Photobook Reviews, Episode 15 – by Kate Schultze
I only went to Paris for two days during this year’s Paris Photo period. Saturday at Polycopies and Sunday starting at Off Print and later making it all the way to the big fair. If you’ve ever been you will be able to relate, or I guess also if you have never been let me tell you: it is overwhelming. Hundreds if not thousands of books and zines and posters and leporellos and things you’ve never even heard of before. Plus all the conversations you could be having with authors, publishers, designers. You certainly won’t get bored. However you also end up doing maybe 50% of what you planned to do. You become desensitised to images, so this year I had a plan, or tried to at least. I made a list of books I had waited for to come out, found the tables, looked at everything they’ve got and then took a walk to kind of cleanse my palette I guess. The books that stayed with me until the end I got just before the fairs closed. I thought this year’s programme was a lot stronger and diverse than last year’s, to the point where I had to leave a good number of titles behind. (I promise I’ll get hold of them for my best of 2025!) But for now, this is what I picked up
The first and only title I got at Polycopies is Noema by Michael Swan, published by my faves Kult Books. In Noema, Michael Swann explores the aura of place and the nature of religious experience through the Marian apparitions reported in Garabandal in 1961 and Medjugorje twenty years later. Combining his own photographs with stills appropriated from footage of the visionaries in ecstasy, he highlights the gap between inner spiritual experience and what can be visually documented. Reflecting on his own lost faith, Swann wonders whether a profound encounter—like those claimed by the visionaries—might allow belief to return.
Publisher
Kult Books
Layout
Hardcover with red foiling, 176 pages, 56 photographs, Offset printing, 15 x 21 cm
Price
35 €
Link
On Sunday I ended up going a bit book and zine crazy. The first title I got is a zine from the online magazine the-iconomist.net who came all the way from Brazil and work mainly with appropriated imagery. It’s definitely more on the bolder side of design but this wasn’t one I had to think about much before getting it.
The zine XXXSpace picks up on Thomas Pynchon’s idea that military tech never stays just military. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the V-2 missile is both precise machinery and a strange mix of desire, fear, and myth, and the zine taps into that same tension—pairing technical specs and diagrams with a broader cultural fixation on spectacle and destruction. By linking intimate imagery, space travel, and warfare, it looks at how explosive, phallic symbols have saturated our screens, marking a moment when violent technology stops feeling shocking and instead becomes a kind of language, entertainment, and even a promise of escape.
I then stopped on the next row at the table of London based publisher New Dimension and even though I didn’t end up getting much appreciated sauna hat I traded zines and got the beautiful title by Ben Goulder Not Much of a View from Here.
The zine mixes short prose pieces and photographs that sit with the strange, quiet moments that follow a loss. Built from walks, funerals, and tossed-off comments, it pays attention to the small disruptions—plastic grave markers, cooling paper cups, awkward laughter—that show how grief actually plays out. Instead of big dramatic scenes, Ben Goulder looks at the leftovers and the atmosphere around them, asking how absence settles into everyday spaces and how we learn to mourn by watching the people around us.
After seeing Bharat Sikka’s work for Zeit Magazin recently I was super excited to see his new publications by Fw: Books from the Netherlands. Unfortunately I missed out on getting a copy of The Sapper but this time I made sure to secure a copy of his new title Ripples in the Pond.
Ripples in the Pond follows the artist’s return to Makharda, a small township on the edge of Kolkata shaped by more than twenty quiet ponds. Rather than treating it as just a place on a map, the work looks at Makharda as a meeting point of memories, shifting traditions, and the slow push of new infrastructure. Inspired in part by the atmosphere of the 1980s TV series Malgudi Days, the project uses the ponds—both real and symbolic—as reflective spaces where past and present, imagination and everyday life, rural character and growing urban pressures all overlap.
My last stop was the Paris Photo fair and with that the Images Vevey table. With immense joy I discovered they still had a few remaining copies of yet another book I nearly missed out on. Peter Puklus’ The Hero Mother co-published with Witty Books. The, I guess sequel, The Hero Father was just launched by Witty at the fair.
In this book Puklus pulls apart familiar ideas about what mothers and fathers are “supposed” to be—motherhood as heroic, fatherhood as duty-bound protector—and treats these roles with both playfulness and critique. Working beyond the photo studio, he builds his own visual language around parenthood and the messy, shifting process of forming a family.
The last title I got, or actually won, is Roger Eberhard’s Escapism. A perfect example of a book I didn’t have on the radar but I’m s glad the lovely people at Images Vevey pointed out to me.
Since the 1960s, Switzerland has printed millions of tiny images on peel-off foil lids—so many that collecting and trading them became a national pastime, firmly rooting them in the country’s collective imagination. For Escapism, Roger Eberhard zooms in on a set of landscape lids, using a high-resolution camera to crop them into extreme close-ups, tapping into this very Swiss habit of slipping into daydreams during a quick coffee break. The resulting series becomes a catalogue of classic landscape motifs—many now under threat from climate change—with the blown-up grid of the prints hinting at their mass-produced origins and grounding the viewer back in reality.
Some titles that I left behind purely because of size and weight were Thomas Duffield’s Poppy Promises by Witty Books, David Brandon Geeting’s The Marble by TBW Books and Eli Durst’s The Children’s Melody by Gnomic Book.
Obviously this is just a tiny insight into all the incredible artists, designers and publishers that made their way to Paris showing off and celebrating their hard work, but maybe, just like me, this made you find a title or two you weren’t aware of before.
PS. I am very aware that all authors of these titles are men, but just you wait for my Favourites of 2025 list! 🙂
