The photobook world: Artists' books and forgotten social objects

By Manchester University Press

This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the ‘photobook’. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographer’s book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. Focusing on North American, British and French photobooks from 1920 to the present, the chapters revisit canonical works – by Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas and Roland Penrose – while also delving into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, DIY communities and the poetic impulse. They throw new light on the way that gendered, racial or colonial assumptions are resisted. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a better understanding of how the meaning of a photobook is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526167569

Book preview

Introduction: the photobook as confluence

Paul Edwards

With the new millennium and the dominance of digital photography came an unprecedented interest in photography books. The ‘photobook’, as the phenomenon came to be called, became an art object, and its definition was tailored to suit a burgeoning collector’s market which placed the photographer at the vanguard of the enterprise: this was a sudden valorisation for photographers, but it misrepresents the history and dynamics of publishing. Resistance to the narrow, art-world definition grew in academic circles. Photo-historians expressed their bafflement at the exclusion of certain titles from the canons that were being drawn up in coffee-table books (mentioning omissions can quickly become a running gag at symposia). No overview, no history, however wide-ranging could possibly encompass the variety of interactions between photography and book history since the early 1840s (Shannon 2010). There remains a problem with the definition and use of the word ‘photobook’, which this volume seeks to address: not by distinguishing auteur photobooks from illustrated books, but by acknowledging the collective nature of all photography book projects.

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The phenomenon took off at the turn of the millennium. Photobooks have been showcased in photography art fairs, there have been major exhibitions in European capitals, and coffee-table books have been devoted to the comparatively unknown history of the photobook. While we can document this growing appeal, we must also acknowledge that the effervescence has not resulted in enthusiastic sales figures. This apparent paradox has been noted by American novelist Teju Cole, who contrasts the limited distribution of photobooks with the plethora of single images in the media and online: ‘In the world of deafening images, the quiet consolations of photobooks doom them to a small, and sometimes tiny, audience. They are expensive to make and rarely recoup their costs. In this way, they are a quixotic affront to the calculations of the market. The evidence of a few bestsellers notwithstanding, the most common fate of photobooks is oblivion’ (Cole 2020). Likewise, an academic survey of the photobook market concludes pragmatically that the photobook will remain the object of a niche market, and that financial sustainability is only possible with direct-to-consumer sales and proactive consumers, since, for publishers, ‘[o]utsourcing to external distributors is not economically viable’ (Jones 2016: 69). Tiffany Jones, a photobook publisher and photographer, and Cole, a successful photobook author and photographer, share a conception of the photobook that derives from art market practices as well as from their image-making perspective. Their pronouncements sound general, but were clearly not intended to comment upon the wider market of photographically illustrated books, textbooks, guidebooks, and so on, which have protean social uses beyond ‘quiet consolations’. The photobook is not always conceived as an artistic endeavour – on the contrary, it has multiple forms, and showing this diversity is central to this volume.

Cole’s use of the adjective ‘quixotic’ is symptomatic. Of course his passing reference to the would-be knight-errant of Cervantes’ tragi-comic novel simply means that it would be mad to think of conquering the market with one’s poetic contributions, but – perhaps unintentionally – he leaves us with the image of the photographer tilting against the windmills of fortune in a solitary chivalric quest. The point about the unreliability of sales is taken, but it is a fiction to suppose that photobooks are the products of isolated individuals. It is precisely against what might be called the ‘Don Quixote myth’ of individual initiative that this book takes a stand, and by doing so we hope to show the collective nature of cultural production. Consequently, this volume brings together case studies and theoretical reflections that consider the photobook as a category beyond the photographer-privileging, capitalism-defined art object. Instead, it views photobooks as always collectively produced, inseparable from the reader and the context of production, and as outputs of collectives, collaborations, communities and institutions.

Focusing on the collective nature of cultural production means putting to one side the search for iconic individuals, and breaking free from the art-history narrative. One of Britain’s foremost champions of group work was photographer and activist Jo Spence, for whom the question of ‘art’ was a means, when not a hindrance or an irrelevance, as she indicated to audiences while her Review of Work exhibition was touring: ‘I have a lot of problems around the word artist’, she concluded (Spence 1986: 204). But she also acknowledged – in a tone of regret that may appear surprising – a certain incompatibility between the anonymity of group work and the desire for an individual artistic career: ‘collective work […] is the quickest way I know to become invisible and not appear within histories of your own subject’ (Spence 1986: 206). She is certainly correct as regards her own collaborative project, the Hackney Flashers, in that many of the members were never to become as well-known as the collective. But it is also true to say that none of them had a career as an artist, nor do they appear to have sought one. The work of both Spence and the Hackney Flashers was primarily pedagogical, political and feminist: the ‘art’ question fudges the issue.

