“What is a book?” Believe it or not, the question was asked more than once in the photo department’s informal but very serious deliberations over the best books of 2012. There was much agonizing and jockeying for favorites as we tried to reduce an array of more than 500 books to just 10 favorites. Ultimately, the most important question, the one that ruled the day, was “Which books do you most want to have on your shelf?” Here are the answers, in no particular order.

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“Story” (SF Camerawork), by Gerald Slota

You have to respect a monograph whose own foreword likens the pictures to “a psychotic arts-and-crafts scrapbooker.” Slota starts with photographs, his own and others’, then scratches, cuts and writes over them; the results are idiosyncratic, emotional and sometimes disturbing. An accompanying essay by Joyce Carol Oates (in which she writes about seeing his work in this magazine for the first time) describes the “quick snaps of arrested narrative” that make his images so mesmerizing. She writes, “Woe to the mere writer whose words appear alongside the artist’s visceral yet dreamlike works of unsurpassing beauty and unease!” Well put.

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“Looking for Love” (Kominek), by Alec Soth

A small volume of photographs taken mostly in 1996, when Soth was working in a printing lab and just beginning to focus on his own photography. But in “Looking for Love,” Soth’s keen observation of character and human longing are already on display. The self-portrait of Soth on his wedding day at the end of the book is a bonus.

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“Coexistence” (Centre National De L’Audiovisual/Nobody), by Stephen Gill

Gill was commissioned by the Centre National De L’Audiovisual in Luxembourg to photograph a former cooling pond at an industrial site in Dudelange. Though he set out to capture the life of the pond after it fell into disuse, Gill’s project soon expanded to include the surrounding community. The resulting mix of studies of microscopic plant and animal life in the pond and of local residents, taken with a camera dipped in water, beautifully reflect the relation between individuals and environments.

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“Story Teller” (Abrams), by Tim Walker

“Fashion photography is the dream department of photography,” Walker says in “Story Teller.” Snails and spiders climb up walls. Fashion models dance with skeletons, become mechanical windup toys or ride on spaceships — Walker’s ethereal, whimsical, sometimes disturbing photographs are certainly the stuff of dreams.

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“Avedon: Murals and Portraits” (Abrams), by Richard Avedon

A brilliant and beautifully designed collection of photographs primarily from the ’60s and early ’70s, when Avedon, already an acknowledged legend, was going through some public and formative failures. (Mary Panzer describes them in her smart introduction.) The book includes Avedon’s murals of the Ginsberg family, Andy Warhol and the Factory, the Mission Council in Vietnam and the Chicago Seven, as well as portraits of civil rights figures, journalists in Vietnam and countercultural figures.

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“Toiletpaper” (Freedman Damiani), by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

The only unanimous selection on our list, “Toiletpaper” is full of things the likes of which we had never seen before. The pictures — which Cattelan and Ferrari created for their magazine of the same name — are strange, surreal, sometimes lurid, sometimes hilarious. The cover image alone, of a canary whose wings are about to be cut, is indelible.

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“Vanilla Partner” (Mack), by Torbjørn Rødland

Rødland’s portraits, still-lifes and landscapes, mostly made in commonplace settings, are deceptively simple. But at the same time, his pictures — an infant whose face and head are covered in spaghetti, a young man just tarred and feathered, an octopus tentacle wrapped around a woman’s wrist — are also threatening and otherworldly.

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“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” (Guggenheim/SFMOMA), by Rineke Dijkstra

An accompaniment to Dijkstra’s midcareer retrospective at the Guggenheim earlier this year, the book is an appraisal of one of the great portrait photographers at work today. From her early Beach Portraits, photographs of children and adolescents at the beach in the 1990s, to later works in which she photographed new mothers just after childbirth or Israeli soldiers, Dijkstra’s portraits are open, vulnerable and delicate.

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“Nostalgia: The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II Captured in Color Photographs” (Gestalten), by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii

One of the first to experiment with color photography, Prokudin-Gorskii made his pictures mostly between 1905 and 1915, on long expeditions sponsored by the czar. A special camera would take three consecutive exposures, each time using a different color filter, and then a special prism projector would combine them for viewing. They were not easily reproduced in print, however. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia after the revolution, taking his plates with him; eventually they were donated to the Library of Congress. “Nostalgia” reproduces them in print for the first time.

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“Soho” (The Photographers’ Gallery/Mack), by Anders Petersen

Anders Petersen’s intimate, high-contrast black-and-white portrait of London’s Soho. For the project, commissioned by the Photographers’ Gallery, Petersen immersed himself in the neighborhood for a month in 2011. His enthusiasm is a constant presence — he can even be seen in an inadvertent self-portrait photographing a woman blow-drying her hair — as he documents Soho’s wealth of characters, their haunts and fashions, their vain postures and their awkward embraces.