12 Photobooks for Summer 2026

Browse the latest titles that have caught the eye of PhMuseum's Artistic Director. Our curated guides spotlight publications by artists from our community and beyond.

Anchor In The Landscape by Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez, published by MACK

The olive tree is a totem of Palestinian identity, culture, and resistance. It supports the livelihoods of more than 100,000 Palestinian families, is a centre of traditions and identities, and has long been a target of destruction and theft. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed by Israeli authorities and settlers. Over the past eighteen months, photographers Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez have been photographing olive trees in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, many of which are thousands of years old. This book brings together their studied, absorbing portraits of these trees, which act as fixed points in a historic and transforming landscape that is constantly disputed, altered, and increasingly destroyed. Each portrait bears witness to the presence and resilience of the Palestinian people and their relationship with the land.

Sudor by Mariela Sancari, published by COMISURA

Produced by the direct contact of her sweat (‘sudor’) with photosensitive paper, these images trace a journey through sweat that goes from the intimate to the collective, from family history to cultural heritage. Drawing from her experience with hyperhidrosis, Sancari presents sweat here as a symptom, stigma, pleasure, work, and imprint. From the Bible, where it is linked to effort and punishment, to Karl Marx's criticism of the sweating system as an emblem of labor exploitation, Sancari displays a constellation of references that reveal to what extent perspiring has never been an innocent gesture. Among these extremes also emerge its ritual and cosmological dimensions, as well as its progressive medicalization in modernity, exemplified in the invention of deodorant as a hygienic device.

Flowers In The Mirror by Ruben Lundgren, published by The Eriskay Collection

Flowers in the Mirror presents a kaleidoscopic overview of Lundgren’s work, bringing together new projects, earlier series, found footage, and photographs from his personal archive. Through the layering of images, unexpected connections and combinations emerge. The title refers to the Chinese proverb “As the moon in the water and flowers in a mirror,” a metaphor describing something that seems clear but ultimately remains elusive. Together with Lundgren’s working method, the title underscores a central question of this publication: What is the relationship between photography and reality, and how do we record a culture that remains partially intangible?

Down By The Hudson by Caleb Stein, published by Palo Press

Down By The Hudson presents over a decade of summers Caleb Stein spent photographing a creek in Poughkeepsie, New York. Since 2013, Stein has returned to the same stretch of water each year, observing the recurring rhythms of friendship, gathering, and care that define this communal space. What began as documentation gradually became a lyrical and tender ode to the freedom and edenic sense of community the place elicits.

Caleb Stein will present his photobook at PhMuseum Lab in Bologna, Italy, on 5 November. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated.

La Illegibile n.13, published by Atelier Tatanka

La.leggibile is a zine emerging from three workshops held in Como prison with six transgender inmates. Through their drawings, words, and bodies, Amanda, Paola, Letizia, Carla, Luna, and Sara share dreams and personal stories, with delicacy and humor, inviting reflection on categorisation and inclusion. Their works are framed by essay-reports written by the workshop tutors. By foregrounding perspectives from the margins, the publication draws attention to the fragile condition of rights within prisons and for those who do not conform to dominant social norms.

Discover La Illegibile n.13 and many other titles at the second edition of Photobook Mania, happening at Serra Madre in Bologna, Italy, from 3–4 October.

Snow by Sohrab Hura, published by MACK books

Kashmir has been at the centre of disputes between India, Pakistan, and China since the partition of India and dissolution of the British Raj in 1947. Each country has laid claim to the land despite the persistent struggles for self-determination of those who inhabit the region. In recent years, Kashmir has been promoted as a paradisical tourist destination to Indian nationals, and above all as a place where they can experience snow. All the while it has remained one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world. This dichotomy between beauty and brutality serves as Hura’s inspiration for the project, which is the first in a pair of twin publications exploring the social, economic, and political landscapes of Kashmir.

