Photobook Recommendations: The Uncomfortable Intimacy Edition
Not every book wants to hold your hand. Some would rather shove you into traffic. These three don’t ask for permission — they just drag you in. What links them isn’t style or format, but fixation: on desire, on damage, on watching and being watched.
Antoine d’Agata’s Antibodies is 560 pages of need and blur — not photographed, but lived. Sex, addiction, war, loss, soaked in sweat and shadow, the images barely hold still long enough to register. Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, rewrites childhood heroines into erotically charged adults, weaving high-literary porn with past trauma, rendered in dreamlike pastels and sharp language. And Exposed, Sandra Phillips’ dense survey of voyeurism and surveillance, traces the camera’s role in everything from early peeping-toms to modern digital tracking — a reminder that every gaze has a cost.
Nothing here is safe, or quiet. But if you’re into work that stares back, this is your stack.