Daylight Books

Home
United States
New York, NY
Daylight Books

Daylight is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing art and photography via books and digital media since 2003. www.daylightbooks.org

Daylight is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing art and photography books. By exploring the documentary mode along with the more conceptual concerns of fine-art, Daylight’s uniquely collectible publications work to revitalize the relationship between art, photography, and the world-at-large.

08/20/2026

Paolo Manzo: 2026 Daylight Photo Awards Juror Highlight

“In photographing his hometown of Naples, Italy, Paolo Manzo has chosen a difficult and important project. As Manzo shines light on the daily brutality and stunted lives forced upon Neapolitans by the mafia, the drug trade and corrupt officials, he shows us why documentary photography is so crucially important. His photos make a difference. They have been seen by tens of thousands, or maybe millions, and helped to put faces to the statistics—and a hard-edged reality to the distant headlines. We finally understand the grinding poverty, addiction and fear that permeate the lives of Naples’ residents. But Manzo does more than just shine a light. His photos are a synthesis of brilliant composition, a nuanced understanding of light and crucial historical moments captured in a millisecond. Both victims and perpetrators play out their daily struggle for survival as clerics, mothers and law enforcement fight for justice and real change. To take photos like Manzo’s requires a deep understanding of societal forces, steady nerves and the sheer guts to put in the thousands of hours, as this photographer has surely done. Manzo has gained the trust, arranged the access and crucially, waited for the moment when it all comes together. The viewers, and Neapolitans, are the beneficiaries of his courage.” —Michael Kamber, Bronx Documentary Center

Each year the Daylight Photo Awards invites leading industry professionals to review the work of contest entries. They are asked to rank all entries from which there emerges one winner of a $2500 cash prize and, also, highlight their personal favorite portfolio or ‘Juror Pick’.

For the 2026 Daylight Photo Awards, juror Michael Kamber selected Paolo Manzo’s portfolio as his ‘Juror Pick’.

Michael Kamber has worked as a journalist for more than 25 years and is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Kamber founded the Bronx Documentary Center in 2011, an educational space dedicated to positive social change through photography and film.

Paolo Manzo
Mike Kamber

Paolo Manzo’s full portfolio is now published on the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/19/2026

A Peoplehood | Amiut Yehudit feature and interview in About Photography

This work is an intimate and layered exploration of contemporary Jewish identity.

Marnie Salsky is a Toronto-based photographer and documentary media artist. She uses a conceptual documentary approach, she combines photographs, archival materials, interviews and fragments of digital life to build layered narratives that extend the boundaries of traditional documentary practice. She earned an MFA in documentary media from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her work spans installation, print, and film; an earlier iteration of this project was screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

Marnie Salsky Photography
About Photography

Read the full interview and feature on the About Photography website.

A Peoplehood | Amiut Yehudit is available to purchase in print through the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/15/2026

Unrecognized Bedouin of the Negev by Ahakim Seri

For centuries the Bedouin have lived in the Negev Desert, which, with the founding of Israel in 1948,came into Israeli hands. Soon after, Israeli politics focused on concentrating the Arab desert peoples into Bedouin townships.Today, 60,000 Bedouin live in such townships,which suffer from unemployment, poverty, and criminality. Another 70,000 Bedouin refuse to give up the land of their birth and their rural lives in forty-five villages not recognized by the state. These villages lack such basic infrastructure as running water, electricity, and sewers, and are also subject to house demolitions and destructive crop spraying. With these photographs I tried to portray the circumstances in which the unrecognized villagers live, and their land dispute with the state. As the Bedouin increasingly declare their solidarity with the Palestinians, the dispute is gaining in intensity.

Ahikam Seri is an independent photojournalist based in Jerusalem. His work is exhibited worldwide and he is represented by Panos Pictures

Unrecognized Bedouin of the Negev was originally published in Daylight Magazine Issue No. 4: Israel/Palestine and can be purchased through the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/13/2026

Wild Pigeon by Carolyn Drake

Carolyn Drake’s book, Wild Pigeon, is a departure from traditional photojournalism. Created in the far western province of Xinjiang Uyghur in the People’s Republic of China, the book is in part an informal collaboration created in a time of extreme change and duress. “I asked willing collaborators to draw on, reassemble, and use their own tools on my work,” explains Drake. “The collages and drawings they made are the product of our exchange, in all their roughness, ambiguity and risk.” As Sean O’Hagan noted in the Guardian, “The book may yet become a lyrical elegy for a way of life that held sway for centuries, but could pass into memory in just a few years.”

Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and has in recent years melded photography with sewing, collage, and sculpture. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries

Carolyn Drake

Wild Pigeon by Carolyn Drake was published on the Daylight Blog, view the full version of the article here on the Daylight Books website.

08/12/2026

Permanent Drift by John Waller

Olde Kensington, north of Center City Philadelphia, was predominantly a post- industrial area when photographer John Waller moved to town. Yet ominous signs of change were everywhere as the neighborhood was rapidly renovated and gentrified like the rest of the city. Like the classic flâneur of old, Waller wandered the streets recording the city in flux.

