Take a look inside our 200 Best Ad Photographers book which is out now

Michael Weinzettl invites you to take a look inside our 200 Best Ad Photographers book, which is out now.

Mark Laita for Abrams

The latest edition of our biennial “200 Best Ad Photographers series is out now and it’s really a stunner. With a circulation of 10,000, the volume weighs in as our biggest-ever special, running to an impressive 536 pages. It was distilled from more than 8,500 submissions received from some one thousand photographers around the world.

Former publisher of the now extinct French publication Profession Photographe, Anne-Rose Schlutbohm, has lent her expertise to all of our previous photography specials – all the way back to our first one 15 years ago. She joined me in the preselection and together we whittled the huge amount of submissions down to around 1,200, a suitable number we thought and one just short of driving our jurors bonkers.

Steve McCurry for Unesco

As for the photographers represented in the book, there happens to be quite a strong dominance from those based in the USA: 66 were selected with work produced within the past two years.

Germany-based photographers follow at some distance with a total of 28. Australian-based photographers took nine of the slots, with New Zealand and the Netherlands-based close behind – each having seven – while Canada and Switzerland boast photographers a piece. The latter tally includes the image on the cover by Juventino Mateo Leon, a Swiss-born Spanish national who lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

Daniel Hertz for Jaguar

Brazil and Spain are each represented with five photographers, and Austria Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy and Japan all notch up four. Argentina, Romania, and Singapore pitch in with three, while Finland, France, India, Poland, and South Africa pick up a brace. Nations featuring through just a single artist each include Chile, Ecuador, Moldavia, Nigeria, Sweden, Thailand, and the UAE.

Michel Jaussi for Carl Zeiss

Quite an international selection as you can see! What pleases me most about the photographers selected is that 84 of them have never appeared in any of our previous 200 Best specials. This, of course, means that the book is not just a collection of work by familiar, justifiably famous ad photographers - the kind of names that crop up in all the other publications on ad photography, but that almost a third of the work is by fresh new talent waiting to be discovered.

So go ahead, do some discovering!