The photobook world: Artists' books and forgotten social objects 1526167573, 9781526167576

Citation preview

The photobook world

The photobook world Artists’ books and forgotten social objects EDITED BY PAUL EDWARDS

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 6757 6  hardback First published 2023 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Photobook section of Paris Photo 2017. Copyright © Paul Edwards.

Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

Contents

List of plates page vii List of figuresx List of contributorsxiii Acknowledgementsxviii Introduction: the photobook as confluence – Paul Edwards

1

Part I: The photobook market   1 Towards an understanding of the market for photobooks – Moritz Neumüller27   2 Theorising encounters with contemporary photobooks: situation, materiality and plurality – Briony Anne Carlin

35

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90   3 Wonder Woman and other fantasies: Joan Lyons and the photo-based artists’ book – Jessica S. McDonald

47

  4 Mothers of invention: Barbara Norfleet, Elsa Dorfman, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas – Mary Panzer

59

Part III: Commitment and visibility   5 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 – Taous R. Dahmani

73

  6 The photobook as event – Jessie Bond

85

 7 Camden, NJ, 2013: a digital photobook – Nicolas Baudouin

95

vi

Contents

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine   8 Photographing race and madness: annual reports of psychiatric hospitals in the US South in the early twentieth century – Élodie Edwards-Grossi101   9 Photobooks and the architectural imagination of California – Volker M. Welter

116

10 Experimental confluence: Amazônia by Claudia Andujar and George Love – Vitor Marcelino

130

11 Dead time: the ‘collectivist’ photobook in the prison work of Mohamed Bourouissa – Andy Stafford 147 Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral 12 The Road is Wider Than Long: a Surrealist photobook – Antony Penrose161 13 An unmade book: Walker Evans’s 1970s alphabet Polaroids – Caroline Blinder

173

Select bibliography184 Index191

Plates

  1 National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo by Briony Carlin.   2 Joan Lyons. Artifacts. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1973. © Joan Lyons.   3 Joan Lyons. Bride Book Red to Green. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1975. © Joan Lyons.   4 Joan Lyons. Bride Book Red to Green. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1975. © Joan Lyons.   5 Joan Lyons. Prom: A Six-Sheet Offset Lithograph. Toronto, ON: Coach House Press, 1975. Portfolio of six, four-colour offset lithographs. 23 × 17 in. Edition of 24. © Joan Lyons.   6 Joan Lyons. Abby Rogers to Her Grand-daughter. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1976. © Joan Lyons.   7 Barbara Norfleet. The Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life. Boston: David R. Godine, 1979, front cover. Reproduced by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., www.godine.com. Photo © Harvard Art Museums.   8 Elsa Dorfman. Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974, front cover. © Elsa Dorfman.   9 Clarissa Sligh. What’s Happening with Momma. Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1988. © Clarissa Sligh. 10 Clarissa Sligh. Reading Dick and Jane with Me. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1989. © Clarissa Sligh. 11 George Love. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love. Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p. 12 George Love. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love. Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p. 13 Claudia Andujar. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love. Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p. © Claudia Andujar.

viii

List of plates

14 Claudia Andujar. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love. Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p. © Claudia Andujar. 15 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 33–34. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 16 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 11–12. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 17 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 5–6. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 18 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 7–8. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 19 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 9–10. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 20 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 39–40. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 21 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 41–42. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 22 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 23 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Corrections to the Arts Council edition. Roland Penrose 1980. (Coll. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Roland Penrose Archive.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 24 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003. (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 25 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003. (Coll. The Penrose Collection) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 26 Roland Penrose. Le Paradis des Alouettes, mixed media, 1936. (Private Coll.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.



List of plates

27 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1939. Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 28 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1980. Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 29 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003. Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 30 Walker Evans. ‘New Haven’, Polaroid, 11 November 1974. The Walker Evans Archive/Metropolitan Museum of Art (1994.245.36). 2022 © Photo Scala, Florence. 31 Walker Evans. Untitled Polaroid, 1973–74. Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994 (1994.245.135). © The Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo © 2022 Scala, Florence. 32 Walker Evans. Untitled Polaroid, 1974. © The Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1994.245.32). Photo © 2022 Scala, Florence.

ix

Figures

3.1 Joan Lyons. Self Impressions. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1972. © Joan Lyons. page 51 3.2 Joan Lyons. Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974. © Joan Lyons. 53 3.3 Joan Lyons. Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974. © Joan Lyons. 54 3.4 Joan Lyons. Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974. © Joan Lyons. 55 4.1 Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, front cover. © Susan Meiselas. 64 4.2 Bea Nettles. Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook. 2nd edition. Rochester, NY: Inky Press Productions, 1977, front cover. © Bea Nettles. 67 7.1 Camden, NJ, 2013. Screenshot from Google Street View, taken by Nicolas Baudouin. © 2009 Google. 96 7.2 Camden, NJ, 2013. Screenshot from Google Street View, taken by Nicolas Baudouin. © 2009 Google. 96 8.1 Anon. ‘Group of Employees’. State of Louisiana Thirty-first Biennial Report of the Board of Administrators of the East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson, Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period March 1st, 1930 to February 29, 1932: 50.104 8.2 Anon. ‘Group of Female Attendants’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1910. Baton Rouge: The New Advocate, Official Journal, 1910, plate inserted between pages 34 and 35. 104 8.3 Anon. ‘Wire Pens and Cribs, Before their Removal’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930: 32.106



List of figures

  8.4 Anon. ‘Individual Rooms being Converted into Dormitories’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930: 42. 107   8.5 Anon. ‘Mardi Gras Festival’. Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital, Pineville, To his Excellency, the Governor, Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1934: 9.108   8.6 Anon. ‘Male Occupational Therapy Department’. Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital, Pineville, To his Excellency, the Governor, Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1934: 22.109   8.7 Anon. ‘Diversional Occupation – Clearing a Hillside for a Corn-Field’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1916. St Francisville: The True Democrat, 1916, plate inserted between pages 48 and 49. 111   8.8 Anon. ‘Diversional Occupation – Patients Hoeing Cabbage’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1916. St Francisville: The True Democrat, 1916, plate inserted between pages 50 and 51. 112   9.1 Gerstle Mack and Thomas Gibson. Architectural Details of Southern Spain: One Hundred Measured Drawings One Hundred and Thirteen Photographs. New York: William Helburn Inc, 1928, plates 64 and 65.120   9.2 Guy Lowell. Smaller Italian Villas & Farmhouses. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 1916, reprinted 1922: 47–48. All photographs by Lowell except the lower left on the left page and the two bottom images on the right page which were photographed by Charles Z. Klauder and Herbert C. Wise. 123   9.3 Winsor Soule. Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings: Photographs and Drawings by Winsor Soule. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 1924: 30. 125   9.4 Winsor Soule. Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings: Photographs and Drawings by Winsor Soule. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 1924: 2. 126 12.1 Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. First draft of the original ms, 1938. (Coll. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Roland Penrose Archive.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk. 166

xi

xii

List of figures

12.2  London Bulletin (June 1939). (Coll. The Penrose Collection.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.170 12.3 Maritza (Maria Tănase) the famous folk singer recording with Hari Brauner, Bucharest University 1946. Photo by Lee Miller. (Coll. Lee Miller Archives.) Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.171

Contributors

Nicolas Baudouin is a Paris-based visual artist from Canada, having initially come to Paris to complete a master’s degree in Aesthetics (Philosophy of Art) at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. For the past fifteen or more years his research interests have focused on the recent mutations in photography and the rise of ‘post-photography’. He is exploring these new practices in the search for a new image that would have an intermediate quality between virtuality and reality. Nicolas Baudouin also teaches art at several American university programmes in Paris, such as NYU, Columbia and Stanford. Caroline Blinder is reader in American Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has written extensively on the intersections between photography and text, starting with Henry Miller’s work on Brassaï in her first book Henry Miller: A Self-Made Surrealist (1999) and, since then, in book chapters and articles on, among others, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Weegee, Robert Frank and, recently, Richard Misrach. She edited the first critical collection of critical chapters on Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous  Men in (2010) and her most recent monograph The American PhotoText 1930–1960 (2019) focuses on the intersections between text and  photography in the twentieth century. In 2020, she co-edited US Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes, for The Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press). Jessie Bond is a writer and PhD candidate at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where her doctoral research examines how the photobook is used by photojournalists to distribute images of conflict. She is  a  recipient of a 2019–20 Harry Ransom Dissertation Fellowship and writes  for  publications including The Art Newspaper, Calvert Journal and Photomonitor. Briony Anne Carlin lectures in Museum Studies at Newcastle University and Art History at the University of Sunderland. She was awarded her PhD in 2022 for her

xiv

List of contributors

thesis, entitled ‘Bindings, Boundaries and Cuts: Relating Agency and Ontology in Photobook Encounters’. The project addresses the affective materiality and social agency of photobooks. With a background in foreign languages and photography, her research interests include the interpretation and multi-sensory translation of meaning in artworks and how perception and response to images are altered by context. Briony previously held the role of Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, contributing to exhibitions including Into the Woods: Trees in Photography (November 2017–April 2018), the inaugural hang of the V&A Photography Centre (October 2018), and White Heat of British Industry: Photographs by Maurice Broomfield at FORMAT Festival (Derby Museums and Art Gallery, March–May 2019). Briony is currently developing her first monograph based on her doctoral research. Taous R. Dahmani is a PhD researcher in the History of Art Department at Paris  1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is writing a thesis in History of Photography under the supervision of Professor Michel Poivert, having taught the history of twentieth-century photography for three years. Since September 2019 she has been a fellow of the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO). Her thesis is entitled: ‘“Direct Action Photography”: a Typography of the Photographic Representation of Struggles and the Struggle for Photographic Representations (London, 1958–1989)’. In November 2018, she published an article entitled ‘Bharti Parmar’s True Stories: Against the Grain of Sir Benjamin Stone’s Photographic Collection’ in PhotoResearcher (No. 30). Her chapter entitled ‘Polareyes: a magazine by and for Black British women photographers as site of resistance in London, 1987’ is to be published in Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States in the Long 1980s (SUNY, 2022). She co-organised the symposium ‘Photography, With or Without Capitalism’, an event which took place at the National Institute of Art History (Paris). She is chief coordinator of the French Photographic Image Research Association (ARIP). Paul Edwards is associate professor at Université Paris Cité and research associate at the Maison Française, Oxford, having previously taught the history of photography at NYU Paris. His research interests are in Photobook Studies, Photoliterary Studies, Decadence and Punk. Publications include Disorder: Histoire sociale des mouvements punk et post-punk, Éditions Seteun, Paris, 2019 (co-editor); Perle noire. Le photobook littéraire, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2016; Soleil noir. Photographie et littérature. Des origines au surréalisme, PUR, Rennes, 2008; Je hais les photographes! Textes clés d’une polémique de l’image 1850–1916, Anabet, Paris, 2006; Collected Works of Alfred Jarry, Atlas Press, London, 2001, 2007. He curated ‘From Studio to Selfie’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2020 (in collaboration with Kathrin Yacavone) and ‘Early Literary Photobooks’, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, 2016.