The corollary of what Spence mentioned about individual invisibility is that for one name to shine, other names must remain obscure, because the market (galleries, dealers, auctioneers, experts) favours the notion of creative genius and is quick to pass over the dialogue and cooperation that attends creation. To give the simplest example of unequal collaboration: Sebastião Salgado and Henri Cartier-Bresson have become ‘names’, but the identity of their darkroom printers are known only to specialists, despite the decisive input of their creative decisions. Cultural objects are, however, best understood as embedded in a team of producers and readers, a cloud of influencers and a forcefield of political dynamics. Collective photography projects are often politically committed, which is why the chapters in this book look at feminism, race and marginalisation; they uncover forgotten social objects, and how personal histories are bound to broader historical movements.

One section of this book, for example, is devoted to various forms of second-wave feminism in the USA. It looks at women working from the margins who established alternative practices: setting up collaborative networks of production and distribution for photobooks that forefronted their subjectivities as wives and mothers, while showing that the constraints and heroics of homemaking and homely labours could be legitimate subjects for art; appropriating archival images for autobiographical purposes; acquiring documentary archives both to correct the art-centred canonical histories of photography and to flesh out the social history of American life; making learn-to-read books to criticise racial assumptions. Several chapters in this book deal with race, and provide critical insights for reading photography as a form of resistance to – or complicity with – institutions or government actions, be they Britain’s colonial past, the Jim Crow South in the United States (between the 1870s and 1960s, an era in which former Confederate states legalised racial segregation), or Brazil’s capitalist drive to ‘civilise’ the Amazonian rainforest and its peoples in the 1970s, during the military dictatorship.

But before engaging with the different contributions in this volume, the general points outlined so far must be substantiated. This introduction aims to clarify two points: first, the interconnectedness between the narrow definition of the photobook and the art market; second, the relation of the wide definition of the photobook to multiple authorship. Accordingly, the first part of this introduction, headed ‘Defining the photobook’, looks at how the word has become a manifesto, founded upon a rhetoric of individual vision, substantiated by anthologies, but whose boundaries are everywhere questioned by collective participation. The second part, ‘The photobook art world’, examines the collective nature of photobook production, the plurality of actors, and the particular case of its dedicated art market. The third part, ‘Diversity and confluence’, addresses the tension between those who define the photobook as an art-based object, and those who see it as an object with a social dimension, and thus a much more diverse object, representing a confluence of interests. The fourth part, ‘Exploring upstream’, introduces the chapters in this volume, showing how they contribute to the general argument of the book.

Defining the photobook

Controversies have arisen concerning the use of the word, and what exactly it refers to, but one thing is sure: forging the neologism was an exercise in valorisation. The Flemish word fotoboek appeared at least as early as 1969, when it became the keyword of a manifesto to grant artistic status to the mechanically reproduced photography book (Prins 1969). Its definition was translated into English thus: ‘A photobook is an autonomous work of art, comparable with a painting, sculpture, theatre performance or film. The photos lose their individual "an sich" [in itself] photographic character and become components translated into printing ink of a dramatic event known as a book.’ For Mattie Boom, writing in 1989 about Dutch documentary photobooks, the term means ‘an independent art form in which the presence of the photographer as author is essential’ (Suermondt 1989: 5). This rallying cry was taken up by Rik Suermondt (1989: 12), Gerry Badger and Martin Parr (2004: 7), Frits Gierstberg (Suermondt and Gierstberg 2012: 8), and countless others. There was an exponential rise in the employment of the neologism in the first years of the millennium (Neves 2017: 18–19). This is the contested meaning, at least among academics (Shannon 2010), since it effectively cordons off illustrated books that are text-heavy, literary, pedagogical, institutional, anonymous, collective, digital, left unfinished in archives, or that otherwise resist being appropriated as ‘art’. It is nevertheless the art history, photographer-as-auteur approach that has given the word ‘photobook’ its twenty-first-century tweak.

