these images, bringing friends to stark gray parking lots and modern apartment buildings to stage various carefully constructed scenes. The resulting photographs carry a charged sense of suspense, where details like a shattered glass or a finger placed in a mouth suggest narratives unfolding both before and after each captured frame.
The book's title carries deep personal meaning for Subbiondo, who explains it has a double significance: "It's like a splint – as in, a brace. This is what the book felt like for me: it was really holding me together this past year and giving me purpose, something to believe in and put all my energy into. But at the same time, it's also like a splinter, something deep under your skin, nagging at you to pull it out. And this was definitely something that I kept coming back to and picking at."
**Lonley City by Jerry Hsu**
For Jerry Hsu, skateboarding and photography represent inseparable ways of navigating and observing the world around him. Born in San Jose and now based in Los Angeles, his beloved work "Lonley City" approaches the California landscape as a vast playground for exploration, capturing hundreds of fleeting moments filled with humor, beauty, and quiet absurdity found on city streets.
The book showcases everything from cheesy slogans printed on T-shirts to hands brushing through the windows of idling SUVs, with clever sequencing that highlights the easily overlooked poetry of everyday life. This marks the third release of this special collection.
Publisher Oliver Shaw emphasizes the book's unique qualities: "This book is very special. The photographs themselves are great, but the pairings are perfect – an impressive exploration of the urban landscape, shot entirely on an iPhone, primarily across Southern California."
**David Armstrong: Fashion**
Curator Vince Aletti and photographer Matthew Leifheit have produced the first posthumous monograph dedicated to the late, great David Armstrong. Published a decade after his death, this book offers never-before-seen insights into his fashion work created between 2002 and 2010.
Focusing largely on sensuous, stripped-back portraits of men, Armstrong's intimate photographic world stood in stark contrast to the bold, high-gloss productions of the 2000s popularized by photographers like Nick Knight and David LaChapelle. Shooting with a painterly sense of timelessness, Armstrong gravitated toward simpler fantasies and fleeting gestures of tenderness – a distinctive style that made him deeply influential in fashion photography.
Nan Goldin once observed about Armstrong's work: "David has always used photography as a seductive device, a sublimation of his desire. His pictures of people feel tactile because one senses his desire to touch, but never in an aggressive or insistent way."
**Rooms by Greta Ilieva**
Greta Ilieva grew up as the daughter of a photographer in Bulgaria, and her mother also happened to be a naturist. These two formative facts of her youth directly informed the creation of her new book "Rooms," which documents eight years spent photographing women in London nude in their bedrooms.
Shot in cool, soft lighting, the book mixes portraits of friends and people discovered through Instagram with photographs of her subjects' beds. Ilieva explains her artistic approach: "Seeing the sheets, the traces of someone's body and rest, somehow felt more revealing than looking at someone naked. I hope the work shows that I'm less interested in control and more in creating space for honesty, where people feel safe enough to be seen as they are."
**Yoko by Masahisa Fukase**
Masahisa Fukase's "Yoko" was originally published in 1978, bringing together tender black and white photographs from his first 15 years of marriage. This cult monograph has been republished this year, with Yoko herself overseeing its reprint.
Behind the spontaneous shots from their wedding, holidays on sandy coastlines, and private moments in bed, the couple's relationship was actually unraveling. Fights, affairs, and the photographer's drinking problems led Yoko to file for divorce in 1976. Viewed two decades after Fukase's death, these images strike various notes of bittersweet loss when contemplated in today's light.
Yoko writes in the new book: "At first, there were a few photographs I wished not to be included in this reprint. But let me say that out of respect for Fukase's intentions, it was decided that the reprint would retain the composition of the original. If Fukase were still alive today and I could say one thing to him now, it would be, 'Well, it is what it is, right!'"
**The Places of Marguerite Duras**
Writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras spent her career exploring the complexities of human desire, often through stories set in evocative locations around the world. This fascinating new book from Magic Hour Press delves deep into these settings, examining the places where Duras staged her most important works.