List of contributors

Élodie Edwards-Grossi is an associate professor in Sociology and American Studies at IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine. From January 2015 to December 2016, she was a visiting graduate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the research centre EpiDaPo (UCLA-CNRS). In 2017–18, she received the Fulbright and Georges Lurcy fellowships to complete her dissertation at Tulane University and was affiliated to the department of History as a visiting research fellow. Her research focuses on the social history of race and psychiatry in the segregated South and the medicalisation of the Black body from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. Jessica S. McDonald is a curator, educator, writer and historian of photography. She has been chief curator of photography at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, since 2012. She previously held curatorial positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman Museum. In 2021 and 2022 she organised Collecting Conversations: Five Women in American Photography, a series of oral history interviews with artists Betty Hahn, Joanne Leonard, Joan Lyons, Bea Nettles and Susan Ressler. Recent exhibitions include Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance (2018) and Stories to Tell: Women in the Studio (2017). Recent publications include ‘Moments in a Real World’ in Nathan Lyons: In Pursuit of Magic (University of Texas Press, 2019), Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World (Aperture, 2016), and ‘A Sensational Story: Helmut Gernsheim and the “World’s First Photograph”’ in Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2015). She holds a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. Vitor Marcelino is a PhD candidate in the Inter-Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History at University of São Paulo, and a professor at the Faculdade SESI de Educação. He frequently participates in art history congresses, and has published articles in some renowned academic journals in Latin America. He has recently published ‘El Lissitzky e o uso da fotografia como linguagem universal’ (El Lissitzky and the use of photography as a universal language) in Revista Arte & Ensaios, and ‘A utopia do livro-monumento: contaminações entre fotografia, cinema, escrita e imprensa na vanguarda russa reverberadas na teoria benjaminiana’ (The utopia of the monument-book: contamination between photography, cinema, writing, and the press in the Russian avant-garde reverberated in the Benjaminian theory) in Revista ARS. Moritz Neumüller is a curator, educator and writer in the field of photography and new media, with a special interest in accessibility to the arts. He has worked for several international art institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, PhotoEspaña in Madrid and PhotoIreland in Dublin, and is currently Chief Curator of the Photobook Week Aarhus (Denmark). After editing The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture in 2018, he is now working on a sequel book called The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, with the help of fifty contributors from around

xv

xvi

List of contributors

the globe. Neumüller is a regular contributor to journals and magazines on photography and visual culture, and has been running an online resource for artists, called The Curator Ship, since 2010. Apart from his curatorial practice, Neumüller has been working for more than ten years at the forefront of making culture accessible for everybody, including those with disabilities. In 2009, he founded the project ArteConTacto, and in 2011, the initiative MuseumForAll.eu, with the mission to make museums open to all audiences. Mary Panzer is an award-winning historian of photography. In the 1990s, she served as Curator of Photographs for the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution. As co-author of Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955 (Aperture, 2005), she contributed to the first international history of magazine photography for the second half of the twentieth century. Her most recent work concerns photography for the printed page, made in the middle decades of the twentieth century, editorial and advertising images alike. Her publications include: ‘“A Remarkable Package of Photographs for [a] Dime”: How Life Became Life’, in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, ed. Katherine Bussard and Kristen Gresh (Yale University Press, 2020); Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Smithsonian, 1997); Lewis Hine/55 (Phaidon, 2002); ‘Pictures at Work: Romana Javitz and the New  York Public Library Picture Collection’, in The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs, ed. Thierry Gervais (MIT Press, 2016); and chapters on photographers such as Richard Avedon, Stanley Kubrick and Irving Penn. Antony Penrose, the son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, is the founder and co-director of The Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection at the former family home, Farleys House and Gallery in Sussex, now open to the public. He is a sculptor, film maker and author, and for the past forty years he has worked on disseminating his parents’ work in exhibitions, plays and film, as well as contributing to radio and television programmes. His published work includes: The Lives of Lee Miller (London: Thames & Hudson, new edition 1988 [1985]); Lee Miller’s War, edited by Antony Penrose; Foreword by David E. Scherman (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014 [1992]); The Home of the Surrealists (London: Frances Lincoln, 2001; Chiddingly: Penrose Film Productions Ltd, 2015); Roland Penrose, The Friendly Surrealist (Munich: Prestel, 2001); The Boy Who Bit Picasso (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); Miró’s Magic Animals (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015); Surrealist Lee Miller (Chiddingly: Farleys House and Gallery Ltd, 2019). Andy Stafford is a critical theorist and a specialist of the work of Roland Barthes. He has published a book on the French photo-text of the 1990s (Liverpool University Press, 2010), as well as articles on Raymond Depardon, André Bazin, Leïla Sebbar and Marc Garanger, and most recently on the photo-text in the work of Gérard Macé (Le temps qu’il fait, 2018). He is senior lecturer at the University of Leeds and was visiting professor at the University of Paris-13 in 2019.



List of contributors

Daria Tuminas is a researcher and curator based in Amsterdam. She studied at St Petersburg State University, majoring in Russian Literature and Folklore, and obtained an MA in Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University. From 2012 to 2014, she co-organised the Dutch Photography Experience project in St  Petersburg, consisting of annual workshops, as well as Undercover, a group exhibition on Dutch photobooks. She was the guest editor of The PhotoBook Review #12, published by Aperture in spring 2017. The issue focused on the relations between cinema and photobooks connected to a public event she cocurated at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 2018, she contributed a chapter on photobooks by female artists from Eastern Europe to the project and book How We See: Photobooks by Women by 10  ×  10 Photobooks. From 2017 until December 2019, Tuminas worked as the head of Unseen Book Market at Unseen Amsterdam. Since 2019, she has been a curator at Utrecht-based photography exhibition space FOTODOK. Volker M. Welter is professor for history of architecture at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California at Santa Barbara. Among his books are Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, MA, 2002), Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home (Oxford, 2012), Walter S. White: Inventions in Mid-century Architecture (Santa Barbara, 2015), and Tremaine Houses: Private Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Mid-Century America, 1936–1977 (Los Angeles, 2019). His current research and book projects focus on revival style in Southern California and on gay ­domesticity in Southern California.

xvii

Acknowledgements

This volume is the result of a two-year project at the Maison Française in Oxford, funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by the staff for their help in the logistics of hosting both the ‘Photoliterature and Photobook’ Seminar and the Photobook Symposium; my warm thanks go to Anne-Sophie Gabillas, Nathalie Maillot and Claire Stevenson. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the MFO director, Frédéric Thibault-Starzyk, for his encouragement in establishing scholarship in photography as a long-term project at the Maison Française. My grateful thanks are also extended to the Friends of the Princeton University Library, who generously offered a grant to consult photobooks at the Firestone Library in 2018. The publication was supported by a grant from the Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA UMR 8225), Université Paris Cité.

Introduction: the photobook as confluence Paul Edwards

With the new millennium and the dominance of digital photography came an unprecedented interest in photography books. The ‘photobook’, as the phenomenon came to be called, became an art object, and its definition was tailored to suit a burgeoning collector’s market which placed the photographer at the vanguard of the enterprise: this was a sudden valorisation for photographers, but it misrepresents the history and dynamics of publishing. Resistance to the narrow, art-world definition grew in academic circles. Photo-historians expressed their bafflement at the exclusion of certain titles from the canons that were being drawn up in coffee-table books (mentioning omissions can quickly become a running gag at symposia). No overview, no history, however wide-ranging could possibly encompass the variety of interactions between photography and book history since the early 1840s (Shannon 2010). There remains a problem with the definition and use of the word ‘photobook’, which this volume seeks to address: not by distinguishing auteur photobooks from illustrated books, but by acknowledging the collective nature of all photography book projects. * The phenomenon took off at the turn of the millennium. Photobooks have been showcased in photography art fairs, there have been major exhibitions in European capitals, and coffee-table books have been devoted to the comparatively unknown history of the photobook. While we can document this growing appeal, we must also acknowledge that the effervescence has not resulted in enthusiastic sales figures. This apparent paradox has been noted by American novelist Teju Cole, who contrasts the limited distribution of photobooks with the plethora of single images in the media and online: ‘In the world of deafening images, the quiet consolations of photobooks doom them to a small, and sometimes tiny, audience. They are expensive to make and rarely recoup their costs. In this way, they are a quixotic affront to the calculations of the market. The evidence of a few bestsellers notwithstanding, the most common fate of photobooks is oblivion’ (Cole 2020). Likewise, an academic survey of the photobook market concludes

2

The photobook world

pragmatically that the photobook will remain the object of a niche market, and that financial sustainability is only possible with direct-to-consumer sales and proactive consumers, since, for publishers, ‘[o]utsourcing to external distributors is not economically viable’ (Jones 2016: 69). Tiffany Jones, a photobook publisher and photographer, and Cole, a successful photobook author and photographer, share a conception of the photobook that derives from art market practices as well as from their image-making perspective. Their pronouncements sound general, but were clearly not intended to comment upon the wider market of photographically illustrated books, textbooks, guidebooks, and so on, which have protean social uses beyond ‘quiet consolations’. The photobook is not always conceived as an artistic endeavour – on the contrary, it has multiple forms, and showing this diversity is central to this volume. Cole’s use of the adjective ‘quixotic’ is symptomatic. Of course his passing reference to the would-be knight-errant of Cervantes’ tragi-comic novel simply means that it would be mad to think of conquering the market with one’s poetic contributions, but – perhaps unintentionally – he leaves us with the image of the photographer tilting against the windmills of fortune in a solitary chivalric quest. The point about the unreliability of sales is taken, but it is a fiction to suppose that photobooks are the products of isolated individuals. It is precisely against what might be called the ‘Don Quixote myth’ of individual initiative that this book takes a stand, and by doing so we hope to show the collective nature of cultural production. Consequently, this volume brings together case studies and theoretical reflections that consider the photobook as a category beyond the photographerprivileging, capitalism-defined art object. Instead, it views photobooks as always collectively produced, inseparable from the reader and the context of production, and as outputs of collectives, collaborations, communities and institutions. Focusing on the collective nature of cultural production means putting to one side the search for iconic individuals, and breaking free from the art-history narrative. One of Britain’s foremost champions of group work was photographer and activist Jo Spence, for whom the question of ‘art’ was a means, when not a hindrance or an irrelevance, as she indicated to audiences while her Review of Work exhibition was touring: ‘I have a lot of problems around the word artist’, she concluded (Spence 1986: 204). But she also acknowledged – in a tone of regret that may appear surprising – a certain incompatibility between the anonymity of group work and the desire for an individual artistic career: ‘collective work […] is the quickest way I know to become invisible and not appear within histories of your own subject’ (Spence 1986: 206). She is certainly correct as regards her own collaborative project, the Hackney Flashers, in that many of the members were never to become as well-known as the collective. But it is also true to say that none of them had a career as an artist, nor do they appear to have sought one. The work of both Spence and the Hackney Flashers was primarily pedagogical, political and feminist: the ‘art’ question fudges the issue. The corollary of what Spence mentioned about individual invisibility is that for one name to shine, other names must remain obscure, because the market



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

(galleries, dealers, auctioneers, experts) favours the notion of creative genius and is quick to pass over the dialogue and cooperation that attends creation. To give the simplest example of unequal collaboration: Sebastião Salgado and Henri Cartier-Bresson have become ‘names’, but the identity of their darkroom printers are known only to specialists, despite the decisive input of their creative decisions. Cultural objects are, however, best understood as embedded in a team of producers and readers, a cloud of influencers and a forcefield of political dynamics. Collective photography projects are often politically committed, which is why the chapters in this book look at feminism, race and marginalisation; they uncover forgotten social objects, and how personal histories are bound to broader historical movements. One section of this book, for example, is devoted to various forms of secondwave feminism in the USA. It looks at women working from the margins who established alternative practices: setting up collaborative networks of production and distribution for photobooks that forefronted their subjectivities as wives and mothers, while showing that the constraints and heroics of homemaking  and homely labours could be legitimate subjects for art; appropriating archival images for autobiographical purposes; acquiring documentary archives both to correct the art-centred canonical histories of photography and to flesh out the social history of American life; making learn-to-read books to criticise racial assumptions. Several chapters in this book deal with race, and provide critical insights for reading photography as a form of resistance to – or complicity with – institutions or government actions, be they Britain’s colonial past, the Jim Crow South in the United States (between the 1870s and 1960s, an era in which former Confederate states legalised racial segregation), or Brazil’s capitalist drive to ‘civilise’ the Amazonian rainforest and its peoples in the 1970s, during the military dictatorship. But before engaging with the different contributions in this volume, the general points outlined so far must be substantiated. This introduction aims to clarify two points: first, the interconnectedness between the narrow definition of  the photobook and the art market; second, the relation of the wide definition  of the photobook to multiple authorship. Accordingly, the first part of this introduction, headed ‘Defining the photobook’, looks at how the word  has  become a manifesto, founded upon a rhetoric of individual vision,  substantiated by anthologies, but whose boundaries are everywhere questioned by collective participation. The second part, ‘The photobook art world’, examines the collective nature of photobook production, the plurality of actors, and the particular case of its dedicated art market. The third part, ‘Diversity and  confluence’, addresses the tension between those who define the photobook as an art-based object, and those who see it as an object with a social dimension, and thus a much more diverse object, representing a confluence of interests. The fourth part, ‘Exploring upstream’, introduces the chapters in this volume, showing how they contribute to the general argument of the book.

