Between the Novel and the Film
MARY MACPHERSON
The word ‘photobook’ clicks together like a well-designed jigsaw piece, but speak it out loud to an unsuspecting person and I often feel there is a pause where I am expected to add something—books by photographers, books that tell their story through photographs? Both are inadequate descriptions so lately I have tried to steel myself to ride the pause.
For photographers, photobook is a word full of promise, conjuring a long history of publications. It means a book that dwells between novel and film, where you are telling a narrative, digging into a theme or maybe challenging the way photography or the book medium work. Photobooks travel the globe and they are where much of the history of photography resides and where many photographers discover their influences and passions.
At its best a photobook is a place where the sequence of images, design, paper stock and even binding combine to lift the work into an intensely imagined world.
UK writer, curator and artist David Campany says in a 2014 essay that the term photobook is relatively recent. Despite the value of photographs and books of photographs, he theorises that it was only after television, video and the internet started to replace printed matter, that the photobook could come under close critical scrutiny. Campany is equivocal about the term photobook, noting ‘it has been welcomed and taken up in order to impose some kind of unity where there simply was none and perhaps there should be ’ none .