Drawing on archival imagery and first-person accounts translated from a 1976 French television interview, the book intertwines memory and place, tracing a journey from her home in Neauphle-le-Château, where she wrote many novels and screenplays, to her childhood house in French Indochina, which inspired "The Sea Wall." The book also visits the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville, where she wrote "The Ravishing of Lol Stein," and explores the sweeping seascapes of Indochina, Bengal, and Normandy.
Duras herself explains in the book: "The films I make come from the same place in me as my books, from what I call the place of passion. A place where we are deaf and blind."
**La Liberté ou L'Amour by Lin Zhipeng**
Beijing-based artist Lin Zhipeng came to prominence during the internet's early golden days, when he began sharing casual yet striking snapshots of daily life online under the moniker No 223. Spanning from his early-2000s internet fame to the present day, this special new publication marks two decades of his irreverent imagery in ten small, loosely-bound booklets designed to be swapped and shuffled.
Destined to become an instant collectible, each section focuses on an individual phrase or idea, blending new, iconic, and obscure images – from passionate nudes and witty still lifes to casual moments of intrigue spotted in everyday life.
Lin Zhipeng told AnOther in a 2024 interview: "While the body and sexuality have certainly been significant themes in [my work], my camera captures more than just that. I am always looking to document daily curiosities – the small but sensual details that often go unnoticed."
**I Call You My Love by Sunil Gupta**
Baron's tender new publication documents an extended, years-long correspondence between Sunil Gupta and his lover Steve Dodd. While Gupta was working in London and Dodd was completing his PhD in America from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the pair regularly maintained contact through handwritten letters.
This heartwarming document of transatlantic connection sensitively combines these writings with Gupta's family album-style images of the couple, along with Dodd's poetry and textural ephemera such as original envelopes, sketches, and newspaper clippings. The book serves not only as an archive of a particular moment in the artist's life but also offers a snapshot of queer love and community thriving against the backdrop of oppression and illness during that era.
**Shells by Roe Ethridge**
The humble shell serves as a symbol of seaside relaxation and classical, painterly mysticism. Miami-born photographer Roe Ethridge has chosen this form as the subject of his latest book, using shells as a touchstone to explore visual storylines that reference popular culture, art history, and his own childhood memories along the Atlantic coast.
The book features a diverse range of images: a tower of brilliant red lobsters created for Laila Gohar, a glamorous bathroom arrangement of conch and hermit shells beside a smoking ashtray, and a wry, cold shot of a Shell gas station logo represent just a few of the visual tangents he explores. These are interspersed with portraits from his fashion work, including one of a model wearing a sailor hat with sun-kissed cheeks.
Humorous and beautiful, the book serves as a sunny tribute to Ethridge's particular way of blurring the lines between commercial and personal work, between fantasy and reality. As the artist once explained: "A sequence has to sing. It's not just something to decode and find the true meaning of. I have to feel its harmonies and disharmonies."
**Kate, For You by Marie Tomanova**
If you're familiar with Marie Tomanova's work, you likely remember the cover of her cult debut book "Young American" – a shot of couple Kate and Odie entangled in a peach-tiled bathtub, gazing directly into her camera lens. At the time an undiscovered artist, Tomanova had just relocated to New York from the Czech Republic, and this image was captured during the first afternoon she met up with Kate in 2017 after connecting online.
It was just one of many raw snapshots of the city's youth at home, on dance floors, and in the streets gathered in the artist's debut book, which together formed an electrifying document of New York youth culture at the end of the 2010s. In the years since, Tomanova has published additional monographs and exhibited her work globally. Meanwhile, Kate has become both a close friend and something of a muse.
Tomanova's new book publishes the complete roll of film from that June afternoon, alongside portraits of Kate continuing up to the present day. These images, showing changing apartments, lovers, and hairstyles, warmly chronicle nearly a decade of Kate's life and document the artists' enduring friendship.
These ten photography books represent some of the most compelling visual narratives available this summer, offering readers the opportunity to explore diverse artistic perspectives, intimate personal stories, and innovative approaches to the photographic medium.