3

4

The photobook world

Defining the photobook Controversies have arisen concerning the use of the word, and what exactly it refers to, but one thing is sure: forging the neologism was an exercise in valorisation. The Flemish word fotoboek appeared at least as early as 1969, when it became the keyword of a manifesto to grant artistic status to the mechanically reproduced photography book (Prins 1969). Its definition was translated into English thus: ‘A photobook is an autonomous work of art, comparable with a painting, sculpture, theatre performance or film. The photos lose their individual “an sich” [in itself] photographic character and become components translated into printing ink of a dramatic event known as a book.’ For Mattie Boom, writing in 1989 about Dutch documentary photobooks, the term means ‘an independent art form in which the presence of the photographer as author is essential’ (Suermondt 1989:  5). This rallying cry was taken up by Rik Suermondt (1989: 12), Gerry Badger and Martin Parr (2004: 7), Frits Gierstberg (Suermondt and Gierstberg 2012: 8), and countless others. There was an exponential rise in the employment of the neologism in the first years of the millennium (Neves 2017: 18–19). This is the contested meaning, at least among academics (Shannon 2010), since it effectively cordons off illustrated books that are text-heavy, literary, pedagogical, institutional, anonymous, collective, digital, left unfinished in archives, or that otherwise resist being appropriated as ‘art’. It is nevertheless the art history, photographer-as-auteur approach that has given the word ‘photobook’ its twenty-first-century tweak. The definition of the photobook as a photographer’s book is now associated with Martin Parr, perhaps because of his celebrity status (prolific Magnum photographer and TV documentary film maker). Though the academic community may take issue with the theoretical framework, there is no doubt that he has had a galvanising effect on photographers, both amateur and professional. Since the publication of The Photobook: A History (Badger and Parr 2004), the Badger-and-Parr definition of the photobook is constantly quoted as if it were self-evident (it is only self-evident with respect to the art world). By ‘photobook’, they mean (I summarise) an autonomous work, in the shape of a book, in which photography plays a structural role; it is the work of an auteur, in the cinematic sense, an author-photographer who ‘directs’ the visual narrative. This means that the page layout contributes to the meaning, as does everything that relates to its material aspect. It can also be the work of an editor, so long as photography plays the primary role. This criterion of primacy is a means of dissociating the work of the photographer from ‘related crafts and commercial enterprises’ in order for the photobook to aspire to the status of art (Becker 2008: 339). The photography is enhanced by the publishing team, but their work remains largely anonymous. Darkroom printers, photogravure printers, and graphic designers often remain uncredited, despite their key role in some of the most famous photobooks. Likewise, the art-world superstructure is hidden from view when the focus of attention is on the creative impetus of the photographer. As Laureline Meizel has argued, it is a ‘corporatist’ definition (Meizel 2017).



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

Defining the photobook has to a large extent been achieved indirectly, by providing lists of examples, often with the collector’s market in mind. As with historically researched sales catalogues, publishing a photobook survey is a way of increasing the speculative value of a personal collection of rare books – especially as such overviews anthologise page layouts rather than texts, showing the books lying open as material objects, like samples for appraisal. The resultant hike in prices on the secondary market was noted with satisfaction in the 2014 introduction to Volume III of The Photobook: A History (2014). It was also noted with no voice of concern for the democracy of access to works considered of particular cultural importance – which gives an unfortunate false impression, given the fact that in the same year Martin Parr secured long-term aid for researchers and other interested parties through his foundation, its library and archive, and in 2017 through the sale of his collection to Tate Modern. The History was lauded by Fred Ritchin in his introduction to Magnum Photobook, and, like many, he attributes to Parr and Badger the greatest impact ‘in the perception of the ­photobook […] with a resulting increase in the prestige of the photobook as well as the prices of many limited-edition and hard-to-fine volumes’ (Ritchin 2016:  16). One may gloss: ‘the perception of the photobook as a work of art’, for this is the novelty with respect to, say, thirty years ago. Reading the entries to the books on photobooks may indeed feel like reading a catalogue entry at a prestigious auction, where anecdotes and adjectives are chosen to arrest and seduce, and all that is missing is the price, acting as the ultimate seal of approval. Logically, the artworld ‘photobook’ excludes that which is not ‘collectible’. Anthologists have constructed a history of what they present as a hithertoneglected art form. Significantly, these anthologies are packaged as a coffee-table books, that is to say signs of conspicuous consumption and an indicator of taste, refinement and culture (Becker 2008: 337). This bolsters the claim that the photobook is a stand-alone work of art, but such a claim is a narrow definition of photobooks and depends on inclusions and exclusions: inclusions that federate approval by appealing to already established criteria of art, such as the reputations of blue-chip photographers who also produced books; and exclusions, such as  books that are more obviously dependent on actors who are not photographers, for example architects, teachers, novelists or editors, as was the case with the Time-Life books of the 1960s, when the editor provided shooting scripts for the photographers. A further problem with the narrow stand-alone definition of the photobook is that it removes books from the publishing history of the photographs which, frequently, were also newspaper or magazine images before they were collected in a book. Not infrequently, photographs are used to tell very different stories from one printed source to another: the readership is not the same, and in many cases the text is not written by the same parties. This is why we can talk about the ‘life’ or ‘biography’ of a photograph. The pictures in Amazônia (discussed in Chapter 10), are a case in point, as are those in Leonard Freed’s Police Work which, notoriously, had been published in the Sunday Times to accompany a toxic discourse

5

6

The photobook world

over which the photographer had no control. Books dialogue with their previous incarnations. A book is not closed within its covers to the outside world like a jewel in a vault, or a rock in a stream. It is, perhaps (following Heraclitus), more like the river itself, never the same twice. Those who draw up canons rarely include the photographically illustrated novel (apart from an-exception-that-proves-the-rule), and illustrated poetry is more frequently anthologised than literary prose, perhaps because the image/ text ratio is more favourable to the image. To some, the ‘literary photobook’ is a contradiction in terms, since the art world requires that photography take precedence over text. The non-negotiable premise is that the true photograph is not an ‘illustration’, in the traditional sense of the word, and cannot be subservient to the text. Contrary to this, we argue in this book that the term ‘photobook’ be applied to any photographically illustrated book. First, because the term ‘illustration’ can be used as a neutral word. The term ‘illustration’ was certainly held at arm’s length by painters who provided drawings for editions of poetry, but the term was not problematic for ‘art’ photographers in the nineteenth century. Julia Margaret Cameron uses it in the very title of her Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and her opinion of photography was of the highest order, spiritual, even. The word ‘illustration’ only starts to be avoided by photographers  – by self-styled art-photographers  – some time after the First World War, and certainly by the time of the Surrealists in the 1930s: this can be seen by looking at the choice of words employed on covers and title pages when announcing the visual component of the book. It is of course necessary to note how the term is used by others, but for the purposes of criticism, I advocate the use of the word ‘illustration’ as a neutral word, without connotations of subservience, unless qualified by an adjective. Second, because using the word ‘photobook’ in the most general sense, as an umbrella term, is a way of rejecting the commercially interested boundaries of the art-world definition, that is to say the ‘photobook’ as a marketing term for today’s photographers. We adopt the term in order to modify its meaning. Employing the term indicates that the history of the book enters a new era with the advent of photography. This was clearly the excitement behind W. H. Fox Talbot’s experiment in publishing entitled The Pencil of Nature (1844–46). It should be noted too that not all writers associated with theorising the photobook have adopted the exact perspective of the auteur definition. Some admit into the category books that are neither photographer-driven nor motivated by artistic pretentions. A section of the 2017 Photobook Phenomenon exhibition was organised by Erik Kessels, who chose what I would like to call ‘found photobooks’, or, in his words, ‘books or manuals profusely illustrated with “useful photography” with the sole purpose of explanation by visualisation’, and which were classed as medical, instructional, scientific, humorous, and so on (Neumüller 2017). Significantly, he writes ‘photo books’ as two words rather than one, as if to escape certain preconceived ideas and associations. The art-world definition would be better qualified as ‘the photographer’s book’. This complements the term invented by Nicolas Malais to describe the



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

bibliophilic book that is orchestrated by the writer  – in which, for example, the novelist or poet controls the typography and ornamentation, the cover and the materials, and themselves commission or work in close collaboration with the illustrator. Malais calls this ‘le livre d’écrivain’, so as to distinguish it from ‘le livre d’artiste’ or ‘artist’s book’. So the art-world definition is ‘le livre de photographe’. This concept is certainly interesting, and has indeed been in vogue among dealers in France since before 2000. But it is also a smokescreen: the photographer as auteur distracts from collective meaning. And it is this collective history of the photobook that has been the focus of this book. I take as a principle that the ‘photographer’s view of their medium’ is not where meaning begins and ends (Badger and Parr 2004:  10–11). Attributing authorship to photographers is to confer authority to them, at the expense of everything else that creates meaning. In brief, this stance rejects the notion that art and the meaning of art is created through social relations and the reader (Barthes 1967). We prefer to follow sociologist Howard S. Becker, whose guiding principle when researching Art Worlds was that art is collective, that the work of art is created by the art world. This effectively prevents the mythification of the photographer-artist-auteur and their supposedly all-guiding eye. It also grants more respect to the ‘support personnel’ involved in making photobooks – ­printers, graphic designers (digital) retouchers, editors, and so on – whose input cannot be acknowledged in passing simply to be glossed over in favour of the photographer. Becker points out that the very term ‘support personnel’ is ‘unfeeling’, though it is an accurate reflection of how they are considered in the art world (Becker 2008:  97). All through the process of making a photobook, creativity, knowledge of conventions, judgement and experience are brought on board by everybody involved. Becker describes this process of making art as a series of ‘editorial moments’ (Becker 2008: 198). And with more subtlety still, he insists upon the importance of art-world participants who do not collaborate explicitly with these editorial moments, by positing that they enter ‘into the internal dialogue which precedes and accompanies these choices’ (Becker 2008: 210). From this, it is easy to understand that a photographer will have some idea of how their photobook will be received, and that creative/editorial choices are made for the benefit of an internalised audience. To study photobooks is also to study their audiences (Walker 2012). The photographer-author is part of a whole, but that whole, that art world, is in flux, and because audiences change, ‘works of art have no stable existence but are continually changing’ (Becker 2008: xxi). The photobook is not a still point at the centre of a maelstrom, it is moving and drawing people in, and the society of editors and readers make up its history and meaning.

The photobook art world Since the turn of the millennium the production and visibility of photobooks has increased spectacularly (Jones 2016; Neves 2017). It has often been remarked

7

8

The photobook world

upon, and is just as often ascribed, at least in part, to the advent of digital photography, though I have encountered no scholarship that substantiates this claim. Two hypotheses may nevertheless be put forward to understand the appeal of the causal link: the nostalgia hypothesis – routinely evoked as much in books as in conversation  – and the simplicity hypothesis. Both have the status of personal observations deduced from lived experience (and I am no exception to the rule). The nostalgia theorem posits that a new technology creates renewed (nostalgic) interest for what it is feared may become obsolete. Here, this refers to silver-based photography and images on paper rather than on screens. To give some examples of nostalgia: there was a wave of enthusiasm for analogue photography that led to the rise of the Lomography company and the return of the Lubitel camera; new instant-films were manufactured after the bankruptcy of the Polaroid Corporation in 2001; The Photographers’ Gallery in London stocked a wide range of boutique 35 mm films proposing colour casts and other chemical special effects; my NYU students all started coming into class with the most obscure old cameras, preferably with mechanical shutters (the Topcon was a hit); while socks, badges and T-shirts were manufactured bearing the outlines of a twin-lens reflex camera, an old Leica, a Practika, or a generic, knobby SLR (and not just for sale in photo-museums). Generally speaking, niche markets were created for people who had the wealth and leisure to combine photography with fashion statements. While these were minor phenomena, economically speaking, they were very visible to those working in academia, and seemed to indicate a widespread renewal of interest in pre-digital photography. More importantly, the Analogue Man posture also became a way for any photographer to distinguish their production from supposedly standardised digital offerings, identified with the mainstream. Though nostalgia, properly speaking, may play a motivating role for older photographers, the term ‘nostalgia’ and the manifestation of interest for the haptic are self-valorising: they draw attention away from what I would propose as a more serious motivation, namely the assertion of inherited cultural capital. The analogue critic can lay claim to a cultural heritage of bibliophilic connoisseurship, an intellectualised haptic sensibility, and 150 years of photo-history and opticochemical photo-technology, all of which distinguishes them from the fledgling, digital generation. It is therefore to be expected that critics will attribute the(ir) renewed interest in the physical book to the coming of the digital age. Also, the ‘material turn’ in the humanities inevitably pushed academics to contrast analogue and digital in haptic terms, and rather than ushering in a flurry of academic publications on digital photobooks, there has been a renewed interest in ‘classic’ photobooks that could be described in a bibliophilic way. Quantitively, critics have been looking at paper books rather than screen books since the advent of digital photography. The increased visibility of the photobook is of course aided by the increased number of studies devoted to the photobook, whether academic or of the coffee-table variety. Yet the increased production of photobooks is, I believe, not so much due to any nostalgia for analogue processes or a renewed



