Alan Rapp

It's a truism that photography uncovers what is "hidden," but my selections for the best photograpahy books of 2010 certainly chart its limitless capacity for revelation. Recently, experimental geographer and artist Trevor Paglen has been on the forefront of presenting the evidence of military black operations—rumored but hardly known—into works that are as potently anxious as they are aesthetically murky. In ways that are hard to articulate, his work defines a central but uncomfortable aspect of our era. But not all of these books are as fraught. From the poetically arbitrary typologies of Taryn Simon's Contraband, or the hidden-in-plain-sight avian project of Stephen Gill's A Book of Birds, or the incredible cross-generational, interdisciplinary project The Complete Architecture of Adler + Sullivan to the deranged brutalist monuments of Spomenik, these books increase human knowledge, and assert why now, perhaps more than ever, the limits of human awareness are defined by our visual environment.