Posted May 01, 2012 in Member News
The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond
Edited by: Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson, Shamoon Zamir
IB Tauris (2012) Hardback ISBN: 9781848856158 Paperback ISBN: 9781848856165
The photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on
the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the
publication of Henry Fox Talbot¹s The Pencil of Nature heralded a new genre
in the history of the book, one in which the photograph was the primary
vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal if sometimes
conflicted partnership with the written word. In this book, practicing
photographers and writers from different fields of scholarship share a range
of new approaches to reading the photobook, developing fresh ways of
understanding how meaning is shaped by an image¹s interaction with its text
and context and engaging with the visual, tactile and interactive experience
of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual
works, from the Victorian aestheticism and indulgent production of Talbot¹s
literary-inspired images to the fragile, disposable yet paradoxically
enduring creations of Ruscha, the photobook in all its manifestations from
fetishised objet d¹art to cheaply-printed booklet is explored and its
unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.
International in scope and encompassing the history of the photobook until
the present day, The Photobook demonstrates a variety of critical approaches
accessible to academic scholars, the art world and the general reader alike.
Contributors
Graham Smith - H. Fox Talbot¹s Scotch Views¹ for Sun Pictures in Scotland
(1845)
Shamoon Zamir - Art-Science¹: The North American Indian (190730) as
Photobook
Mick Gidley - Emil Otto Hoppé, Autobiography, and Cultural Moments
David Campany - Recalcitrant Intervention: Walker Evans¹s Pages
Patrizia Di Bello - Sculpture, Photograph, Book: The Sculptures of Picasso
(1949) 91
Ian Walker - A Kind of a Huh?: The Siting of Twentysix Gasoline Stations
(1962)
Liz Wells - Beyond the Exhibition from Catalogue to Photobook
Annebella Pollen The book the nation is waiting for¹: One Day for Life
(1987)
David Evans - A Spectre is Leaving Europe (1990): Appropriation in a
Post-Communist Photobook
Colette Wilson - The Photobook as Object of Memory and Nostalgia: Alexandrie
l¹Égyptienne by Carlos Freire and Robert Solé (1998)
Paul Melo e Castro - The Eye of the Lens and the Feet of the Photographer:
Eduardo Gageiro¹s Lisboa no Cais da Memória (2003)
Gabriel Koureas - Orhan Pamuk¹s Melancholic Narrative and Fragmented
Photographic Framing Istanbul: Memories of a City (2005)