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

enthusiasm for the haptic (self-valorising though it may be to say so), but because photography has entered a new era of push-button simplicity. Since the turn of the millennium, new technologies have made image-capture, retouching, printing and bookmaking easier for both amateurs and professionals (Cablat 2019). Photobooks are now made by amateur photographers (e.g. students, tourists, wedding guests), because the technology enabling capture, enhancement and online layout is child’s play to manipulate for all but the most technophobic, and the cost is about the same as ordering a set of thirty-six prints. Furthermore, this simplicity, coupled with the Internet, has also resulted in a proliferation of amateur stock photographs, including eyewitness photographs of current events, which in turn has led to image banks and press agencies closing shop, while newspaper photographers have been laid off. In the case of photojournalists, producing books answers a need. They have been obliged to find other spaces to show their picture-stories, such as galleries and books, because the economic model upon which photojournalism was maintained finally collapsed in the late twentieth century (Pfrunder et al. 2012: 643): newspaper and magazine distribution fell, as did advertising revenue; slide image banks closed shop; in-house press photographers were laid off; picture editors were replaced by art editors; stock images were substituted for commissioned images; and for illustrative material, there has been an increasing reliance on amateur images and the Internet. In the meantime, the importance of the book for photography has grown. Books play the role of portfolios, calling cards and constitute the promise and goal of funding requests. They are exhibited in museums alongside or in place of prints; films are made of them being leafed through and these films are projected on gallery walls. Today still, the documentary photobook appears to be in its golden age. This is undoubtedly the case in terms of professional investment, production numbers, auction-house sales, curatorial activity, American university library acquisitions (the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley, being gifted 1,500 photobooks from the David and Reva Logan collection in 2013, or the Beinecke at Yale purchasing the entire Indie Photobook Library in 2016, for example) and museum acquisitions (the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, buying 22,000 photobooks from the Manfred Heiting collection in 2013, or Tate Modern buying Martin Parr’s personal collection of 12,000 photobooks in summer 2017). All is not golden, however. Distribution and easy public access remain challenges to be overcome, and making the photobook market sustainable requires greater collective action: better definition of market segments (including children’s books), new business and distribution models, and ‘organized collaborative action’ on the part of publishers (Jones 2016:  70–71), which includes participation in galleries and festivals and a degree of creative initiative (Neumüller 2019: 13–20). Clearly, the actual sale of photobooks is but one aspect of this effervescence: ‘Selling photobooks became less and less important for us’, says Frederic Lezmi, Founder of the PhotoBook Museum, Cologne (Neumüller 2019: 5). The photobook as commodity is rarely

9

10

The photobook world

commercially viable, as Teju Cole so rightly said, so the search for profit must be less important than the social activity it generates. A critical mass of interested people was reached at the turn of the millennium. Networks were constituted between photographers and publishers, producers and facilitators, critics and readers, designers and event managers. Interactions around the works gave people a sense of belonging, as did codes, conventions, production values, hierarchies and meeting places. Concurrent with this increased productivity, profusely illustrated anthologies devoted to single countries, towns, or time periods have been issued (see Bibliography). These bear witness to an ever-growing interest among dealers, collectors and curators. Indeed, Christie’s sales catalogues have focused on photobooks since 2006. Aperture has had an imprint entitled The PhotoBook Review since 2011. There have been exhibitions devoted to the photobook at major museums: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2014); the Benaki Museum in Athens during the Athens Photo Festival (2015); the Photobook Phenomenon exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2017); the Photobook Belge at the FOMU Fotomuseum in Antwerp (2019); the Photo.Book. Art exhibition at Albertina (Vienna, 28 June 2019–22 September 2019), subtitled ‘Transition and Reorientation in Book Design. Austria 1840–1940’, to name just a few (there is even a mobile PhotoBookMuseum in Cologne). Photobook publishers and photobook competitions feature prominently at Photo London, Photo Los Angeles and Photo Paris, the huge art fairs held annually in prestigious locations. The photobook community, writes Moritz Neumüller, ‘has produced its own ecosystem which consists of fairs, festivals, exhibitions, screenings and contests’ (Neumüller 2017). Though he qualifies it as a niche market with weak institutional support, a change has been seen in collaborative structures and mentalities. To borrow the concepts, focus, vocabulary and expressions of Howard Becker: exhibitions and writings have been produced to initiate and educate the (buying) public, and an ‘adequate organizational support system’ has been set up to change the status of the photobook from non-art to art, and to ensure that ‘enough people cooperate in regular ways’ to sustain the apparatus of this new ‘art world’ (Becker 2008: 300–301). ‘Art world’ is the concept that perfectly describes the photobook effervescence. Basing our approach on Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, and Nick Crossley’s ‘networks’ (Crossley 2015), the photobook is conceptualised as a ‘world’ rather than an object or the work of a single creator. If art is created collectively, then it takes a collective to turn an object such as a book of photographs into a work of art, and this is exactly what has happened over the last couple of decades, as witnessed by the meteoric rise in the price of out-of-print photobooks by certain institutionally approved photographers. The photobook is now art, because it is bought and sold as art. And lest the client still feel that photomechanical reproduction lacks credentials, publishers commonly include fine art prints in special boxed editions to reassure the client that their book/box contains art. Books of photographs have become potential financial investments.



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

A permanent feature of any art market is the over-supply of works; so to encourage sales (and in the case of the second-hand market, to keep prices on the increase), hierarchies are necessary, as are any type of vertical ranking or canons (Menger 2009). One means of achieving this is the creation of competitions, another is the publication of anthologies, because of the canonisation they inevitably induce. In the case of an emerging market, new competitions quickly become visible. The legitimacy of competitions and anthologies have to be established very quickly for them to be effective. Competitions were created by the publishers themselves, and the most visible competitions are associated with long-established publishers, such as Aperture. Competitions help to create canons, and their multiple nominations ultimately function as brand advertisements in the same way as the coffee-table anthologies. These competitions and canons have been widely criticised (sometimes lampooned) in reviews and blogs, with bloggers ritually proposing their own lists  – the need for ranking being apparently stronger than the rationale for doing away with them altogether. Just as the creation of international competitions has created job opportunities, so has the private activity on the internet afforded new visibility to individuals. Intervening on the constitution of the canon can confer a modicum of authority upon the writer, but it is difficult to ‘remove’ a book from the canon once it has been ranked or given a place in an anthology. Anthologies, canons, lists and collections fuel the market by encouraging collecting habits. As complete collections are better financial investments than incomplete collections, buyers are motivated to become completists (seeking all the 101 books in Andrew Roth’s 2001 anthology, for example). Through this process, and because supply is low and demand is high, difficult-to-find books become ‘famous’. The quest to find certain books can become obsessive, because the dissatisfaction associated with incomplete tasks (such as not being able to find a book on a wish list) is more present to the mind than the satisfaction of a completed task (such as the successful purchase of a book on such a list). This common psychological occurrence, sometimes referred to as the Ziegarnik effect (Ziegarnik 1927; Heimbach and Jacoby 1972), should be tempered with the observation that completed tasks that involve self-esteem and pride (such as the purchase of a particularly difficult book to come by, thanks to a degree of cunning and research) are better recalled than failures to complete certain tasks (such as the acquisition of impossible-to-find or overly expensive items) (Friedman 2011). Despite that proviso, the (interrupted) task of filling a hole in a collection can become a fixation (‘the collector’ as addict or perfectionist has long been a staple of literary tales and anecdotes), and, at the very least, it can be said that the psychology that attends collecting reinforces the climate for demand. To conclude: creating a canon, whether through competition nominations or anthology inclusion, creates a need among buyers. Cultivating this need is the goal of the market, which thrives on a discourse of valorisation. Even the anthology that attempts to redress the gender bias in the photobook canons, How We See: Photobooks by Women (Lederman 2018), all too often falls into the trap of

11

12

The photobook world

striving to praise rather than contextualise, particularly so when images attain a degree of abstraction or ‘Surrealism’, which seems to situate them in the realm of dreams rather than in their social context. This discourse is precisely that which this volume seeks to work against: not by criticising the photobook market, but by examining why photographs were put into books in the first place, that is to say their pedagogical, dialogistic role, as a place of confluence.

Diversity and confluence When scholars study the history of photobooks, they encounter very diverse material objects, produced in different historical contexts. Amazônia (1978), by Claudia Andujar and George Love, famously tells its story of the Yanomami and the forest in pictures; The Road is Wider Than Long (1939), by Roland Penrose, is principally a poem accompanied by his travel snaps; Reading Dick and Jane with Me (1989), by Clarissa Sligh, uses collage to shock the reader into awareness of the colour line in children’s books; The Black Triangle (1985), by Armet Francis, is resolutely pedagogical in an academic rather than playful manner; and artistic pretentions could not be further from the minds of the compilers of the Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital, Pineville (1934). Yet all are photobooks, rich in texture and meaning, each of them singular in their employment of photographs and texts together. So disparate indeed are the numerous publications examined by the authors of this volume, that each photobook seems to define new contours of the medium’s possibility. To engage with this exciting complexity and variety, the working hypothesis in these pages is that the photobook is best understood as a collective endeavour, a confluence of individuals, interests and events, as well as a confluence of image and story. This in no way diminishes the importance of artists and individuals, who, in any case, are never looked at in isolation, but 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 here is to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the photobook. Not that we wish to do away with author-based criticism. There is always meaning in what a work means to its author, and the (auto)biographical element remains a key element in our enjoyment of art and learning about art. Our issue is with the commodification of artistic endeavour, especially when it creeps into academia, consciously or unconsciously, embroiling photobooks in a new formalism that removes the work from its social context, to place it instead in the display case, forever beached. Fortunately, scholars working today on the history of photography have, in the main, systematised the historical, contextual, material approach as a counter to the purely formalist approach that treats the photograph as a closed world, or which prioritises the role of the photographer/author in creative isolation, dominating the creation of meaning. Nevertheless, the overwhelming presence



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

of the art market in discussions of the photobook, and the emphasis put on great individuals by traditional art historians, has given currency to canon-building descriptions of photographic works. Weight is given to production values, to the book as material investment. Parallels are offered between formal aspects of the works and political, economic and cultural changes in society at large, parallels which offer a certain narrative closure to the supposedly silent medium of photography, but which are as enticing as they are difficult to prove. A typical example can be found in an art book called Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France (Sichel 2020). Of Germaine Krull’s Métal (1928) and Moï  Ver’s Paris (1931), Sichel writes that these striking volumes, which include almost no words, juxtapose and intercut industrial images and reform them as a series of abstract yet formally interrelated shards. In Métal, unidentifiable metal fragments form interlocking trusses dancing in the air – visual poems of the abstract beauty of industrial metal. […] Krull and Moï Ver […] craft book-length kaleidoscopes of urban and industrial life at the end of the 1920s  – constructions of fractured building blocks that develop an abstract, non-storytelling medium. These books mirror the postwar period’s cacophonous industrial and urban expansion – reflecting both its enthusiasm and its anxieties. (Sichel 2020: 11)

It all builds up to the last sentence, which has a satisfying ring to it, but how can the hypothesis be proved? What represents enthusiasm, and what anxiety? What does Krull’s book actually show us of urban and industrial ‘life’ in France and the Netherlands? How do the many pictures of pre-war structures fit into the argument? or the close-up of a wrist watch? The symbolic interpretation answers a need on the part of readers who wish to see more in Métal than an exercise in photographic style, more than the antipictorialist manifesto that transpires from Krull’s disingenuous 1976 preface, in which she writes that Cranes, corn elevators – all these machines had always existed, only nobody had neither [sic] the courage nor the taste or fascination to see them, to feel them and to represent them. […] I did not have a special intention or design when I took the Iron photographs. I wanted to show what I see, exactly as the eye sees it. Métal […] initiated a new visual era and opened the way for a new concept of photography. (Krull 2003)

Although Sichel provides ample information about the artistic and publishing context in which Krull took her photographs, as well as briefing the reader that ten years after the First World War France was an important iron-producing nation and in the process of rebuilding its economy, nevertheless, the symbolic interpretation linking artistic form to social change remains mere hypothesis, and no methodology is proposed. Making such unsubstantiated parallels, and taking art as a mirror reflecting society in a manner that is clear for all to see, has become commonplace in photobook criticism, and is understandable as a rhetorical strategy, since the mere assertion of social relevance provides closure in descriptive commentary.

