Top 10 Travel Photography Books from Across the World

Even the most avid readers of travel guides and travel literature will not have encountered a book quite like this one. It is huge and heavy but reasonably priced, and it is vastly informative, which is its calling card. All the writers who contribute to the Lonely Planet travel guide series have put heads, knowledge, and experience together and come up with an A-Z series of capsule profiles of every country in the world, 230 in number. Each country gets a two-page spread, on which are placed, like luscious dishes set before one at a feast, illustrations that are typical of Lonely Planet's unique, non-picture-postcard brand of shots. The accompanying text presents a cogent rundown of the best experiences for gaining the essence of the place; books to read beforehand; music to listen to before you go; food and drink to consume once you are there; and a few brief but pungent closing comments on the trademark things to do and buy and see and what, ultimately, is the best surprise awaiting the tourist. For borrowers in the travel section to sit down, look at, and make notes from, without taking off the premises.

If you ever wondered where the catwalk got its claws, then the portraits gathered in photographer Shoichi Aoki's book Fruits, from the streets of Harajuku in Tokyo, point the way to an extraordinarily imaginative and invariably stunning glut of mongrel fashion heists. A best-of collection from the fanzine of the same name, and published for the first time outside Japan, Fruits keeps its style clean: front-on, razor-sharp images, ranging from the deadpan to the manic, of the sharpest collages of sartorial influence that, usually, little money can buy. From off the peg to off the wall, kitsch to bitch, each person bears a combination and philosophy as distinctive as DNA. All shades of aesthetic are raided, with exquisite, scrupulous attention to detail. Punk is a favorite, as is, appropriately, Vivienne Westwood, alongside Milk and Jean-Paul Gaultier, and the occasional Comme des Garçons. Many of the outfits, though, are second-hand or self-assembly, such as a skirt drooping petals of men's silk ties, Wa-mono, when tradition Japanese clothes are topped with, say, an authentic bowler hat, EGL (elegant gothic Lolita), and a swathe of tartans, pinks, and turquoises. The most malleable feature, unsurprisingly, is hair, with dreadlocks, mohicans, back-combing, and crops dyed an irradiated spectrum. While the eye is drawn, obediently, to the mannequins, the background is often worth a look, either for the vending machines against which a number are shot, or the ubiquitous Gap store and bags, a constant reminder of the global mass market.

The old adage that says a picture is worth a thousand words seems to hold true especially well for travel. Browsing through Lonely Planet’s One Planet: Inspirational Travel Photographs, a collection of some of the best photos from the Lonely Planet Images Library, will give you plenty of inspiration for your f*ture travels; alternatively, you could simply use it as an excellent armchair travel experience. The introduction to this (smallish) coffee table book says that the pictures were chosen for beauty, of course, but also "for their sense of capturing a moment in time, a moment that is shared across the globe". And it’s a good point, because this collection is relatively free of those vast landscape photographs or impossible-to-replicate air shots that some travel books love. In fact, in the vast majority of photographs there are people, keeping the collection far removed from typical postcard shots. The photographs are, as you can imagine, from across the world: a teenager in Chile, divers in Indonesia, street parades in London and people struggling against typhoon winds in Hong Kong. It’s a book to dip into again and again, whether you’re looking for ideas to help you plan a trip or just wanting to escape for a moment from everyday life.

A cradle of Nobel Prize winners and a font of ancient wisdom, Latin America provides a wealth of sublime source material for the husband-and-wife creative team of Danielle and Olivier Föllmi. In the latest installment in their Offerings for Humanity series, the authors draw nuggets of written wisdom from the Andean plains to the Mexican desert. Set against the stunning visual backdrop of 365 photographs, taken all across the continent by Olivier, these quotations come from both world-renowned Latin American writers (including Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes) and traditional Indian spiritual teachings, demonstrating the subtle interweaving of ancestral belief and contemporary thought in one of the world’s most intellectually fertile regions. Like their previous explorations of Buddhist, Indian, and African wisdom, this new volume will surprise, enlighten, and nourish the soul. Danielle and Olivier Föllmi are the authors of 14 books, including Offerings, Wisdom, and Origins in the bestselling 365 series. They are the founders of HOPE, an association dedicated to education in the Himalayas and divide their time between the Alps and travels around the world.

Brian Vanden Brink's photographs of a decaying America provoke both melancholy and wonder. This is a thoughtful book that is worth keeping at hand for those times when one feels a need for introspection. Each of us likes to think that we are unique with eternal visions of our lives, but in fact our place in this world is only temporary - doomed to a certain deadly end. But men and women tend to leave monuments behind, and Vanden Brink has captured those relics with his camera -- before the relics, too, turn to dust. Vanden Brink is a professional architectural photographer whose career has focused on contemporary architectural design. As he traveled around the country on assignment for such magazines as Architectural Digest, the New York Times Magazine and Down East Magazine in Maine, however, Vanden Brink's artistic eye fell on old wrecks of homes, churches, stores, factories and bridges that were all but falling down. Fortunately, he took the time to photograph his discoveries. Vanden Brink is following a grand tradition in modern photography. The pioneer in this genre, of course, was Eugene Atget who focused on ancien France with his 19th century photographs of ghostly structures. Andre Kertesz was also a well know chronicler of fading architecture, as was Maine native Berenice Abbott. More recently, William Christenberry captured the essence of the old south with his penetrating photographs of crumbling buildings overgrown by vines and trees.