The definition of the photobook as a photographer’s book is now associated with Martin Parr, perhaps because of his celebrity status (prolific Magnum photographer and TV documentary film maker). Though the academic community may take issue with the theoretical framework, there is no doubt that he has had a galvanising effect on photographers, both amateur and professional. Since the publication of The Photobook: A History (Badger and Parr 2004), the Badger-and-Parr definition of the photobook is constantly quoted as if it were self-evident (it is only self-evident with respect to the art world). By ‘photobook’, they mean (I summarise) an autonomous work, in the shape of a book, in which photography plays a structural role; it is the work of an auteur, in the cinematic sense, an author-photographer who ‘directs’ the visual narrative. This means that the page layout contributes to the meaning, as does everything that relates to its material aspect. It can also be the work of an editor, so long as photography plays the primary role. This criterion of primacy is a means of dissociating the work of the photographer from ‘related crafts and commercial enterprises’ in order for the photobook to aspire to the status of art (Becker 2008: 339). The photography is enhanced by the publishing team, but their work remains largely anonymous. Darkroom printers, photogravure printers, and graphic designers often remain uncredited, despite their key role in some of the most famous photobooks. Likewise, the art-world superstructure is hidden from view when the focus of attention is on the creative impetus of the photographer. As Laureline Meizel has argued, it is a ‘corporatist’ definition (Meizel 2017).

Defining the photobook has to a large extent been achieved indirectly, by providing lists of examples, often with the collector’s market in mind. As with historically researched sales catalogues, publishing a photobook survey is a way of increasing the speculative value of a personal collection of rare books – especially as such overviews anthologise page layouts rather than texts, showing the books lying open as material objects, like samples for appraisal. The resultant hike in prices on the secondary market was noted with satisfaction in the 2014 introduction to Volume III of The Photobook: A History (2014). It was also noted with no voice of concern for the democracy of access to works considered of particular cultural importance – which gives an unfortunate false impression, given the fact that in the same year Martin Parr secured long-term aid for researchers and other interested parties through his foundation, its library and archive, and in 2017 through the sale of his collection to Tate Modern. The History was lauded by Fred Ritchin in his introduction to Magnum Photobook, and, like many, he attributes to Parr and Badger the greatest impact ‘in the perception of the photobook […] with a resulting increase in the prestige of the photobook as well as the prices of many limited-edition and hard-to-fine volumes’ (Ritchin 2016: 16). One may gloss: ‘the perception of the photobook as a work of art’, for this is the novelty with respect to, say, thirty years ago. Reading the entries to the books on photobooks may indeed feel like reading a catalogue entry at a prestigious auction, where anecdotes and adjectives are chosen to arrest and seduce, and all that is missing is the price, acting as the ultimate seal of approval. Logically, the art-world ‘photobook’ excludes that which is not ‘collectible’.

Anthologists have constructed a history of what they present as a hitherto-neglected art form. Significantly, these anthologies are packaged as a coffee-table books, that is to say signs of conspicuous consumption and an indicator of taste, refinement and culture (Becker 2008: 337). This bolsters the claim that the photobook is a stand-alone work of art, but such a claim is a narrow definition of photobooks and depends on inclusions and exclusions: inclusions that federate approval by appealing to already established criteria of art, such as the reputations of blue-chip photographers who also produced books; and exclusions, such as books that are more obviously dependent on actors who are not photographers, for example architects, teachers, novelists or editors, as was the case with the Time-Life books of the 1960s, when the editor provided shooting scripts for the photographers.

A further problem with the narrow stand-alone definition of the photobook is that it removes books from the publishing history of the photographs which, frequently, were also newspaper or magazine images before they were collected in a book. Not infrequently, photographs are used to tell very different stories from one printed source to another: the readership is not the same, and in many cases the text is not written by the same parties. This is why we can talk about the ‘life’ or ‘biography’ of a photograph. The pictures in Amazônia (discussed in Chapter 10), are a case in point, as are those in Leonard Freed’s Police Work which, notoriously, had been published in the Sunday Times to accompany a toxic discourse over which the photographer had no control. Books dialogue with their previous incarnations. A book is not closed within its covers to the outside world like a jewel in a vault, or a rock in a stream. It is, perhaps (following Heraclitus), more like the river itself, never the same twice.