13

14

The photobook world

This volume positions itself against such market-oriented discourse, insisting instead on the fluid, collaborative and collective nature of book-making, as well as on how reception can vary dramatically from one audience to another, from one physical location to another. Once the emphasis has been removed from the auteur, the photobook, viewed simply as any book containing one or more photographs, becomes more alive: it is the place where interests meet, where a dialogue seeks approval, where ideologies clash, where norms are invisibilised or exposed; it will feel like a stage play with different actors ready in the wings. Irrespective of the fame of the photographer, the photobook as historical document is a remarkable confluence of social interactions. The consequence of effecting this displacement from the artistic to the social and collective is to open photobook studies to items that would not usually be considered artistic at all, and without it being necessary to seek to transform documentary or conceptual photobooks into artistic enterprises. After all, the question of artistic status becomes secondary once it is accepted that all cultural productions are social documents. This volume therefore starts, very modestly, by aligning photobook studies with (interdisciplinary) photography studies as generally practised in academia, and as reflected in such publications as History of Photography, or in such departments as the Photographic History Research Centre at de Montfort University, both of which may be held up as models. In so doing, this volume aims to widen the history of photography by drawing attention to the wealth of photographs that have been included in books, and which have attracted little attention because of their apparently ‘illustrative’ nature. Think only of the under-representation of the nineteenth century in discussions of the photobook (with the notable exceptions of Goldschmidt and Naef  1980: Gernsheim 1984, Armstrong 1998: Foster et al. 2007). A perfect example of overlooked illustrations is provided in this volume by the annual reports of segregated asylums published at the beginning of the twentieth century in the US South, the photographs of which help reveal for us today the dynamics of race relations in the United States in the early twentieth century. Including such publications within the category ‘photobooks’ casts a light on all photobooks: they are evidence, they call out for historians, they bring out the detective in the reader. Norms, prejudices, reading habits and other assumptions held to be self-evident are present in all photo-texts, and it is precisely these social constructs, this collective meaning, that has always intertwined with the history of photography, as it has in the history of art.

Exploring upstream The chapters in this book develop the various points that have been set out in the preceding pages, taking us away from the auteur model of the photobook and towards the fascinating collective nature of origins and creative processes.



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

In succeeding sections, the authors demonstrate how the art market forms part of the situational experience of reading; how political context becomes political content; how marginalised genres can be rediscovered; how the stories and experiences of marginalised peoples can become touchstones in national memory; how artistic capital can be democratised. As Jessica S. McDonald writes in these pages, bookmaking practice at a personal level can be ‘an act of self-empowerment’, and an act of resistance to gender and racial bias in career opportunities. Pedagogical in format, often playful, readable and historically informed, photobooks and their dissemination can challenge invisibilisation in society at large. The increasing cheapness and rapidity of self-publishing means the new and the urgent can bypass the art market. The social function of the photobook likewise bypasses any concern for canonicity. The chapters look mostly beyond canonical works. Canons and the auteur model of the photobook have been consolidated with every new international fair, prize, museum exhibition, reprint publisher and specialised shop – as witnessed by the frenzy of new editions for Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl 2004) or Christina de Middel’s The Afronauts (2012) – but at the same time a parallel enthusiasm has grown on the part of intellectuals to look outside the canon in search of human stories where creativity meets commitment, research, testimony and questions of identity. The scholars in this volume investigate the interactions at stake between the photographer and social, political, institutional, governmental or non-governmental actors, and so discover new excitements in the way that photographs and texts function together to address social or ­historical concerns. This volume examines North American, British or French photobooks from 1900 to the present. The material is mainly from the United States, with a strong concentration on English-language publications (including one on Brazil and another on Nicaragua), but also two contemporary French publications. It is with regret that books in Spanish, Portuguese or German (to mention but three languages) have not been included – to say nothing of Africa, India and China – and that there is not a more comprehensive representation of twentieth-century history, women’s history and the evolution of printing practices. A global survey of the photobook is not attempted in these pages, which refer instead to histories, geographies and languages that are familiar to anglophone and francophone readers, who, after all, make up the target audience of this modest volume. While photobooks produced in Japan and Russia have generated considerable interest, the language barrier often prevents the texts from being directly mediated in the West, and so for reasons of accessibility, all books discussed in this volume are in English (bar the two in French). This focus reflects the content of a two-year research seminar and symposium organised at the Maison Française in Oxford (UK), the fascination that the United States exerts on photography historians in France, and the affiliations and profiles of the contributors. They are specialists in the history of photography, book studies and visual studies, researchers in sociology, US history, anthropology, critical race theory, feminism, postcolonial

15

16

The photobook world

studies, architecture and comparative literature, and there are contributions from practising photographers and curators. The volume is divided into five parts, all concerned with the limits of what constitutes a photobook, and the visibility of photobooks to different publics in the creation of a collective meaning. Part I, ‘The photobook market’, surveys the market for photobooks from the point of view of producers and readers, a dozen years or so after the publication of Badger and Parr’s first opus in 2004. The first chapter, by Moritz Neumüller (in collaboration with Daria Tuminas, both curators), surveys the ecosystem of the market, employing the quantitative results of person-to-person interviews to categorise the buyers and ascertain the growth potential of the market. They identify the inherent methodological limitations of web-based questionnaires, and critique social media as a source of herd behaviour. They conclude that it is a buyer’s market, and point towards other research methods, such as qualitative analysis of non-photographic or non-economic buying factors. The latter are important, since consuming is often to acquire signs of distinction, status symbols or a positive self-image. Non-photographic buying factors, such as the educational value of a book, have been notoriously absent in photobook histories. Utilising participant observation in different places where photobooks are consulted, such as libraries, museums and fairs, art historian Briony Carlin theorises the reader’s encounter with the photobook as a haptic object in a social context. Drawing upon theories of affect, phenomenology and sociology, and basing the study on empirical examples, it is possible to show the diversity of the photobook’s situational experience. The chapter then extends its observations to show the interconnectedness of the photobook art world, thus reinforcing the aptness of Howard Becker’s ‘art world’ model to contemporary photobook practice. Carlin shows that the art world forms part of the situational experience, and provides a theoretical approach that can be applied as much to a museum or bookshop display as to a visual workshop run by feminists or schoolteachers. This chapter posits the material encounter with the book as an ineluctable factor in the continued production of meaning. It therefore demonstrates that photobooks are mutable, like stage plays, requiring a performance: the stage is the particular location of the book, and the reader who apprehends the book is the actor, aware of their surroundings. This chapter plays a pivotal role in this volume, taking us from marketing and the buyer to the reader, and, above all, using the materiality of photobooks to show the importance of the different book displayers and handlers who re-create the existence of the book, and thus how the performance can take precedence over the script and its author. The two chapters in Part I show how buyers and readers, far from being passive consumers, are deeply implicated in the photobook world, and co-­ creators of a photobook’s meaning. Part II, ‘Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–1990’, then looks at what might be called ‘micro art worlds’, communities of production and exchange that remained counter-cultural rather than mainstream, and which forefronted the experience



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

of women, their work, including domestic work, much of which had remained invisible in the world of art, just as the resultant photobooks were for a long time ignored in the histories of photography. Curator Jessica McDonald discusses Joan Lyons and the Visual Studies Workshop in New  York. Historian of photography Mary Panzer profiles the lives and bookwork of five photographers: Barbara Norfleet, Elsa Dorfman, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas. Many of the women under discussion are still working today, and, writes Mary Panzer, ‘it’s vital to recognize and inscribe their pioneering contributions in our histories of photography as it expands to include the photobook genre alongside the more familiar accounts of individual fine print production’. McDonald and Panzer give prominence to photobooks made by women in the wake of the 1960s, when feminism made creative use of countercultural networks of production, and, like fanzine culture, had recourse to small presses and DIY bookmaking. The turn-of-the-millennium boom in the home-produced had a previous incarnation in the work of American women in the 1970s and 1980s. Women working from outside the domain of commercial publishers could keep control over the means of production, the distribution, the communication strategies and the subjects that they wanted to talk about. From the margins, women who were engaged in cultural resistance could reach out and generate forums of exchange without having to approach or negotiate with established art world institutions such as museums or galleries. The book could be a be-all and end-all, a catalyst too. And it could be art, self-proclaimed, an artist’s book (livre d’artiste), simply a new way of making, a new form of art. This part, in the words of Mary Panzer, ‘considers the rise of American photobooks as a form of feminist self-fashioning, and as a practice distinct from those enshrined in the established historiography of the period. Questions of the materiality of photo-reproductive technique and process, pedagogy, control of the means of production through small press initiatives like the Visual Studies Workshop Press, and the circulation of photobooks are explored through the case studies of individual women’s production’, all of which go to show how the photobook world is a collective enterprise. The two authors in Part II show how photographers, even when seeking recognition as artists and in complete creative control of their means of production, are deeply implicated in collective forms of meaning production, in this particular instance because of their shared feminist agenda. Part III, ‘Commitment and visibility’, consists of three chapters that further investigate the intimate connection between political commitment and visibility in the production and mediation of the photobook. In all three chapters, the theme of political engagement is at the centre of the photographic work and its methods of presentation: the topics are systemic racism (Chapters 5 and 7) and the Sandinista-led uprising in Nicaragua (Chapter  6). All three deal with the theme of ‘revisiting’ earlier published books with a concern for updating, reframing, and extending readership and thus visibility: Armet Francis issuing Children

17

18

The photobook world

of the Black Triangle (1988) after The Black Triangle (1985); Susan Meiselas revisiting Nicaragua (1981) for her documentary app Pictures from a Revolution (1991) and for her book Reframing History (2004); Baudouin revisiting Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012) for his Camden, NJ (2013). This second connection brings home the temporal aspect of the collective creation of meaning. Just as American feminist photographers and book makers worked from the margins to bring ‘women’s work’ and the ‘home made’ into the fine art market (and into more socially relevant streams of circulation), so too Black British photographers, faced with systemic discrimination, found ways to ‘package’ their photographs and tell their stories. The marginalisation and invisibility of Black British photographers in the historiography is the subject of the first chapter, by historian of photography Taous Dahmani, which is also a case study of Armet Francis and the agency Autograph ABP. Founded in London in 1988 to support photographic practices by Black photographers, the agency helped to keep the photographic work circulating, and to maintain issues of social justice in the public eye. Bar a few notable exceptions, such as Magnum (Ritchin and Naggar 2016; Bouveresse 2017) and Neurdein (Bouillon 2017), picture agencies, as places where people can meet and socialise, as spaces where politics, craft and professionalism are debated, remain understudied factors in the history of photography. Documentary and journalistic photographs, as they go from periodical to book, are often put into a broader context, and their newsworthiness transformed into a significance that is more historical. And yet it is also true to say that the photobook is just as much a product of its moment. As historian of photography Jessie Bond explains in Chapter 6, the methods put into practice by Susan Meiselas to reactivate her photobook Nicaragua (1981) have gained much media attention and institutional backing (to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its publication). By revisiting her photobook, its loci and human subjects, through street installations, videos, websites, apps and exhibitions that constantly challenge former presentations and interpretations, Bond shows how Meiselas has given photobooks an appearance of movement, open-endedness and continual possibility. Her opening up of the printed work may be set to become a touchstone in photobook history. Part III closes with a rapid ‘making-of’: in the third chapter, photographer and art historian Nicolas Baudouin explains how he made Camden, NJ, 2013, a digital photobook that exploits Google Street View with a pedagogical aim. It is an exercise, a working example to encourage people to conduct their own photojournalism in corners of the world that are too difficult or too dangerous to explore on one’s own; it is also a way to check for oneself the locations that appear in other people’s photobooks. As Baudouin shows when he unofficially re-illustrated Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), a graphic documentary by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, other people’s books can be appropriated, revisited and shared, ­bypassing the market entirely by making it freely available on the web.



