Over the holidays, we had dinner with a group of friends and the topic of Spotify Wrapped came up. For those that don’t use this particular streaming music service, at the end of the year, the system tallies up various statistical measures of your entire listening year into a little slideshow called Wrapped, offering data points and lists of your total minutes spent listening and your most listened to songs and bands (mine was Fontaines D.C). It seems the desire to quantify and summarize our lives and interests, especially at the end of the year, has become ubiquitous. A similarly snappy year end review is now available from Goodreads (for books read), Letterboxd (for movies watched), Beli (for restaurants visited), and likely whatever other apps and digital services you use most often.

Sadly, here at Collector Daily, even if you’ve been methodically reading with us all year, we can’t offer you a personalized statistical summary of your photobook habits. What we can do is take a look at our own photobook review activity in aggregate (across our entire team of writers), and tease out some of the patterns we see in what we’ve been doing. And while we might like to know about the total number of photobook fairs we attended, the total hours spent browsing in bookshops, the total number of images seen or pages turned, or better yet the total number of photobooks we examined closely but didn’t actually buy, we have provided below some of the metrics we consistently use to track our efforts. Last year, we collectively reviewed at total of 76 photobooks, so think of that number as the baseline on which our other statistical metrics are built; that tally represents a small drop from our 2024 sum, but a number still large enough to provide a robust and broad sense of what was happening in the world of photobooks. Many of the data points in the tables below are relatively stable from year to year, but the changes in relative weight over time can often signal ideas worth thinking about more fully.

It’s clear that the single photographer single project monograph continues to be the dominant photobook form that we select. And every year, when we see just how skewed we are towards monographs, we recommit to reaching out beyond those boundaries.

Gender parity is our goal on this metric, and last year we came decently close to achieving it. It is however still very much the case that male artists remain in a dominant position in terms of the total volume of photobooks published in any given year, so aiming for equity requires making intentional choices that keep the scales balanced.

Given that Collector Daily is based in the United States, our location inherently creates a small bias towards books by local artists – they are somewhat more available, the publishers are somewhat better known to us, and the artists and subject matter are often more familiar. And in many ways, this is a perspective we are constantly fighting, trying to get out beyond these handy selections to more photobooks made by artists from other places. Last year, we were less successful at this than in prior years, with more than 40% of our reviews featuring artists from the US and Canada. Underneath that top line, however, the flows were quite fluid, with 2025 bringing in more artists (on a percentage basis) from Central/South America, the Middle East, and Scandinavia, and less from Western Europe, Asia, the United Kingdom/Ireland, Russia/Eastern Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. The obvious takeaway is that photobook greatness isn’t bounded by nationality, and if we’re focused on unearthing the best of what’s being published in a given year, we need to have our feelers actively out beyond our own borders.

One of the intriguing inversions in the publisher data this year is that while we were heavily weighted toward selecting photographers from the US and Canada this past year, the dominant publishers in our lists (including the self-published titles) were largely from the UK and Western Europe. Many of the usual suspects are clustered at the top, whose consistently robust publishing programs and superlative design and production capabilities attract photographers known and unknown, with the long tail reaching out to nearly 60 other publishers (and co-publishers) from around the world. With a hundred or more photobook publishers taking part in book fairs like Polycopies or the New York Art Book Fair, it’s clear that the photobook industry continues to renew itself with smaller publishing houses and new entrants, so a thoughtful balance between high quality established players and those taking more risks with smaller budgets is continually required.

In the next few months, we’ll begin to look ahead to the as yet unseen photobooks of 2026 and continue to gather up the last of the noteworthy (or late arriving) 2025s that we may have missed for one reason or another, so the process of sifting and sorting never quite ends. Back in my Spotify Wrapped this year, one of the new features was a statistic somehow measuring “Listening Age”. I say somehow as my friends and I were mystified by the various numbers we all received – mine was a hilariously disheartening 80, likely driven by a bit too much classical piano streamed while working. Perhaps this coming year we need to start tracking photographer birth dates, so we can tabulate our own collective “Viewing Age”. If so, we’ll have to trade off some 19th century masters for more recent MFA graduates to make sure we skew a bit younger.

And for those interested in comparing the numbers above with our photobook statistics from previous years, summary reports are available for 2024 (here), 2023 (here), 2022 (here), 2021 (here), 2020 (here), and 2019 (here).