American Photo Picks the Best Photobooks of 2014

What makes a photo book great? “It has to embody originality and, ultimately, be a thing of beauty, a work of art,” wrote rare-book dealer Andrew Roth in his seminal collection, The Book of 101 Books, more than a decade ago. We concur. The following 54 books meet that test. These volumes also reflect current trends in photography—the evolution of the snapshot aesthetic, the manipulation of images, the storyteller’s art, the ubiquity of social media—which have emerged in the bound book without diminishing it. The photograph and the printing press were made for each other.