Anna Atkins was making photographs in 1843. Not just taking them—publishing them, illustrating botanical specimens with a technique so precise it reads like science and so beautiful it reads like art. She did this in Victorian England, where women weren't supposed to do much of anything. And then history forgot her name, burying it behind initials.
Corey Keller's biography Anna Atkins: Photographer, Naturalist, Innovator pulls her back into the light. It's the kind of book that makes you angry you didn't know this story, then grateful someone bothered to tell it properly. Atkins worked with cyanotypes—placing delicate algae directly onto sensitized paper and letting sunlight do the work. The images are rigorous science and visual poetry at once. She published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions as early as 1843, making it the first photographically illustrated book. Keller restores what was lost: not just a scientist, but an innovator whose visual imagination still resonates.
Gigartina purpurascens from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (Vol. I) by Anna Atkins, 1846–47. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 84. XA.1107.13
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Ceylon from British and Foreign Ferns by Anna Atkins and Anne Dixon, 1853. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XO.227.94
Vaucheria dichotoma from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (Vol. III) by Anna Atkins, 1853. Spencer Collection. From The New York Public Library digitalcollections.nypl.org
Spiraea aruncus (Tyrol) from British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns by Anna Atkins, about 1854. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2004, 2004.172
The rest of this year's standouts
Claire Rosen started with a pet parakeet and wallpaper remnants. Twelve years later, Birds of a Feather contains 120 portraits of 55 bird species, each one posed against historically inspired backdrops—Victorian motifs, damask textiles, neoclassical patterns. What began as a visual experiment became something stranger: the discovery that every bird has a personality. "Even within the same species, each had its own temperament and quirks," Rosen says. "Some were engaging, posing as if they understood the performance. Others were more curious, mischievous or contemplative." The project took her to Dubai, South Africa, Jordan. The photographs are gorgeous, but they're also a quiet statement about what we've lost—these birds in their carefully curated frames, so far from the environments they actually call home.
Galah Cockatoo, No. 7461, English Arts and Crafts Paper
Greater Flamingo, No. 0350, Damask Textile
Spotted Eagle-Owlets, No. 7681, Chinoiserie Damask Textile
Hyacinth Macaw, No 7677, Ornamental Neoclassical Paper
Western Barn Owl, No. 7275, Damask Textile
African Penguin, No. 7125, Striped Paper
Lee Friedlander's Christmas is a black-and-white road trip through American kitsch. Full-frame Santas at diners. Tinsel billowing off trees. Friedlander, a pioneer of the self-portrait, has spent decades finding whimsy in the everyday, and here he captures the exact contradiction that defines the holiday: "This amazing combination of commercialism and sentimentality." It's all there. It's all American.
New York City, 1984
Nashville, Tennessee, 1966
Tim Flach's Feline contains over 170 photographs of cats—domestic, pedigreed, wild, mythic. But what makes it more than a coffee-table book is the thinking behind it. Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos traces the long arc of feline evolution. Neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach explores why we find cats so captivating at a neurological level. Flach's technique is striking: he isolates details—eyes, paws, whiskers—at startling angles, then presents full-bodied portraits with painterly control. And recognizing that some of his images look "unbelievable," he includes QR codes linking to behind-the-scenes footage. Proof these animals are real, not A.I. fabrications. It's a book that works on multiple levels: as visual love letter, natural history, and gentle critique of how we breed, commodify and adore cats.
Genesis Báez's Blue Sun is a monograph about movement and stillness, about the Puerto Rican diaspora told through color and light. Raised in both New England and Puerto Rico, Báez frames these images as deeply personal—fleeting moments of condensation, leaves lifted into the air, gestures that feel both ephemeral and eternal. "Although the work is rooted in my experience living in Puerto Rico's diaspora," she explains, "the photographs create an entirely new place, one that exists beyond geography."
Parting (Braid), 2022
Skyscape, 2022
Lifting Water, 2017
Sound is also a wave, 2024
Brandon Ruffin's Migration Patterns is rooted in family history. His ancestors were part of the Great Migration—more than 6 million Black Americans who moved from the rural South to northern and western cities between the 1910s and 1970s. But Ruffin's photographs don't just document physical movement. They probe the spiritual and emotional migrations of Black identity, lineage, belonging. The book opens with a poem by Enjoli Flynn-Ruffin and includes an essay by cultural critic Pendarvis Harshaw, framing the images with literary depth. The photographs themselves are rendered with quiet intimacy—stillness and memory become visual anchors that evoke a contemplative mood. Traces of Southern Black heritage emerge through ritual, language, the architecture of everyday life. The first edition is beautifully produced: 72 pages, 36 images, printed on heavyweight Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper. It's the kind of commitment to craft that matches the ambition of what's being said.
Balarama Heller grew up in a Hare Krishna community in West Virginia. Sacred Place uses photographs from two trips to India to explore and challenge those beliefs. "The project forced me to reconcile long held misgivings about religion, spirituality and self," Heller says. "I was able to find breakthroughs, moments of transcendence that shed light on the former misgivings." The photographs are enigmatic and colorful, their sequences built on visual tension, reflection, unity through color, geometry, pacing. Personal as they are, they connect to something universal—the search for meaning, the possibility of transcendence.
I AM THE LIFE OF ALL THAT LIVES, 2019, Vrndavana, India
NO DESTINATION BUT ETERNITY, 2019, Vrndavana, India
DOORS OF THE HEAVENLY PLANETS, 2019, Vrndavana, India
SECRET OF ALL SECRETS, 2019, Vrndavana, India
RESCUE, 2019, Vrndavana, India
Steven Haddock and Sönke Johnsen's The Radiant Sea is the book that captures what it feels like to discover an entirely hidden world. Haddock works at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Johnsen is a biologist at Duke. Together they've photographed creatures most of us will never see—jellyfish, swimming snails, worms, coral, shrimp, fish larvae, octopus—most measuring between an inch and a foot, living in shallow reefs or depths of 13,000 feet. The photographs are striking on their own, but the science beneath them is what transforms the book. Haddock and Johnsen explain transparency, pigmentation, iridescence, bioluminescence, fluorescence. They describe the challenge of capturing bioluminescence—nature's living light. "It can be like catching a firefly mid-flash," Johnsen says. The occasion is brief, the lighting dim, the organism needs to stay still for a second or two. Some images were shot in situ on scuba dives, others in a glass photo tank on a ship or in a lab. The result is a book that makes you feel, for a moment, like you're seeing the ocean the way it actually is—full of light and strangeness and beauty we've barely begun to understand.