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

Baudouin shows how the Internet, as both a source of raw photographic material and a site of publication, makes the world encounterable in new ways, and also makes it possible to re-illustrate existing works. As the history of photobook production repeatedly demonstrates, an inspirational creation with a clear methodology can encourage waves of followers and generic publications. Well-known examples include Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Various Small Fires (1964) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), which are continuously re-invented by succeeding generations of photographers (Brouws, Burton and Zschiegner 2013). Has this happened for photobooks that only exist on screens? Are there generic or copycat e-photobooks? It remains difficult to answer the question while the history of photography has yet to chronicle the proliferation of internet-only photobooks. DIY e-photobook production remains off the radar, as Baudouin’s foray intimates by demonstrating how anyone can generate an armchair travelogue for a blog. Furthermore, Baudouin, like Panzer’s study of Norfleet, shows that images are re-authored by appropriation. Finally, Baudouin, like Carlin, demonstrates that decontextualisation and recontextualisation are how images and books exist through time, as the boundaries fixed by the author become shifting sands. Overall, the three authors in Part III deal with the boundaries of the photobook by looking at what makes them visible or invisible – an especially important question for social documentary that deals precisely with the invisibility of certain classes of people (people of colour in the United Kingdom, Sandinista rebels fighting a dictatorship, or the poor in Camden, NJ). The three solutions they comment upon (creating committed photo-agencies, revisiting the people and places for new editions with new technologies such as apps for smartphones, and utilising Google Street View to encourage people to see for themselves) are all ways  of fanning out socially (obviously enough), but all point to the ongoing exchange that a photobook produces, rather than fixing it on a pedestal, frozen in time. After looking at photographers who deal explicitly with political issues and social justice, and their relationship with visibility and representation, Part IV, ‘Institutional v. clandestine’, examines material objects that are just as rooted in politics but whose status is determined by organisms of state which approve or repress. On the one hand are institutional photobooks, made by or for public bodies, and on the other are clandestine or illegally produced photobooks. In the former case we have storytelling through pictures that purport to be self-evident, pleasant fictions which reflect ideologies and utopias; in the latter we have experimentation and an aesthetics of challenge, in the photography, the storytelling, and the layout. The chapter by sociologist and US historian Élodie Edwards-Grossi deconstructs the posed photographs taken for the annual reports of public asylums in the US South during Jim Crow. These little-known pictures are veritable icons of racial representation, showing the differential treatments given to mental patients along the colour line, according to prevailing theories of race, moral

19

20

The photobook world

therapy and work therapy. The photographs, seemingly anodyne, regain their meaning when informed by Edwards-Grossi’s archival and historical research. These ‘exemplary’ photographs, and these historically compelling photobooks, are typical of what has been left out of the historiographies, having no market value, no aesthetic appeal according to the criteria of the fine art print, and no immediate ‘visual story’ without the viewer’s commitment to unearthing the history through archival research. While art photography, popular photography and commercial photography are now well covered in the historiographies, institutional photography remains underdeveloped as a field of exploration  – with the notable exception of anthropology and photography (Edwards 1992; Maresca and Meyer 2013). To study institutional photography necessitates a transdisciplinary approach which depends on the nature of the institutions that are implicated, whether geopolitical or anthropological, scientific or architectural. Such collaborations are still greatly needed in photography studies, and are a probable indication of its future. The second chapter, by architecture historian Volker M. Welter, looks at architectural photobooks produced in Southern California at the same period (early twentieth century), which can be considered ‘institutional’ in that they are primarily aimed at architects rather than the general reader, and function as textbooks. They constitute another overlooked category of the photobook, as the focus is on the architecture not on photographic art, the subject and not the means. Yet the documentary photographs all collaborate, from one book to the next, from one author to the next, in building up a vision of Southern California in which European architecture is naturalised, made at one with the landscape. Although the photographs were made for a professional body, they carry with them a wider vision, that of a unified nation and a conquered land(scape). Photographs can begin their lives as institutionally approved, and veer to clandestinity in a short space of time, depending on the context of publication, the accompanying texts, or the poetic space that certain of the subjects are given with respect to other subjects. The third chapter, by art historian Vitor Marcelino, provides the publishing and exhibition history of the photographs included in Amazônia, a subjective visual experiment that documents the life of the Yanomami, and a clandestine publication when it came out in 1978. The images and sequences had first been reproduced in a magazine that defended the government’s incursion into Yanomami territory, but were later recast as disorienting slide-shows and museum installations which played a perhaps more ambiguous role in representing the Yanomami  – and the rainforest itself  – as on the one hand they became very visible in the public eye, but on the other, no threat to their survival seemed apparent. This subjective-experimental approach would, however, inform the content and layout of their photobook. Over the course of time, photographers Claudia Andujar and George Love were able to reclaim their photographic work and, with the help and input of a publishing team, voice their protest against the colonisation of the Amazon by the military. Marcelino’s chapter engages directly with the running theme of the book, namely



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

the collective production of meaning of cultural productions and artistic endeavours, by providing a history of the different viewing spaces of the Amazônia photographs, and how their meaning changed over time depending on collaborations and audiences, the latter being co-creators of meaning that is collectively produced. In the case of Amazônia, one such audience was the censor, who removed a text and a series of photographs, thus keeping alive a government-approved myth of the Amazon as a pure, untouched, virgin space; another such audience is the photobook market today, which celebrates Andujar as a contemporary artist, and mostly passes over George Love’s contributions and his pursuit of formal experimentation, perhaps for its own sake, but increasingly as a means of preserving the mystery and integrity of the subject. The fourth chapter, by critical theorist Andy Stafford, distinguishes Mohamed Bourouissa’s Temps mort (2014) from other carceral photobooks on account of the illegality of the methods used: texting and sending photographs on a smuggled smartphone from inside prison. Stafford argues that the collaboration between the photographer and his friend the inmate ‘Al’, which also produced a website, a film and an exhibition before becoming a book, is better understood as a collectivist enterprise, in which the photographer ‘lets go’ of authorship. All four authors in Part IV deal with photobooks in which pretentions to photographic artistry is either eschewed (in the case of the group portraits in the asylum reports, the architectural photographs and the clandestine smartphone snaps), or transformed into artistic experimentation (an attempt to communicate, using special effects, the subjective experience of a Yanomami ceremony, or of flying over the shifting landscapes of the Amazon). Although Andujar and Bourouissa are today celebrated photographers (Love, interestingly, less so), the emphasis in this part is not on how photographer-driven a publication can be, but on the place of a photobook in a national debate (racialised medical treatment, attitudes towards the Spanish-Mexican heritage of California, the human cost of exploiting the Amazon rainforest, the degree to which French prisoners can communicate with the outside world). Approval or censorship from the government, an institution, or a corporation are reminders that photobooks cannot be separated from the debates that founded them, and that these debates cast the photographer more as conduits than as creators. Part V returns to one of the most popular ideas associated with photographs, namely their ability to preserve the past. In that optic, the photobook is a memorial, and its subject is seen as ephemeral, however long or short the phenomena or tradition may be thought to last under natural conditions. Here, two attempts by high-profile artists to preserve the memory of cultural traditions are examined. The first is by Roland Penrose, poet, painter and amateur photographer, who was concerned with the survival of traditional rural life in Romania, having travelled there himself in the late 1930s. The second is by Walker Evans who, at the end of his life, took Polaroids of roadside signs and their individual letters, out of an interest in Americana, and a certain craftsmanship that had survived despite industrialisation.

21

22

The photobook world

The two chapters in this section, penned by curator and author Antony Penrose and literary and cultural critic Caroline Blinder respectively, draw from archival material to describe the conditions under which the two works were conceived: the first, a work of photoliterature, and an extremely rare example of an English Surrealist photobook; the second, an alphabet book which only existed as an ongoing project. While alphabet books (usually for children) and literary photobooks have occasionally been valorised in existing historiographies when allied to famous names, they remain marginalised as genres. As with many photobooks, and many of those discussed in this volume, whether they exist as singularities or as typical cases, they are best approached as case studies, fully historicised, which goes against the grain of the sweeping historical surveys, which of necessity require generalities. The way forward in photobook studies is without doubt to engage in micro-histories, and to relinquish the hubris of attempting a History.

Works cited Armstrong, Carol (1998). Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, MA: October/MIT. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2004). The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2006). The Photobook: A History, Vol.  2. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2014). The Photobook: A History, Vol. 3. London: Phaidon. Barthes, Roland (1967). ‘The Death of the Author’. English translation by Richard Howard. Aspen Magazine 5–6 (Fall/winter). Becker, Howard S. (2008). Art Worlds. 25th Anniversary Edition Updated and Expanded. Berkeley: University of California Press. [The first edition was published in 1982.] Bouillon, Marie-Ève (2017). ‘Naissance de l’industrie photographique. Les Neurdein, éditeurs d’imaginaires (1863–1918)’. PhD thesis, EHESS. Bouveresse, Clarisse (2017). Histoire de l’Agence Magnum. L’art d’être photographe. Paris: Flammarion. Brouws, Jeff, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner (eds) (2013). Various Small Books Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Cablat, Olivier (2019). ‘On the Role of Digital’. In Moritz Neumüller, What? Market? Market! Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus; Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market. https://unseenamsterdam.com/looking-back-market-what-market, and bit. ly/33zBE57. Cole, Teju (2020). ‘Smell the Ink and Drift Away: Why I Find Solace in Photobooks’. Guardian (24  February). www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/24/teju-colephotobooks-fernweh. Crossley, Nick (2015). Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: the Punk and PostPunk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–80. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Di Bello, Patrizia, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir (eds) (2012). The Photobook: from Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond. New York: I.B. Tauris.



Introduction: the photobook as confluence

Edwards, Elizabeth (ed.) (1992). Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Foster, Sheila J., Manfred Heiting and Rachel Stuhlman (eds) (2007). Imagining Paradise. The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at George Eastman House. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl; and Rochester, NY: George Eastman House. [Freed, Leonard] (1973). ‘New  York. A Lesson for the World: the Crime, the Violence, the Fear  – and How New  York is Managing to Live with Itself. An Investigation  by  George  Feifer, Photographs by Leonard Freed’. Sunday Times Magazine (4 March). Freed, Leonard (1980). Police Work. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone. Friedman, W. J. (2011). ‘The Zeigarnik Effect and Completing Everything’, accessed from MentalHelp.net on 11  September 2020. www.mentalhelp.net/stress/the-zeigarnikeffect-and-completing-everything/. Gernsheim, Helmut (1984). Incunabula of British Photographic Literature. London: Scolar Press. Goldschmidt, Lucien, and Weston J. Naef (1980). The Truthful Lens: A Survey of the Photographically Illustrated Book, 1844–1914. New York: The Grolier Club. Heimbach, James T., and Jacob Jacoby (1972). ‘The Zeigarnik Effect in Advertising’. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the Association for Consumer Research, ed. M. Venkatesan. Chicago, IL: Association for Consumer Research: 746–758. Jones, Tiffany K. (2016). ‘Current Dynamics of the Photobooks [sic] Market, Future Publishing Viability, and Potential for Audience Expansion’. MA dissertation, Oxford Brookes University. Krull, Germaine (1928). Métal. Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs. Krull, Germaine (2003). Métal. Cologne: Ann and Jürgen Wilde. Lederman, Russet, Olga Yatskevich and Michael Lang (eds) (2018). How We See: Photobooks by Women. New York: 10 × 10 Photobooks. Malais, Nicolas (2016). Bibliophilie et création littéraire (1830–1920), Cabinet Chaptal Éditeur, s.l. [Paris]. Maresca, Sylvain and Michaël Meyer (2013). Précis de photographie à l’usage des sociologues. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Meizel, Laureline (2017). ‘Inventer le livre illustré par la photographie en France 1876–1897’. PhD thesis, Université Paris I. Menger, Pierre-Michel (2009). Le travail créateur: S’accomplir dans l’incertain. Paris: Gallimard-Seuil. [Translated into English as The Economics of Creativity: Art and  Achievement under Uncertainty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.] Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2017). Photobook Phenomenon. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona/Fundació Foto Colectania/RM Editores. Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2019). What? Market? Market! Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus; Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market. https://unseenamsterdam.com/ looking-back-market-what-market, and bit.ly/33zBE57. Neves, José Luís Afonso (2017). ‘The Many Faces of the Photobook: Establishing the Origins of Photobookwork Practice’. PhD thesis, Ulster University. [Available on ethos.] Pfrunder, Peter, Martin Gasser and Sabine Münzenmaier (2012). Schweizer Fotobücher 1927 bis heute: Ein andere Geschichte der Fotografie – Livres de photographie suisses de 1927 à nos jours. Une autre histoire de la photographie – Swiss Photobooks from 1927

23

24

The photobook world to the Present: A Different History of Photography. Baden (Switzerland): Lars Müller Publishers; and Winterthur (Switzerland): Fotostiftung Schweiz. Prins, Ralph (1969). ‘Met foto’s vertellen. Ralph Prins  – Cas Oothuys’. Wereldkroneik (27 December). Ritchin, Fred, and Carole Naggar (2016). Magnum Photobook. London: Phaidon. Roth, Andrew (ed.) (2001). The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC. Shannon, Elizabeth (2010). ‘The Rise of the Photobook in the Twenty-First Century’. St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 14: 55–62. Sichel, Kim (2020). Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spence, Jo (1985). Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press, 1986. [Contains: ‘Some Questions and Answers’: 204–211.] Suermondt, Rik, and Mattie Boom (1989). Photography between Covers. The Dutch Documentary Photobook after 1945. Amsterdam: Fragment Uitgeverij. Suermondt, Rik, and Frits Gierstberg (2012). The Dutch Photobook: A Thematic Selection from 1945 onwards. New York: Aperture. Talbot, William Henry Fox (1844–46). The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans. [6 instalments, 24 salt paper prints.] Walker, Ian (2012). ‘A Kind of “Huh”: The Siting of Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962)’. In Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir (eds) (2012). The Photobook: from Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, 110–128. Ziegarnik, Bluma (1927). ‘Über das behalten von erledigten und unerledigten Handlungon’. Psychologische Forschungen 9: 1–85.

