Photo Books For Girls Who Don’t Like To Read

If to be a woman is to perform, then Rose English takes that job very seriously. Ranking among the most influential performance artists of our time, her art combines elements of theatre, circus, opera, comedy, and poetry for an interdisciplinary investigation of themes including the politics of gender, the identities of performers, and the metaphysics of presence – the true nature of performance.

To look forward we must look back – specifically back into archival photographs, documents and autobiographical texts, that narrate the life of María Belén Correa, a leading activist for transgender rights in Argentina and Latin America. Her personal story reflects the history of the LGBTQIA+ community in Latin America and the struggles it faced in the 1980s and 1990s.

There isn’t a female gaze quite as sexy as Donna Trope’s and “If the legendary beauty photographer isn’t aroused on set, then she might as well not be on set at all.” Gaze upon a collection of Trope’s award winning, world-renowned beauty images. These sexy, conceptual, ground breaking shots went against the grain of what was considered commercially beautiful and are now the much imitated status quo.

Immaculate styling and set design sit on the surface of ECHO, a delicate and poetic tale
of female intimacy, friendship, and the negotiation of the fluid territory between adolescence and young adulthood. Each one of Guen’s photographs “speaks of such push and pull struggle where two bodies at war with one another see in the other, and in their unity, their worst enemy: the obscure object of their desire as well as the embodiment of their worst nightmare.”

Mothers, grandmothers, aunties alike, this delicate publication, inspired by Al-Arashi’s great-grandmother, Aisha, is an homage to the lineage of women that she descends from; women of the multidimensional and many-layered landscapes of the MENA region. Searching for an understanding of the tattoos that graced her great-grandmother’s body,
Al-Arashi embraces the complexities of a symbolic matriarchal tradition.

Boys get on your knees for this whirling, twirling, panorama of satanic sleaze! This monumental art book reveals a world of diabolical smut that was so compelling and obscure that many people today would question whether the magazines were real or just an elaborate and detailed modern photo editing invention. These artefacts come from a bygone era promoting sexual revolution and freedom with overt and unholy occult themes. If you have any issues with hardcore witchcraft and Satanism, body hair or nudity, don’t pick this book up and quickly get it out of your sight. Just remember life's too short to take everything so seriously. Flesh is beautiful!

Love Little Miss Sunshine? Same.  In Bellissima, Carla Rossi photographs Rebecca, a young contestant she met during the Miss Italia selections, tracing her journey from casting calls to national auditions and uncovering a system driven by spectacle, competition, and the tireless pursuit of a narrowly defined ideal of femininity. Through the photographer’s lens, beauty is not a fixed idea but a performance, shaped, repeated, and refined in response to the gaze of others.

Blast back to the traumatic times of teenage girlhood with Catholic Girl by Andrea Modica, who shortly after graduating, in March 1984 photographed her alma mater: a largely Italian-American Catholic high school for girls. The assertion of identity beyond uniform, burgeoning womanhood and oppressive institution, transcend representation and open a rarely intimate insight into the realities of girlhood.

Romance is absolutely not dead in Idola Hunnikin’s DICKSWINGERS, a lesbian love letter to girlfriend Alessia celebrating their first year living together. Documenting their university year abroad in Paris, New York, their parent’s houses and Berlin, the work was shot in 2021-22, and explores lesbian fetishisation, desire, sexuality, religion, consumption and beauty.

Get 18 for the price of 1 in A Nice Magazine Issue 3 – this multidimensional collection of 18 women photographers containing images that talk about friendship, motherhood, and sex work, and some that are simply beautiful photographs. Together these artists evoke the myriad ways in which women are depicting not just others, but their inner psychological landscapes.