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- Author: Paul Edwards x
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This volume proposes that the photobook is best understood as a collective endeavour, a confluence of individuals, interests and events. By looking beyond canons and artistic definitions, by factoring in the public and by paying closer attention to the texts and the contexts, the aim of this book is to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the ‘photobook’. While the market is geared today for photographer-driven books, and is buoyed by the theoretical framework proposed by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, this book casts a wider net, and pays particular attention to anonymous photographers, institutional publications, digital opportunities, unrealised projects, illegal practices, collectives, poets, and the reader. The chapters uncover forgotten social objects, and show how personal histories are bound to broader historical movements. Certain chapters deliberately engage with canonical authors (Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Roland Penrose, the Visual Studies Workshop, for example) to reveal the origination contexts and the ‘biographies’ of the photographs. Together, the chapters examine the North American, British or French photobook from 1900 to the present. The chapters address the ecosystem of the photobook art market; commitment and explicit political engagement; memory and the writing of history; materiality and how material form affects circulation. The contributors are specialists in the history of photography, book studies and visual studies, researchers in sociology, US history, anthropology, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, feminism, architecture and comparative literature, and there are contributions from practising photographers and curators.
The introduction takes a vigorous stand against the dominant but narrow, art market definition of the photobook. It reviews the growth of the photobook market and the popularity of the word ‘photobook’, currently associated with photographer-driven, collectible, photographer’s books, and proposes instead to follow Howard Becker’s theoretical model of the ‘art world’. This shifts the focus away from the singular auteur and onto the collective nature of cultural production. The introduction argues that the photobook – whether art object or not – is a social object, and should be seen as the output of collectives, communities, networks or institutions. This perspective makes it possible to widen the definition, while still respecting the specificity that the photographic medium brings. The word ‘photobook’ is used in this volume as an umbrella term, embracing all photographically illustrated books and, most importantly, their texts. The introduction then explains how the individual chapters (which look both inside and outside the canon of anthologised photobooks) examine various notions of collective production, collective meaning and collective history. The case histories describe the fascinating origination contexts and processes, and so reveal the confluence of interests involved when photography is used as a mode of resistance to colonial exploitation and racial discrimination, or as a means to give visibility to feminist issues or vernacular culture.