Part I The photobook market

Towards an understanding of the market for photobooks Moritz Neumüller1

While it seems reasonable to state that photographic books have significantly aided the acceptance of photography as an art form and the establishment of many photographic careers, there is less consensus about terminology and the history of this specific medium or ‘genre’ (Neves 2016; Neves, 2017:  15–40). Furthermore, the ‘photobook phenomenon’, as it has been called (Neumüller 2017), is situated at the crossroads of design practice, artists’ books, fanzines and magazines, and is of course part of the history of photography. Some scholars, such as Horacio Fernández, speak of ‘two histories of photography’, that is, one composed of a canon of masterworks in the museums and the other ‘in the form of books with nearly unlimited (re-)editions’ (Neumüller 2014: 79). This ‘revisionist history’ was an intent ‘to write the history of photo­ graphy through the photobook, but not a history of photobooks’ (Parr and Badger 2018:  320). The major concern of other scholars, however, is not so much whether it is possible, or even necessary to write this alternative history of photography through the photobook, but who is writing it, and how (Shannon 2010:  58). The current format of publication, established in the late 1990s, is books on books, based on connoisseurship, and the funds of private collections ‘reflecting the preoccupations of many of those responsible for making these selections. Collecting may encourage connoisseurship and vice versa, but the link between these books and the art market is often explicit’ (Shannon 2010:  59). In the years after the publication of Parr and Badger’s first two volumes of their Photobook History, critical voices detected a ‘paucity of critical literature’ on the subject of the photographic book, linked with a ‘boom on the international collector’s market that can in part be regarded as overheated’ (Schaden 2008: 338). Parr and Badger themselves reacted to this criticism with the argument that theirs was of course ‘a subjective view point, but objectivity has been given by our collective experience, by studying the subject for many years, and by talking to many people’, and that they ‘tried to cover the big picture and […] the project was a step in the right direction’ (Parr and Badger 2018: 321). It seems that these books, and most of all the three volumes by Parr and Badger, established a canon, and a shopping list for collectors.

1

28

Part I: The photobook market

In a community that is driven by the passion of its members, the influence of these ‘guru figures’ is often seen as useful to attract institutional support, but problematic in terms of market transparency and speculation. An example: The Afronauts by Cristina de Middel, self-published in 2012 in an edition of one thousand copies and with a price tag of €28, sells for more than €1,000 on the Internet today. However, such cases are exceptions, and the artists hardly ever profit from the secondary market transactions. They are what Ramón Reverté has called ‘polarised sales’: either a book sells very well, or not at all. According to de Middel herself, ‘the benefit of a successful book is not money; it actually is something you cannot buy with money: it is visibility and that people have access to your work’ (Neumüller 2017: 3). In any case, the book was re-published by the Archive of Modern Conflict in London in 2016 in an edition of one thousand, and despite the unit price of £42 (nearly double the original price) it sold out quickly. It seems significant to say that in the literature, there is no consensus over why (sometimes even, if) the market for photobooks is stagnating and whether there is potential for growth. An overall estimation of the market is that every year around two thousand photobooks are published, more than half of them by sixty leading publishing houses, the rest by smaller ones, by independent publishers, or by the photographers themselves (Neumüller 2017: 3–4). Many of the sales happen over the Internet, the marketing is done through social networks, and financing often uses crowdfunding. Consequently, bookstores specialised in the medium, such as Kowasa in Barcelona and Schaden in Cologne, had to close their doors, while more and more online distributors are popping up, sometimes in places such as Spain, but mostly in traditionally strong markets such as the United States, Japan, Germany, The Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom. Over the past years, we have seen a new interest in art market studies. However, even today, few quantitative art market studies exist, and most address the secondary market. While new apps, as well as large databases such as Magnum and artnet.com, help buyers on the art market, online databases and search engines such as AddAll.com are used in a similar way for finding photobooks. The photobook market could be an interesting field of inquiry for art market studies, because, just as for print-making and photography, it is possible to find and compare a large number of works available on the primary and secondary markets. Some attempts have been made to analyse the market through buyers’ choices. Abbe (2009) and Platt (2009) shared a list of photobooks purchased in a year, explaining how pricing was the key factor in their decisionmaking process (though other motivations were at play too). Spowart and Cooper (2015) conducted a survey project entitled ‘My Favourite Photobook’, where sixty-five buyers submitted a portrait of themselves with their favourite book, and discussed the reasons behind their choice. Jones (2016: 33) combined a secondary literature review with a survey strategy using web‐based questionnaires to collect quantitative and qualitative data from respondents mainly in the United Kingdom, Western Europe and North America. Some of her ­findings  – for example that buyers base their decisions on information they



Understanding the market for photobooks

receive via social media (72 per cent), reading book reviews online (66 per cent), visiting bookshops (59 per cent) and friend recommendations (56 per cent) – seem biased by the fact that the research was only done online, and via interest groups for photography and photobooks on social media. Another finding was that 38  per cent of photobook buyers do not purchase at arts book fairs ‘which suggests they do not attend, either because they are not aware of them, or that fairs [are] held outside their area and they do not travel to attend’ (Jones 2016: 35). This is where our own research becomes complementary and could help give a more complete picture, as it has been performed in the framework of an important book fair, and a rather small book market that is celebrated at a specialised festival for photobooks. That is, it covers areas hitherto understudied and overlooked in the literature. Market? What Market? (2017–19), a collaboration between Unseen Amsterdam Book Market and Photobook Week Aarhus, explored the nature of the photobook market in this context. Following a series of guest contributions to the Unseen Amsterdam’s website, and roundtable discussions in Aarhus and Amsterdam in 2017, we designed an online booklet, available for download as a PDF (Neumüller and Tuminas 2017),2 which brought together experts from the photobook community and their varied perspectives on the history of the photobook market as well as the challenges it faced at the time. As the 2017 editions of Unseen Book Market and Photobook Week Aarhus took place during the same weekend (21–24  September), the organisers decided to launch a joint discussion about distribution and selling strategies in the contemporary photobook market. The project Market? What Market? kicked off with a series of three Book Market Statements made by guest contributors on the Unseen Amsterdam’s website. The issues raised by the authors in their text entries were continued during the roundtable discussions in Aarhus and Amsterdam. Finally, the texts from the website, transcripts from the roundtable discussions, as well as two commissioned contributions were edited into a booklet with the following contents: Gerry Badger, ‘On Three Markets’; Olivier Cablat, ‘On the Role of Digital’; Sebastian Arthur Hau, ‘On the Community and the Market Space’; Round Table Discussions, ‘Quotes from Talks at Photobook Week Aarhus & Unseen Living Room’; Carlos Spottorno, ‘On Enlarging the Market’; and Natalia Baluta, ‘On Potential Audience’. Following the success of the online document, we decided to print the booklet and distribute it together with the Danish magazine KATALOG, in an edition of seven hundred copies. In 2018, it was decided to continue the project into a second edition, What? Market? Market!, to be focused on solutions for the challenges facing the field of the photobook. During the three days of Unseen Amsterdam 2018, Moritz Neumüller, curator of Photobook Week Aarhus, conducted over forty interviews with artists and publishers, while Daria Tuminas, head of Unseen Book Market, travelled to Denmark to conclude the research there. Artists, (self-)publishers, collectors, distributors and booksellers were asked to contribute to a participatory

29

30

Part I: The photobook market

research effort in order to document new ways of releasing the photobook from its self-imposed niche market, by finding alternative audiences, and raising awareness of the medium. The results of this research were presented alongside a series of texts written by guest contributors such as Bruno Ceschel (‘Resetting the Expert Community’), Frederic Lezmi and Markus Schaden (‘Street to Book, Book to Street’), Hannah Darabi (‘Self-Empowerment through a Book Form during the Iranian Revolution’), and Laurence Aëgerter (‘Photographic Treatment ©: A Photobook at Care Institutions’). In the middle of the booklet, eight pages were used to reflect upon the outcome of the interviews in the form of quotes, together with photos that were taken at Unseen Book Market 2018. Additionally, interviews with David Solo (‘From Performance to Digital: Sketching the Development’) and Sonia Lenzi (‘Last Portrait: A Photobook Reinforcing Relationships between Women’) were added. The second edition was also made available as a downloadable booklet and in printed form in July 2019, in an edition of six hundred copies (Neumüller and Tuminas 2017).3 Both booklets were produced to foster a better self-­ understanding of the photobook community and present the findings in the form of essays, quotes and interviews, together with photographs taken at Photobook Week Aarhus and Unseen Book Market, all in an eye-catching design by Vandejong Creative Agency. It is through such a presentation that they differ from academic research, the aim being to attract readers from the non-academic field. In their conception and realisation, they rely on a number of explicit or implicit assumptions and definitions formed and discussed by the authors. The first of them is the conception of the research field as a community, which has been little theorised or researched, even if there is a clear understanding that it exists, and a somewhat less clear idea of who it consists of. For example, buyers, sellers and publishers are the only three groups Jones (2016) concentrates on in her primary research on the photobook market. A fuller way to describe the ecosystem could be the following: • Artists, especially photographers, who publish their work in photobook form. • Collectors, and more generally speaking, buyers of these books, who may purchase directly from the artist (in person or via their websites), in a bookshop (online or offline), or at a book fair. When these buyers do not get the book of their choice (that they desire, even) before it sells out on the primary market, they are sometimes willing to buy a copy at a more elevated price on the secondary market, that is to say at auctions, from dealers, or other collectors (again both online and offline). • The production chain to make a book, meaning, beside the photographer, the editor, designer, printer, publisher, and distributor, as well as gallerists, agents, and other people who pre-finance parts of the costs (such as crowdfunders). Of course, the publishers, as entrepreneurs, play a central role in this chain.