Those who draw up canons rarely include the photographically illustrated novel (apart from an-exception-that-proves-the-rule), and illustrated poetry is more frequently anthologised than literary prose, perhaps because the image/text ratio is more favourable to the image. To some, the ‘literary photobook’ is a contradiction in terms, since the art world requires that photography take precedence over text. The non-negotiable premise is that the true photograph is not an ‘illustration’, in the traditional sense of the word, and cannot be subservient to the text. Contrary to this, we argue in this book that the term ‘photobook’ be applied to any photographically illustrated book.

First, because the term ‘illustration’ can be used as a neutral word. The term ‘illustration’ was certainly held at arm’s length by painters who provided drawings for editions of poetry, but the term was not problematic for ‘art’ photographers in the nineteenth century. Julia Margaret Cameron uses it in the very title of her Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and her opinion of photography was of the highest order, spiritual, even. The word ‘illustration’ only starts to be avoided by photographers – by self-styled art-photographers – some time after the First World War, and certainly by the time of the Surrealists in the 1930s: this can be seen by looking at the choice of words employed on covers and title pages when announcing the visual component of the book. It is of course necessary to note how the term is used by others, but for the purposes of criticism, I advocate the use of the word ‘illustration’ as a neutral word, without connotations of subservience, unless qualified by an adjective. Second, because using the word ‘photobook’ in the most general sense, as an umbrella term, is a way of rejecting the commercially interested boundaries of the art-world definition, that is to say the ‘photobook’ as a marketing term for today’s photographers. We adopt the term in order to modify its meaning. Employing the term indicates that the history of the book enters a new era with the advent of photography. This was clearly the excitement behind W. H. Fox Talbot’s experiment in publishing entitled The Pencil of Nature (1844–46).

It should be noted too that not all writers associated with theorising the photobook have adopted the exact perspective of the auteur definition. Some admit into the category books that are neither photographer-driven nor motivated by artistic pretentions. A section of the 2017 Photobook Phenomenon exhibition was organised by Erik Kessels, who chose what I would like to call ‘found photobooks’, or, in his words, ‘books or manuals profusely illustrated with useful photography with the sole purpose of explanation by visualisation’, and which were classed as medical, instructional, scientific, humorous, and so on (Neumüller 2017). Significantly, he writes ‘photo books’ as two words rather than one, as if to escape certain preconceived ideas and associations.

The art-world definition would be better qualified as ‘the photographer’s book’. This complements the term invented by Nicolas Malais to describe the bibliophilic book that is orchestrated by the writer – in which, for example, the novelist or poet controls the typography and ornamentation, the cover and the materials, and themselves commission or work in close collaboration with the illustrator. Malais calls this ‘le livre d’écrivain’, so as to distinguish it from ‘le livre d’artiste’ or ‘artist’s book’. So the art-world definition is ‘le livre de photographe’. This concept is certainly interesting, and has indeed been in vogue among dealers in France since before 2000. But it is also a smokescreen: the photographer as auteur distracts from collective meaning. And it is this collective history of the photobook that has been the focus of this book.

I take as a principle that the ‘photographer’s view of their medium’ is not where meaning begins and ends (Badger and Parr 2004: 10–11). Attributing authorship to photographers is to confer authority to them, at the expense of everything else that creates meaning. In brief, this stance rejects the notion that art and the meaning of art is created through social relations and the reader (Barthes 1967). We prefer to follow sociologist Howard S. Becker, whose guiding principle when researching Art Worlds was that art is collective, that the work of art is created by the art world. This effectively prevents the mythification of the photographer-artist-auteur and their supposedly all-guiding eye. It also grants more respect to the ‘support personnel’ involved in making photobooks – printers, graphic designers (digital) retouchers, editors, and so on – whose input cannot be acknowledged in passing simply to be glossed over in favour of the photographer. Becker points out that the very term ‘support personnel’ is ‘unfeeling’, though it is an accurate reflection of how they are considered in the art world (Becker 2008: 97). All through the process of making a photobook, creativity, knowledge of conventions, judgement and experience are brought on board by everybody involved. Becker describes this process of making art as a series of ‘editorial moments’ (Becker 2008: 198). And with more subtlety still, he insists upon the importance of art-world participants who do not collaborate explicitly with these editorial moments, by positing that they enter ‘into the internal dialogue which precedes and accompanies these choices’ (Becker 2008: 210). From this, it is easy to understand that a photographer will have some idea of how their photobook will be received, and that creative/editorial choices are made for the benefit of an internalised audience. To study photobooks is also to study their audiences (Walker 2012). The photographer-author is part of a whole, but that whole, that art world, is in flux, and because audiences change, ‘works of art have no stable existence but are continually changing’ (Becker 2008: xxi). The photobook is not a still point at the centre of a maelstrom, it is moving and drawing people in, and the society of editors and readers make up its history and meaning.

