The photobook world: artists' books and forgotten social objects

Abstract

This volume challenges the art-market definition of the photobook as a photographer's book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. The chapters revisit canonical works and delve into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, collectives and the poetic impulse.

Contents

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 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 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