The photobook world : artists' books and forgotten social objects / edited by Paul Edwards.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Edwards, Paul, 1966- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artists' books--History.

Artists' books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 195 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2023.

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Paul Edwards is Associate Professor of English at Université Paris Cité and Research Associate at the Maison Française, Oxford.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 27 Feb 2026).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Edwards, Paul Ernest Michael (editor). The Photobook World

ISBN:

9781526175496

1526175495

9781526167583

1526167581

OCLC:

1370923302