One hundred photobooks. I’d like to think that such a neatly round figure could provide a decently representative sampler of a year’s worth of global photobook activity, especially if those one hundred books were carefully selected and intentionally spread out to cover most of the relevant themes, trends, and ideas percolating around in a given artistic year.

Last year, here at Collector Daily, we collectively reviewed a total of 95 photobooks, so not quite 100, but pretty close. It was our busiest year for photobook reviews since 2021 and the tumult of the pandemic (in 2020, we actually reviewed 156 books, our largest total ever, when there were no galleries and museums open). The writing load this year was divided between three principal writers (Olga Yatskevich, Blake Andrews, and myself), all working consistently from month to month.

While each of us selects our own books to review, based on our own photographic and photobook interests, we use a simple tracking system to communicate with each other about which books we’re writing about in any given week, and which books are already sitting on our individual stacks waiting to be reviewed soon (or have been ordered and are on their way). We also share an open-ended list of books we’ve been alerted to, heard about, or are potentially interested in – books which are essentially unclaimed (for the moment), so anyone can grab them and add them to their own forward looking piles should they spark an interest.

And while this informal sharing does alert us to what others are thinking about and working on (and prevents duplications), we still need some additional statistical measures to keep us aware of the collective patterns we might otherwise miss individually. And it is these measures that we have been reporting back to you, on an annual basis, for the past five years now, in the hopes that they might offer some unexpected insights into both our own activities and the rhythms of the larger photobook industry.

The tables below reflect some of the metrics we use to measure ourselves, and while many of the data points are relatively stable from year to year, it’s often the outliers and the changes in relative weight from year to year that tend to provide the friction for new thoughts.

The single photographer single project monograph continues to be the dominant photobook form that we choose to engage with. But these annual statistics are a constant reminder that there are many other photography book forms that we can and should be considering from time to time, from catalogs and retrospectives (particularly of worthy shows in distant locales) to zines and newspapers, with boxed sets, portfolios, essays, biographies, histories, photopoetry, and photonovels all offering possible detours worth following.

Two years ago, we made a deliberate effort to reach gender parity in our photobook reviews, and achieved the goal of reviewing the same amount of photobooks made by female photographers as those made by male photographers. In the time since, we have relaxed that intention a bit, and have fallen back to the old disparity between male and female, with men back in a statistically dominant position, as seen in the numbers above. This is of course a two layered problem – our choices of what to write about, drawn from publishers’ choices of what books to publish – so both sets of decisions need to be addressed to find a more durable sense of balance.

The headline for this year’s geographic data is the surge of titles from Western Europe, with more than a quarter of our reviewed books coming from the region for the first time. Books by artists from the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany led the way, with plenty of other Western European countries also represented. This European rise inevitably rebalanced the scales a bit, tilting away from the USA/Canada and Asia to make room. Other locales were decently consistent in terms of representation year over year, with always more work to do in terms of getting out beyond our easily accessed comfort zones to more distant regions.

I think the publisher data above can be read two ways. On one hand, it might represent the gradual consolidation of the leaders, with familiar names like MACK and GOST clustered near the top, potentially crowding out other smaller publishers, and taking over the top spot in our data from self-published titles for the first time. But on the other, our 2024 review selections came from a total of 70 different publishers and co-publishers (not including the self-published titles), with a handful of book makers joining the list for the first time. A trip to any busy photobook fair will be proof enough that the industry is vibrantly filled with publishers of all sizes, so perhaps the concentration seen in the numbers above simply represents the outsized ability of high quality publishers (with wider distribution capabilities) to attract a certain set of high quality photographers.

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In the next few months, we’ll begin to look ahead to the as yet unseen photobooks of 2025 and continue to gather up the last of the noteworthy 2024s that we may have missed for one reason or another, so the process of sifting and sorting never quite ends. But it is this regeneration that keeps us coming back, always in search of the perspectives we haven’t seen before and the ideas worth thinking about more deeply.

For those interested in comparing the numbers above with our photobook statistics from previous years, summary reports are available for 2023 (here), 2022 (here), 2021 (here), 2020 (here), and 2019 (here).