The photobook art world

Since the turn of the millennium the production and visibility of photobooks has increased spectacularly (Jones 2016; Neves 2017). It has often been remarked upon, and is just as often ascribed, at least in part, to the advent of digital photography, though I have encountered no scholarship that substantiates this claim. Two hypotheses may nevertheless be put forward to understand the appeal of the causal link: the nostalgia hypothesis – routinely evoked as much in books as in conversation – and the simplicity hypothesis. Both have the status of personal observations deduced from lived experience (and I am no exception to the rule). The nostalgia theorem posits that a new technology creates renewed (nostalgic) interest for what it is feared may become obsolete. Here, this refers to silver-based photography and images on paper rather than on screens.

To give some examples of nostalgia: there was a wave of enthusiasm for analogue photography that led to the rise of the Lomography company and the return of the Lubitel camera; new instant-films were manufactured after the bankruptcy of the Polaroid Corporation in 2001; The Photographers’ Gallery in London stocked a wide range of boutique 35 mm films proposing colour casts and other chemical special effects; my NYU students all started coming into class with the most obscure old cameras, preferably with mechanical shutters (the Topcon was a hit); while socks, badges and T-shirts were manufactured bearing the outlines of a twin-lens reflex camera, an old Leica, a Practika, or a generic, knobby SLR (and not just for sale in photo-museums). Generally speaking, niche markets were created for people who had the wealth and leisure to combine photography with fashion statements. While these were minor phenomena, economically speaking, they were very visible to those working in academia, and seemed to indicate a widespread renewal of interest in pre-digital photography. More importantly, the Analogue Man posture also became a way for any photographer to distinguish their production from supposedly standardised digital offerings, identified with the mainstream.

Though nostalgia, properly speaking, may play a motivating role for older photographers, the term ‘nostalgia’ and the manifestation of interest for the haptic are self-valorising: they draw attention away from what I would propose as a more serious motivation, namely the assertion of inherited cultural capital. The analogue critic can lay claim to a cultural heritage of bibliophilic connoisseurship, an intellectualised haptic sensibility, and 150 years of photo-history and optico-chemical photo-technology, all of which distinguishes them from the fledgling, digital generation. It is therefore to be expected that critics will attribute the(ir) renewed interest in the physical book to the coming of the digital age. Also, the ‘material turn’ in the humanities inevitably pushed academics to contrast analogue and digital in haptic terms, and rather than ushering in a flurry of academic publications on digital photobooks, there has been a renewed interest in ‘classic’ photobooks that could be described in a bibliophilic way. Quantitively, critics have been looking at paper books rather than screen books since the advent of digital photography. The increased visibility of the photobook is of course aided by the increased number of studies devoted to the photobook, whether academic or of the coffee-table variety. Yet the increased production of photobooks is, I believe, not so much due to any nostalgia for analogue processes or a renewed enthusiasm for the haptic (self-valorising though it may be to say so), but because photography has entered a new era of push-button simplicity.

Since the turn of the millennium, new technologies have made image-capture, retouching, printing and bookmaking easier for both amateurs and professionals (Cablat 2019). Photobooks are now made by amateur photographers (e.g. students, tourists, wedding guests), because the technology enabling capture, enhancement and online layout is child’s play to manipulate for all but the most technophobic, and the cost is about the same as ordering a set of thirty-six prints. Furthermore, this simplicity, coupled with the Internet, has also resulted in a proliferation of amateur stock photographs, including eyewitness photographs of current events, which in turn has led to image banks and press agencies closing shop, while newspaper photographers have been laid off. In the case of photojournalists, producing books answers a need. They have been obliged to find other spaces to show their picture-stories, such as galleries and books, because the economic model