Reading Time: 6 minutes

Albert Elm’s What Sort of Life is This, Mathieu Asselin’s Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation and the group book project Amplitude No.1, which is edited by Nadya Sheremetova and includes photographers such as Irina Yulieva, Igor Samolet and Irina Ivannikova, have all made the shortlist for the prestigious First Photobook award in the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards. The PhotoBook of the Year shortlist includes Jim Goldberg’s The Last Son, Mark Neville’s Fancy Pictures, and Henk Wildschut’s Ville de Calais.

Established in 2012, the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards are divided into three categories – PhotoBook of the Year, First PhotoBook, and Photography Catalogue of the Year. The winners will be announced on 10 November at Paris Photo, and all the shortlisted and winning titles will be profiled in The PhotoBook Review and exhibited at Paris Photo, the Aperture Gallery in New York, and at other international venues.

The full shortlist for the First PhotoBook is: Mathieu Asselin, Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation; Zackary Canepari, REX; Teju Cole, Blind Spot; Sam Contis, Deep Springs; Debi Cornwall, Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay; Albert Elm, What Sort of Life Is This; Mary Frey, Reading Raymond Carver; Jenia Fridlyand, Entrance to Our Valley; Darren Harvey-Regan, The Erratics; Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen, Eyes as Big as Plates; Dawn Kim, Creation.IMG; Laura Larson, Hidden Mother; Feng Li, White Night; Cecil McDonald Jr, In the Company of Black; Virginie Rebetez, Out of the Blue; Claudius Schulze, State of Nature; Nadya Sheremetova, ed, Amplitude No.1; Senta Simond, Rayon Vert; Alnis Stakle, Melancholic Road; Mayumi Suzuki, The Restoration Will.

PhotoBook of the Year shortlist is: Anne Golaz, Corbeau; Jim Goldberg, The Last Son; Nicholas Muellner, In Most Tides an Island; Mark Neville, Fancy Pictures; Alison Rossiter, Expired Paper; Mike Mandel, Susan Meiselas, Bill Burke, and Lee Friedlander, Subscription Series No. 5; Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan; Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril, La Grieta (The Crack); Erik van der Weijde, This Is Not My Book; Henk Wildschut, Ville de Calais.

The Photography Catalogue of the Year shortlist is: Brassaï: Graffiti, Le Langage du Mur, Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska; CLAP! 10×10 Contemporary Latin American Photobooks: 2000–2016, Olga Yatskevich, Russet Lederman, and Matthew Carson; Diary of a Leap Year, Rabith Mroué; Hans Eijkelboom: Photo Concepts 1970, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Wim van Sinderen, Gerrit Willems and Dieter Roelstraete; New Realities: Photography in the 19th Century, Mattie Boom, Hans Rooseboom.

The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards is judged by two separate juries – one which creates the shortlist, and another which picks out the winners. This year, the shortlist jury included: Gregory Halpern, winner of the 2016 PhotoBook of the Year Award with ZZYZX; Lesley A Martin, creative director of the Aperture Foundation book programme and publisher of The PhotoBook Review; Kathy Ryan, director of photography for The New York Times Magazine; Joel Smith, Richard L Menschel curator of photography at the Morgan Library & Museum; and Christoph Wiesner, artistic director of Paris Photo.

The shortlists were created over three days, from over 900 submitted books. “The task of the shortlist jury is essentially a curatorial one,” says Martin. “The selected books comprise an exhibition that showcases the incredible array of creativity and excellence taking place right now in contemporary photobook making.”

The winners of the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards will be announced at 1pm on 10 November. https://programme.parisphoto.com/en/photobook-awards.htm