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.
Author(s): Paul Ernest Michael Edwards (editor)
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 216
Front Matter
Contents
List of plates
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the photobook as confluence
Part I: The photobook market
Towards an understanding of the market for photobooks
Theorising encounters with contemporary photobooks: situation, materiality and plurality
Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90
Wonder Woman and other fantasies: Joan Lyons and the photo-based artists’ book
Mothers of invention: Barbara Norfleet, Elsa Dorfman, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas
Part III: Commitment and visibility
Missing photobooks: a symptomatic reading on the reasons for and impact of the lack of publications by Black British photographers in the 1970s and 1980s
The photobook as event
Camden, NJ, 2013: a digital photobook
Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine
Photographing race and madness: annual reports of psychiatric hospitals in the US South in the early twentieth century
Photobooks and the architectural imagination of California
Experimental confluence: Amazônia by Claudia Andujar and George Love
Dead time: the ‘collectivist’ photobook in the prison work of Mohamed Bourouissa
Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral
The Road is Wider Than Long: a Surrealist photobook
An unmade book: Walker Evans’s 1970s alphabet Polaroids
Select bibliography
Index
Plates
