Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—an annual celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. A jury met in Paris on November 13, 2025, to select this year’s winners. The jury 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.”
A presentation of the thirty-seven books shortlisted for the 2025 PhotoBook Awards, including the winners, is currently on view at Paris Photo through November 16 and will travel to Printed Matter, New York, in January 2026, and then to the Leipzig Photobook Festival, with additional venues to be announced.
Below, read about this year’s winning titles.
Photography Catalog of the Year
Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements, Edited by Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer
ATLAS, Lisbon, Design by Teo Furtado and Ana Schefer
“The history of photobooks looks different from the vantage point of the African continent,” Drew Thompson writes in Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements, a vigorous anthology about the links between photography and anticolonial politics from the 1960s to the 1980s, when Portugal’s former colonies in Africa fought for independence. The product of a research initiative begun in 2018—with texts in English, French, and Portuguese—this book spotlights organizations such as the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which was instrumental in producing photobooks wielded by activists to inspire international solidarity. Covers and spreads from rare publications are reproduced throughout, displaying an immense range of visual communication strategies that often put a premium on dramatic, high-impact images, and showing how politically motivated publishers in Maputo, Mozambique, as well as Amsterdam, Moscow, San Francisco, and Tokyo, envisioned Africa’s freedom and self-determination.
Augusta Conchiglia, from Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements, 2025
First PhotoBook Award
A Study on Waitressing by Eleonora Agostini
Witty Books, Turin, Italy, Design by Massimiliano Pace
Eleonora Agostini’s A Study on Waitressing is a timely, multilayered interrogation of the roles that women are asked to play within the regime of self-presentation in the labor market. Agostini approaches this conceptual study by making fictionalized images of a waitress, played by her own mother. The book is divided into six chapters, each featuring a series of staccato-like sequences that layer upon one another ingeniously, narrowing in on mundane details of gesture, movement, and behavior. These visuals are mixed in with semitransparent pages to mark the transition between sections, featuring small, handwritten notes in her mother’s native Italian. Midway through a sequence of cropped close-ups of a woman’s smile, the book shifts to a manual-like text describing how a waitress is to appear, dress, speak, and maintain herself. The phrase “Always Smile While Speaking” is punctuated throughout—a stern reminder that the customer is always right.
Eleonora Agostini, from A Study on Waitressing, 2025
PhotoBook of the Year
The Classroom by Hicham Benohoud
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London, Design by Loose Joints Studio
In the early 1990s, Hicham Benohoud was a jaded high school art teacher in Marrakech. Like his students, who came from underprivileged backgrounds, he felt trapped by the stultifyingly rigid power structures of postcolonial Morocco. So he started to improvise photoshoots to pass the time, transforming his four-hour class into a site of joyful photographic ingenuity and hands-on learning. Made between 1992 and 2002, the black-and-white photographs of The Classroom show Benohoud’s pupils posing against makeshift backdrops and behind paper cages, at desks stacked atop other desks, with Hula-Hoops and in surreal outfits crafted with long cardboard tubes or plastic bags, their faces often playfully obscured. “This book stopped me in my tracks,” says juror Florian Koenigsberger. “Above all, I’m attracted to the resourcefulness of the work. I think it’s a model for creativity in a lot of ways, of making the most of what you have. It offers a beautiful perspective on imagination.”
Hicham Benohoud, from The Classroom, 2025
Jurors’ Special Mention
Flowers Drink the River by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth
STANLEY/BARKER, London, Design by ramel·luzoir
Under the moonlight, in the dark cover of the night, Pia-Paulina Guilmoth guides us into a nocturnal dreamscape that reveals the beauty and resilience born from transformation. Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Guilmoth’s gender transition, when she began photographing her community in rural Maine, exploring both the joy and terror of life as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Using a large-format camera and a heavy flash, Guilmoth oscillates between the mystical and ominous, and each frame feels as if it’s a small moment captured mid-ritual, leaving us to imagine what transpires outside the frame. Spiderwebs and moths sparkle against darkness; mud-drenched bodies intertwine in fields; and landscapes shimmer with an almost ethereal haze. Flowers Drink the River blends Guilmoth’s mystical yet exacting view upon her own search for resistance, magic, and safety in a world often devoid of it.
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, from Flowers Drink the River, 2025
An exhibition of 2025 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo through November 16 and will travel to Printed Matter, New York, in January 2026.