John Waller, born 1976, is an American photographer living in Massachusetts.

Permanent Drift is available to purchase through the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/10/2026

We are excited to announce the Juror Highlights for the 2026 Daylight Photo Awards

Each year the Daylight Photo Awards invites leading industry professionals to review the work of contest entries. They are asked to rank all entries from which there emerges one winner of a $2500 cash prize and, also, highlight their personal favorite portfolio or ‘Juror Pick’

Presented here are some of the favorites from our 2026 Daylight Photo Awards jurors:

Bryan Locke
Bryan Kenneth Locke
—James Wellford, National Geographic
James Wellford

Diana Cheren Nygren
Diana Cheren Nygren 📷
—Hideko Kataoka, Newsweek Japan
Hideko Kataoka

Hankyung Ryu
류한경
—Tif Ng, Magnum Foundation
Tif (伍家恩）

Laila Annmarie Stevens
laila a. stevens
—Momo Takahashi, The New Yorker
Momo Takahashi

Paolo Manzo
Paolo Manzo
—Mike Kamber, Bronx Documentary Center
Mike Kamber

Find the Juror Highlight’s full portfolios and Juror praise on the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/09/2026

Family Amnesia by Betty Yu exhibited at ICP’s Photobooks USA 2000-25

“Bringing together more than 50 photobooks, Photobooks USA 2000–25 examines how artists have used the medium to tell stories and circulate their work in new ways”—ICP

Family Amnesia is a visual tribute and love letter honoring the artist’s Chinese American family roots in the U.S. The art book explores her family’s multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, her own captured images and archival material.

The book project honors the past and current lives of Asian Americans and immigrants in the U.S. by examining the incalculable and traumatic impact that historical events like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act continue to have on the Asian American experience. This is a painful part of our American history. Betty Yu is reclaiming that narrative through her own personal family’s story. The book will feature her grandfather’s role as a founding member of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of NY, her mother’s plight as a garment worker who became a labor organizer, as well as her sister’s legacy as a community activist. Yu knows that her family’s story is not unique. It is part of the larger collective Asian-American immigration experience.
 Betty Yu is an award-winning filmmaker, socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer and activist born and raised in NYC. Yu integrates documentary film, installation, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. Betty’s films and multimedia work has focused on labor, immigration, gentrification, abolition, racism, militarism, transgender equality among other issues.

Betty Yu
Int'l Center of Photography

Installation photographs © Jenna Bascom for the International Center of Photography

Family Amnesia is available to purchase through the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/08/2026

Once Upon A Time in Shanghai by Mark Parascandola

China, poised to become the world’s largest film market, is home to an expansive state-supported movie and television industry. On an unparalleled scale, entire towns have been built around making movies. Given film censorship codes in China, period films provide a safe and familiar format to tell stories based around “official” narratives. The movie sets, rivaling real-world cities and monuments in their scale, have themselves become destinations for domestic and international tourists. Despite the fiction, they bear witness to a dynamic and changing China.

Mark Parascandola is an award winning photographer based in DC. His book Once Upon a Time in Almería was published by Daylight in 2017

Mark Parascandola

Once Upon A Time in Shanghai is available for purchase in print through the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/06/2026

Midnight Sun by Joseph Seif  Midnight Sun is a photographic exploration of the polar regions, created during expeditions to Antarctica, Svalbard, and East Greenland. The project reflects both the beauty and fragility of these ecosystems while examining the human forces that are reshaping them. In Midnight Sun, Joseph Seif merges fine art aesthetics with a journalistic sensibility, crafting images that balance awe with urgency while documenting ecological and cultural change. The work invites viewers into a dialogue about humanity’s relationship with the planet and the choices that will determine our collective future.

Joseph Seif is a California-based photographer, filmmaker, and composer whose work explores the intersection of art, science, and environmental storytelling. His previous fine art photobook, ONWARD, features images created over twelve years across multiple countries, tracing his photographic journey and the evolution of his visual style. With a background in both commercial and fine art photography, his career has taken him from major brand campaigns to personal projects in remote corners of the world.  Joseph Seif   Midnight Sun is available to purchase through the Daylight Books website, link in bio.

08/05/2026

“Cinema Play House is a visual document: of the real, decrepit space of the single-screen cinema theater but that attempts to imagine it fictively and creatively; a portrait of the people who inhabit these shrinking spaces but that evokes them entirely in their absence; and finally a contemplation about death and passing but sans any mourning or lamentation”— Priyadarshini Shanker

Nandita Raman is an artist and photographer who studied in the Bard College–International Center of Photography program. She was appointed Associate Professor of Photography at Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 (unable to join), and taught at SUNY Purchase College previously. She teaches in Photography Expanded Fellowship focused on climate, for the Magnum Foundation. Nandita is studying Acupuncture and practices non-dual (advaita) meditation. She finds remarkable overlaps between these and creative practices

Nandita Raman

This piece was trimmed and edited for Instagram, please find the full multimedia video at
www.daylightbooks.org

Address

79 Essex Street
New York, NY
10002

Website

http://www.daylightbooks.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Daylight Books posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company in New York?