From Capa to Kanaga: The best photography books of 2024

Detail from an image by Mikko Takkunen in Hong Kong | Mikko Takkunen

The average adult in the UK now spends more than an hour and a half every day looking at social media and, as almost all social media posts now include an image of some kind, that also means an hour and a half every day scrolling through images, mostly photography. That in turn equates to ten and a half hours a week, or 546 hours a year, which means we are now consuming exponentially more photography than at any time in our history. We're soaking up gigabytes of the stuff every few days, mainlining pixels ​on an unimaginable scale, and increasingly we're making decisions about what information to consume and what to ignore based on the quality or otherwise of the accompanying image.

Against this backdrop, the idea of a physical photography book seems almost quaint - a throwback to a time before our current era of visual overstimulation. Then again, photography books also seem more essential than ever, in that they offer an opportunity to consider images at a slower speed - to pause for a moment and spend time thinking carefully about what a photographer is trying to show us without the urge to scroll on to the next thing.

The age of endless online photography certainly doesn't seem to have killed the photography book - if anything, it seems as if there are more than ever to choose from. All that choice is a wonderful thing, but it can also pose its own problems, chiefly: at a time when anyone with a smartphone can be a photographer, how do you decide which photographers are worth spending time and perhaps even money on?

One way of navigating the many thousands of photo books produced every year is to follow the experts. ​Geoff Dyer’s​ The Ongoing Moment​, published in 2005, is one of the most critically acclaimed books ever written about photography​, and over the years he has proved a useful touchstone. In 2015, for example, I saw that he had written the introduction to Lynn Saville’s book ​Dark City: Urban America at Night​, so I tracked it down and instantly fell in love with Saville’s brooding, sometimes sinister streetscapes. Dyer also wrote the introduction to a new book Hong Kong by Mikko Takkunen (Kehrer, £38) and, like the Saville book, it is full of images which reward careful attention.

Born in Finland in 1979, Takkunen was working in Hong Kong as Asia photo editor for the New York Times when the pandemic hit in 2020, so he felt the urge to pick up a camera and document the city at a time when, "reeling from protests and on the precipice of a pandemic" it felt as if it might cease to exist, "at least in a way that had long seduced people from around the world." Takkunen is a master of the half-seen and the partially obscured - figures glimpsed in wing mirrors, reflected on shiny metal surfaces or warped through rain-covered glass. This isn't a huge book, consisting of less than 70 images, but each one packs in so much visual information that, when you finally put it down, you feel as if you've been away for a while.

An image from Sealskin by Jeff Dworsky | Jeff Dworsky

Also offering a fascinating window to an unfamiliar world is Sealskin by​ Jeff Dworsky (Charcoal Press, £50), a suite of images loosely based around the Celtic myth of the Selkie. Dworsky dropped out of school at 14, bought a Leica camera at 15, and moved to a small island in Maine at 16 to become a fisherman. Shot on Kodachrome film, his p​i​ctures record daily life in a small fishing village during the 70s and 80s, and​ range from the atmospheric - clapboard houses shrouded in mist; boats rocking at anchor in the teeth of an approaching storm - to the visceral - a woman giving birth; a field on fire; a dead whale washed up on a cobblestone beach. Strange, otherworldy and unforgettable.

Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher), 1989, by Anna Fox, taken from The 80s: Photographing Britain | Anna Fox

At the same time that Dworsky was photographing smalltown Maine, photography in the UK was going through a series of seismic changes, and this period of upheaval is comprehensively charted in The 80s: Photographing Britain (Tate, £40), the book produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name which runs at Tate Britain until May next year. As the show's curators Yasufumi Nakamori, Helen Little and Jasmine KaurChohan explain in their introduction, the body of work they have assembled actually covers the years from 1976 to 1983 - a period they call "the long 1980s, to include the years just prior to and in the immediate aftermath of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Government of 1979-90."

Over a series of absorbing chapters, the book looks at the ways in which photographers of the period captured and also helped shape perceptions of key political events like the Miners Strike, the Poll Tax Riots and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and also how they challenged commonly-held views of women and ethnic minorities. There's also an illuminating chapter by Little on the impact of colour photography, titled "From Today, Black and White is Dead." Hard to believe the first exhibition of colour photography in the UK took place as recently as 1979.

A woman with her baby, whose father is German, and her mother are jeered by crowds in Chartres after having their heads shaved as punishment for collaborating with the Germans. | Robert Capa / Getty Images

Few people in the history of photography could claim to have captured so many key moments of 20th century history as the great photojournalist Robert Capa. From the Spanish Civil War to the Normandy Landings and the war in Vietnam, where he was killed by a landmine, he consistently put himself in harm's way in order to capture images he felt the world needed to see. Edited by Michel Lefebvre, Robert Capa: In the Making (Thames & Hudson, £40) is a major new survey of his work, incorporating both iconic and rarely-seen photographs, and it also gives context to many of these pictures, showing how they appeared in the newspapers and magazines where they were first published.

Two Women, Harlem, c. 1938 by Consuelo Kanaga | © Brooklyn Museum

Finally, the American photographer Consuelo Kanaga is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and in ​​Consuelo Kanaga​ (Thames & Hudson, £50), the book published to accompany the show, the art historian and curator Drew Sawyer gives a clear-eyed overview of her considerable and varied output.

​Like Capa, she was primarily a photojournalist, capturing some of the major social conflicts that swept the United States during the 20th century, from struggles over workers' rights to the fight for racial equality. It's her portraiture, though, which really grabs and holds the attention. If you were looking for an image to illustrate the idea that the eyes are windows to the soul, Kanaga's impressive body of work would be an excellent place to start.

Read More: Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan on The Best Exhibitions of 2024