As Long As The Sun Lasts by Joselito Verschaeve, published by Void

As Long As The Sun Lasts follows Joselito Verschaeve’s characteristic working process: building an ever-growing archive of photographs from daily encounters, sketching ideas, and drawing from this pool of images to shape a new story. For this book, the photographs conjure a world that feels close to its ending. They pulse with a soft melancholy, as if the light itself were counting down. The title borrows from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, where the sun nears its death and humanity prepares for its own. Yet, in Calvino’s story, the end isn’t only tragedy – it is also clarity, a strange peace that comes from recognising life’s transience. Verschaeve’s work holds the same duality: a tension between continuation and collapse, optimism and extinction, beauty and the certainty it won’t last. This oscillation between drive and doubt shapes every page of the book, and resonates with our present moment – when the theme of the world coming to an end feels less like fiction.

Une fable Egyptienne by Sandra Guldemann Duchaterlier, published by Process Editions

Exploring the silence of those in exile, this book explores the line between oblivion and the transmission of memory. The artist’s work brings together fragments of a scattered family history – reinventing memory born of intuition and reviving an era of which only splinters remain. Carried by the shadow of a mother whose memory falters, this work becomes an act of love and resistance against erasure. Nourished by a childhood imbued with orientalism and paternalistic stories, Guldemann Duchaterlier seeks to connect generations – visible and invisible, disappeared and remaining.

The project was developed through PhMuseum 2022/23 CRITICAE Online Masterclass On Documentary Photography and PhMuseum 2023/24 FOLIO Online Masterclass On Photobook Making.

Unlike Flowers by Francesco Pennacchio, published by Artphilein Editions

Unlike Flowers is a long-term photographic investigation into grief, memory, and the fragile mechanisms through which presence can persist beyond absence. Combining family archives, vernacular imagery, botanical references, and newly produced photographs, Francesco Pennacchio's work explores the capacity of images to act as mnemonic devices and relational surfaces across time. At its core, the project proposes image-making as an act of love: a gesture that does not resolve loss, but insists on the reconstruction of memory and connection.

The project was developed through PhMuseum 2023/24 CURAE Online Masterclass On Curatorial Practice.

Fishworm by Pia Paulina Guilmoth & Jesse Bull Saffire, published by Void

For the past seven years, Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire have been scavenging within a sixty-mile orbit of their home: abandoned houses collapsing into the earth, mould-streaked cardboard boxes, the hunting camp at the end of the road, a politician’s discarded gay porn collection, yard sale leftovers, a junk-shop beside the waterfall. Family photos, town reports, forgotten newspapers – fragments of lives slipping out of memory. The book collects these rescues, re-assemblies, and accidents: material both tender and grotesque, mundane and uncanny. Among them are photographs taken by Pia and Jesse on 8 MP digital cameras while trespassing and scavenging for material, alongside images from Pia’s own family archive. In their hands, the cast-offs of rural central Maine transform into a jumbled chronicle – a history that never asked to be preserved, yet somehow survived, soggy and stubborn. All in all, Fishworm is about dykes digging through trash.

Say My Name by Simon Émond, published by Sternthal Books

The book's haunting black-and-white images began as frames from wedding and family portraits that Émond created during his years as a photographer – while still bearing the scars of relentless bullying for being gay. Through meticulous post-production processes, he reworks these photographs into surreal self-portraits, turning his former clients into unwitting participants in a visual exorcism of his demons. The book's title deliberately invites us all to speak his name, not to give it power, but to take it away, to break its hold on him and free him from torment.

The project was developed through PhMuseum 2023/24 FOLIO Online Masterclass On Photobook Making.

Altera Italia by Alessia Rollo, published by Miracoli Visivi

A photographic and anthropological project that explores the ritual imagery of Southern Italy, reinterpreting its visual history and reworking the stereotypes inherited from the last century’s neorealism. Altera Italia is the result of five years of research, begun in 2019 and developed as a multidisciplinary project that intertwines photography, archives, video, and animation. The work reconsiders the cultural identity of Southern Italy, critically rereading the visual legacy produced between the 1950s and 1960s by anthropologists, filmmakers, and photographers associated with Ernesto De Martino’s expeditions, which helped crystallise the image of the South as an archaic and superstitious place.

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Join us in Bologna on 3–4 October for the second edition of Photobook Mania, our publishing fair taking place at Serra Madre in conjunction with PhMuseum Days 2026.

Explore more publications in our Photobooks section. You can also contribute by uploading your own titles, which will be considered for our monthly features across homepage, newsletter and social media.