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THE BEST TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS OF 2022

Yevhen Samuchenko has won numerous international awards for his photography, but none of his projects has been quite like his new book. The Beauty of Ukraine, with text by Lucia Bondar (teNeues, £39.95), was envisaged as a tribute to the landscapes of his homeland. It has also become a testament to the determination of his publishing team in Kyiv, CP, who had to flee their office after the Russian invasion but, with the support of teNeues, continued work on the book.

Here – seen mainly from the air – are pink salt lakes, their shapes and patterns reminiscent of the art of Kandinsky or O’Keeffe; the waterfalls and canyons of the Carpathian Mountains; and the beaches of the Black Sea. Many of the places featured have since been severely damaged by bombing and shelling. An image of a woman walking through a field of purple blossom, heavy clouds building above her, has a prescient title: “Before the Storm”.

Travel features strongly in a superlative collection from the Sony World Photography Awards: 2022 (World Photography Organisation, £38.99) embracing everything from sport, via landscape, to still life. There’s a tribute, with an essay by the historian Simon Schama, to the Canadian Edward Burtynsky, who won an “outstanding contribution to photography” award. Through the terrible beauty of his images of waste and wreckage, Schama says, Burtynsky “calls on us to repair our only earthly home”. There are portfolios on migrants from Latin America, who had to scale fences to get into the United States, and on football fans in Prague, who set ladders against their club’s wall when Covid forced the team to play to an empty stadium.

Perch that seem to be swimming in a soft turquoise sky rather than water – in pink clouds of an algal bloom that is probably caused by global warming; a giraffe hiding in a national park – seen from a train that will rattle overhead on a newly built railway: Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Portfolio 32 (Natural History Museum, £25), the latest showcase for a competition that began in 1965, combines wonders with warnings. The foreword, by the conservationist Chris Packham, is blunt. Most of the natural world, he argues, “is no longer beautiful. It’s very ugly. And we need to see that… we need to look at it – long and hard.”

My favourite image in Landscape Photographer of the Year: Collection 15 (Ilex, £35) is a glorious one of

Chrome Hill in the Peak District, including not only a rainbow but raking light along the Dragon’s Back. The photographer, Demi Oral, couldn’t believe how things had fallen into place. Jon Brook tells how he had a similar break on a sunshine-and-showers day while trying to capture a steam train on the Glenfinnan Viaduct. “I was lucky,” he says. “Sometimes, the more you plan, the luckier you get.”

Portrait of Humanity Vol 4 (Hoxton Mini Press, £25) is the fruit of a competition designed “to celebrate that which unites us in a time of division”. Those brought together in its pages include a fur-clad young eagle huntress and her bird in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, and a suited teacher in New York’s Central Park, marking Latin papers while coaching an athletics team. Both look perfectly at home. Then there are the Syrian toddler and her baby sisters, twins born in a refugee camp in Iraq, and the two activists from the Waorani tribe in the Ecuadorian rainforest, who flew to Glasgow with their baby – their first time on a plane – to call for action on climate at Cop26.

TRAVEL BOOKS

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2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

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Daily Telegraph