It was not unlike a political caucus. The candidates — in this case, nearly 100 photography books published this year — took over every inch of available counter space in the photo department, where they were carefully scrutinized by a group of opinionated voters, each of whom was given just 10 Post-it notes as ballots. Impassioned speeches were made. Votes were cast: a few books grew polychromatic bouquets of Post-its — each voter had his or her own individual color — while others sprouted single lonely Post-its. Votes were changed: worthy candidates, including the likes of Diana Vreeland and Gerhard Richter, were abandoned. Finally, after weeks, a group of winners emerged. Like all campaigns, it was brutal. Here are the 10 victors, in no particular order.

“In the Picture: Self-Portraits, 1958-2011” (Yale University Press) by Lee Friedlander

Self-documentation and self-promotion are now so pervasive that it’s easy to forget they aren’t just contemporary impulses. There is Lee Friedlander, stepping into the frame in 1966, holding the camera at arm’s length in a posture that has been replicated millions of times since. There he is in Arizona in 1993, pressing his head against a cactus. His shadow looms over scenes in Kentucky, Denver, New Orleans. We see him in the I.C.U. after bypass surgery. Gazing at his grandchildren. Standing with Maria. Through decades of keen observations of the American cultural landscape, Friedlander has been methodically, relentlessly and endearingly documenting himself. “In the Picture,” Friedlander’s fifth book of self-portraits, celebrates the pleasures of looking back at a life well seen.



“Permanent Error” (Prestel), by Pieter Hugo

A series of documentary portraits and landscapes at a dumping ground for obsolete computers and electronics in Ghana (some of which were published in The New York Times Magazine in 2010). A young man carries a tangle of wires over his head. A group of cattle graze as a plume of smoke billows in the background. Clusters of men stand next to piles of burning electronics. Workers “harvest” precious metals from First World e-waste. Hugo’s pictures expose the underbelly of the digital revolution, confront us with the consequences of the electronic age.

“The Unseen Eye” (Aperture), by W.M. Hunt

The one volume on our list that isn’t “by” a photographer. Instead, Hunt is a collector, and has been for more than 30 years. His is a curious collection: all of his photographs are about concealed or obscured eyes. As a result, his book, which draws only from his collection, is all about the role the viewer plays in photography and what it means to look at pictures. With works from photographers like Brassai, Joel Peter Witkin, Cindy Sherman, Alexandra Boulat, Adam Fuss, it is also an impressive survey of photography from the 19th century to the present.



“Illuminance” (Aperture), by Rinko Kawauchi

This is Kawauchi’s 12th book, but the first published outside Japan. Kawauchi is a master at grasping dreamlike moments, both profound and banal, with incredible detail: swirling surf, a translucent small frog perched on the edge of a hand, a child intensely focusing on a tiny speck on the sidewalk. As David Chandler writes in an essay that accompanies Kawauchi’s pictures, which were taken over the last 15 years, “Recorded are the rhythms of this life, rather than its set pieces: a breath, a touch, and a glance, the things that happen inside the moment and that can never be clearly seen.”

“Vivian Maier: Street Photographer” (Powerhouse), by Vivian Maier

Maier never worked as a professional photographer; she made her living mainly as a nanny for well-to-do families on Chicago’s North Shore. But photography was clearly her calling. In this collection of pictures, shot from the 1950s to the 1990s, for the most part on the streets of Chicago and New York (but also in a number of foreign countries), she demonstrates an incredible eye for composition, certain slants of light, interesting faces and the revelatory caught moment. Maier didn’t achieve any measure of fame during her lifetime — she died in 2009 at the age of 83 — but the photographs, which were discovered in 2007, have since been exhibited to rave reviews at galleries in the United States and in Europe.

“You and I” (Twin Palms), by Ryan McGinley

They are bounding through fireworks. Falling through the air. Climbing through trees, waterfalls, caves and rooftops. Laughing and embracing. In this long-awaited collection of McGinley’s first decade of work as a photographer, the sublime madness of youth fills each page. Every bit as striking and evident, however, is the sense of McGinley constantly experimenting, pushing, making pictures without antecedent.



“Magnum: Contact Sheets” (Thames & Hudson)

An extraordinary window into the editing process that goes into photojournalism. Arranged chronologically, the book gives readers the chance to study the contact sheets, marked-up by editors and the photographers themselves, that yielded some of the most iconic images in the Magnum archive. Accompanying text fills in the story behind the shoots. An absolute must-have for students, editors and lovers of photography.

“Redheaded Peckerwood” (Mack), by Christian Patterson

Patterson takes his inspiration from the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, an Eisenhower-era teenage couple who murdered 10 people in Nebraska over three days before they were captured by authorities. Patterson, who approaches their story “as a poet and a gumshoe,” in the words of Luc Sante, whose essay accompanies the book, combines historical photographs, documents and his own creative wanderings into an unsettling dance between evidence and myth.

“Mom & Dad” (Mörel Books), by Terry Richardson

Richardson shifts his focus from fashion models and commerce to his parents — and the result is fascinating. There’s one volume for his mom and one for his dad, and they seem like equally kooky and troubled characters. Most striking are the photos of Richardson’s frail, bohemian-looking mom, smiling, topless, smoking, giving the finger, surrounded by her knick knacks, and generally looking like she would be a hoot to hang out with, and the photos of his dad’s ominous messages scrawled on the walls of his apartment (“I think my son is in danger”). We get two biographies told entirely through photos, and an autobiography of the photographer himself that’s almost painfully revealing.



“Is This Place Great or What” (Aperture/Cleveland Museum of Art), by Brian Ulrich

A blunt assessment of Americans’ obsession with consumption. In 2001, after 9/11, Ulrich was struck by a speech in which President Bush linked “the vitality of the American economy” with “the willingness of Americans to spend.” The first two chapters, “Retail” and “Thrift,” of the ensuing project were photographed before the financial crisis of 2008. The final chapter, “Dark Stores,” which was started that year, examines the fallout of the Great Recession and serves as a sobering coda to the earlier work.