Understanding the market for photobooks

• Sellers, comprising bookshop-owners, online and offline dealers, antiquarian booksellers and organisers of book fairs. Of course, the artists and their gallerists also fall into this group. • The organisers of non-commercial events around the photobook, such as festivals, talks and conferences. • The interested public who might visit these events, but not primarily to buy a book. It is important to recognise that our research (as with most other attempts in this direction) was conducted from within this community, as both authors are involved as producers, editors, writers, curators and organisers of events connected with photobooks (see biographies and references). According to Tiffany Jones, who also participated in the interviews at Unseen Book Market, the market for contemporary photobooks is an understudied area of publishing, but a current thrust of enthusiasm among publishers, buyers and booksellers suggests potential for significant sales growth (Jones 2016: 18). Our interviewees shared this view to a certain extent, but insisted that new strategies would be needed to make this happen. To understand the Photobook Market, as a field of research, it should probably be theorised as an art world system (Danto 1981; Dickie 1984), with its own rules; a rather ‘closed-circuit’ environment, meaning that many of the buyers are also producers of photobooks, or in the words of one interviewee, Bas Vroege: ‘What we do with photobooks – we sell them for ourselves, photobook lovers, makers and people involved. We pump 70–80 per cent of sales around within our community’ (Neumüller and Tuminas 2017:  12). This situation has been described before: ‘Too many young photographers are in a ghetto where they focus on style not content, and all buy books from each other. We need to go beyond that’ (Markus Schaden, cited in Pantall 2012: 71). As many as 98 per cent of photobook buyers who filled out Jones’s online questionnaire identified themselves as photographers, and 60 per cent said they had published a photobook (Jones 2016: 29). However, when compared to our own results, these percentages seem to be exaggerated, and a result of the research methodology which involved collecting data from online respondents only. Nevertheless, this decidedly incestuous behaviour could also be connected to the ‘social media bubble’, because a large amount of communication is indeed performed through social media: ‘Social media is the communication vehicle of choice and participants in the photobook network are driven to frenetically seek updates, reviews, new releases, posts about their books and the latest gossip through social media channels’ (Spowart 2015: 1). Thus, the influence of social media networks can produce herd behaviour, especially in connection with the Best of lists which create a sense of We must have this item (Jobey, 2015). In our own research, we observed that at fairs and festivals there are a good number of buyers who are neither photographers nor bookmakers, and yet as collectors, designers, students or visual artists, they are interested in photography and photobooks.

31

32

Part I: The photobook market

Our research also confirms the view that the primary market for photographic books is mostly a buyer’s market, meaning a situation in which supply heavily exceeds demand, giving purchasers an advantage over sellers in price negotiations in the secondary market for sold-out and out-of-print books (a market ever driven by the factors of rareness and condition, with ‘as new’, or ‘mint condition’ being the prerequisite for high-end transactions). There are also important non-economic factors at work, such as the egos of buyers and sellers, fetishism, personal connections, favouritism and so on. Apart from these factors, there seem to exist heterogenous buying motives that go beyond the aesthetic qualities of the photobook as an artwork, especially when bought because of a theme, the educational value of a book or some other considerations. A good example for the importance of this ‘non-photographic’ buyer segment is the book I Want to Disappear: Approaching Eating Disorders, by Mafalda Rakos, who claims that ‘45 per cent are people from non-photographic backgrounds who are affected by an eating disorder or who treat people with an eating disorder’ (Neumüller and Tuminas 2019: 14). Our conclusions from the interviews and the comparisons of the collected statements with comparable research, are threefold: first, the results of web-based questionnaires and calls on social media do not appear to fully reflect the overall picture of the photobook community. Second, interviews, expert talks and observation of transactions at fairs are valid and remain necessary research methods. Third, further research should include a wider perspective, and look into the future of the global market.

Coda A last point to add to this text is that it was originally written in late 2019 and could not be updated for this publication. It thus does not reflect the vast changes to the photobook market in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Future research will have to take this caesura into account, both in quantitative terms and in relation to the change in the interest of the readers, after the immersion into the digital realm and other game-changing transformations during the lockdowns.

Notes 1 The material of this text is rooted in the collaborative project and research conducted with Daria Tuminas within 2017–19. 2 The booklet can be downloaded from the Photobook Week Aarhus website. 3 The booklet can be downloaded from the Photobook Week Aarhus website.



Understanding the market for photobooks

Works cited Abbe, Dan (2009). ‘The Photobooks I Bought this Year’. Street Level Japan [online]. blog. mcvmcv.net/2009/12/13/the-photobooks-i-bought-this-year/. Abbe, Dan (2013). ‘Photobook Collecting in the Age of the Thousand-Dollar Zine’. American Photo [online]. www.popphoto.com/american-photo/photobook-collect​ ing-age-thousand-dollar-zine/. Danto, Arthur (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dickie, George (1984). The Art Circle. New York: Haven. Hodgson, Francis (2015). ‘Photobooks vs. Books of Photographs’. Photoworks [online]. photoworks.org.uk/photobooks-vs-books-photographs/. Jobey, Liz (2015). ‘Why Photobooks are Booming in a Digital Age’. Financial Times (27 February). www.ft.com/content/be1fd978-bceb-11e4-a917–00144feab7de. Jones, Tiffany K. (2016). ‘Current Dynamics of the Photobooks Market, Future Publishing Viability, and Potential for Audience Expansion’. MA dissertation, Oxford Brookes University. Lakin, Shaune (2008). ‘Review of The Photobook: A History’. History of Photography 32.4 (winter). Menzel, Katharina (2004). ‘Fotografie im Buch. Eine kurze Einführung’. In Printed Matter. Fotografie im/und Buch, Barbara Lange (ed.). Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Neumüller, Moritz, and Ángel Luis González (2011). Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade. Dublin: PhotoIreland. Neumüller, Moritz (2014). ‘The Spanish Photobook’. PhotoResearcher 21: 77–85. Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2017). Photobook Phenomenon. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona/Fundació Foto Colectania/RM Editores. Neumüller, Moritz (2018). The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Neumüller, Moritz, and Daria Tuminas (2017). Market? What Market? Edited by Moritz Neumüller, Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market; and Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus. bit.ly/2DAGZOR. Neumüller, Moritz, and Daria Tuminas (2019). What? Market? Market! Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market; and Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus. bit. ly/33zBE57. Neves, José Luís Afonso (2016). ‘What is a Photobook?’ Source Magazine: 6–9. Neves, José Luís Afonso (2017). ‘The Many Faces of the Photobook: Establishing the Origins of Photobookwork Practice’. PhD thesis, Ulster University. October. Pantall, Colin (2012). ‘Doing it by the Book’. British Journal of Photography (January): 64–71. Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger (2004, 2006, 2014). The Photobook: A History, Vols I–III. London: Phaidon Press. Parr, Martin and Gerry Badger (2018). ‘The Revised History of the Photobook’. In Neumüller The Routledge Companion, 317–322. Platt, Stacey (2009). ‘What May Come: On the Future of Photobooks’. The space in between. [online]. the-space-in-between.com/2009/12/13/come-future-photobooks/. Rakos, Mafalda (2017). I Want To Disappear: Approaching Eating Disorders. Baden: Edition Lammerhuber.

33

34

Part I: The photobook market Reverté, Ramón (2014). ‘Editor’s Note’. The PhotoBook Review 7, Aperture (spring). Schaden, Christoph (2008). ‘Eine Frage bis heute. Das Fotobuch im Visier der Sammler’. Photonews special number 5: 6–8. Schaden, Christoph (2008). ‘The Photobook  – Comments on a Medium that has been Largely Ignored by Photo-Historical Research’. In Jubilee – 30 Years ESHPh, Congress Minutes, Anna Auer and Uwe Schögl (eds.). Salzburg: Fotohof: 438–445. Shannon, Elizabeth (2010). ‘The Rise of the Photobook in the Twenty-First Century’. St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 14: 55–62. Spowart, Doug (2015). ‘Photobook Anxiety: Social Media and Indie Publishing’. Transcript of a paper presented at the symposium Borderless Futures: Reimaging the Citizen, Ballarat International Foto Biennale. Spowart, Doug, and Victoria Cooper (2015). ‘My Favourite Photobook: A Survey Project about Those Who Read Photobooks’. [online] World Photobook Day: Brisbane. ­wotwedid.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/wpbd-selected_submissions.pdf. Tuminas, Daria (ed.) (2017). The PhotoBook Review 12, Aperture (spring).

Theorising encounters with contemporary photobooks: situation, materiality and plurality Briony Anne Carlin The photobook is a three-dimensional, interactive medium for engaging with photography. Yet, all too often the holistic physical, designed object is lost in discussions that centre solely upon the photographs. Many reviews, anthologies and an increasing number of ‘histories’ are adept at describing the photobook’s subject matter, aesthetic, sequence, content of the images and the biography of the artist. This provides a thorough picture of ‘what the book is about’, but not always ‘what the book is’. The photobook is a material creation with a head, tail and (usually) a spine. To apprehend its contents one must pick it up, stroking or turning its pages in a fuzzy blend of affective, tactile and environmental experience. In other words, the photobook’s ‘history’ cannot be divorced from its social, interactional engagement. This text concentrates upon the multi-dimensional, designed experience as that which differentiates the photobook from other photographic practices. At a time when the medium is subject to new attention and evolution, I consider what it is to interact with a photobook and to engage with it as an object, and not solely as a collection of images. Utilising empirical examples observed in focus groups, book fairs, exhibitions and elsewhere, I present an exploration of the social and experiential qualities of photobooks, identifying photobook interactions as situated and embodied encounters. I then examine the broader value of this insight to a more general study of the photobook genre and the interconnectedness of its ‘art world’.

The social photobook Following Howard Becker, artworks are not isolated and static feats of creative achievement, but products that are embedded in their respective ‘art world’ of social and technical relations: from the invention of the tools, materials and people involved in their production, to the environments and audiences of their eventual display. This sociological approach fosters ‘an understanding of the complexity of the cooperative networks through which art happens’ (Becker 2008: 1).

2

36

Part I: The photobook market

If, then, the art world is a cooperative network performed by those technologies and people that create, distribute, appreciate, respond to and criticise the artwork, then the art world of the photobook is performed most vividly in the moments when somebody interacts with it. The photobook’s versatility means that interactions can occur in varied locations from high street bookshops (or even charity shops), to esoteric spaces like photobook awards and museum art libraries. Each environment attracts different audiences with varied motives for engaging with photobooks, aligned with the expectations and coded behaviours of that place. The circumstances of photobook encounters can shed light on the solidifying structures of the photobook’s art  ecology, by questioning the rules and roles of each environment, and how practices of photobook consumption vary. Each engagement with a photobook is specific to time, space and place, not to mention the state of mind and body of the individual. The situated event of photobook engagement, subject to human and environmental variables, can be described as an encounter, which Margaret Wetherell defines as unique ‘moments of embodied interaction’ (Wetherell 2012:  7). In the photobook encounter, the material environment and the haptic qualities of the encounter are affective, in that they inspire what Wetherell calls ‘embodied meaning making’ (Wetherell 2012: 4). The encounter is layered and complex, described as an event in which ‘various “small worlds” are put together in the moment’ (Wetherell 2012: 359), echoing Becker’s view that ‘art worlds’ are ‘performed’ in the consumption of the work.

The situated encounter Because photobooks appear in many places, it is pertinent to consider how their situation in certain environments frames both the attitude of the viewer and the role of the book in the encounter. For some time photobooks were often called ‘coffee table books’, which characterises the object in question as a frivolous symbol of cultural status and economic affluence, destined to lounge visibly but idly upon surfaces alongside sofas. Photobooks are sometimes gallery exhibits, whether they are placed on a plinth in a starring role, or play supporting actor to a collection of prints. They frequently jostle for attention in a sea of others of their kind as saleable commodities in a book shop or book fair. Each environment offers discretely different modes of presenting the photobook suggesting different functions and value. Location additionally impacts upon the encounter because it has a dramatic effect on the extent to which the viewer engages meaningfully with an individual photobook. Perception is shaped by environmental conditions, both physical and social (Merleau-Ponty 1962). After visiting a book fair, people have often expressed sentiments to me such as ‘I liked the look of this or that book, but I didn’t look at it long enough to want to buy it’ because the fair was too busy, or they felt a social awkwardness under the gaze of the publisher or artist manning the stall.



Encounters with contemporary photobooks

To explain how physical and social environment impacts individual and collective experience, Ben Anderson describes their ‘affective atmospheres’ in similar terms to the factors like air pressure, humidity and temperature that constitute meteorological atmosphere. Affective atmospheres are ‘a class of experience that occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity […] atmospheres are the shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge’ (Anderson 2009: 78), consisting of certain material and immaterial affects that permeate those within it. For example, the affective atmosphere of chaos in the book fair that emerges from the loud music, chatter, fluorescent lights, busy crowds, overwhelming numbers of books and the very short duration of the event pressurises purchases and intensifies the positive, indifferent or negatively felt judgements people make about books. Like the book fair, the museum is another example of how environment conditions our behaviour. Carol Duncan identifies tacit and explicit ways in which museums create architectural and biopolitical epistemologies that predispose responsive behaviour, through ‘the organisation of space and the visual, rhetorical and monumental characteristics of […] buildings and displays’ (see Whitehead 2016:  4). In reality, discovering a photobook in a museum often means encountering it on a book cradle, beneath glass, out of reach, prohibiting a manually interactive encounter and offering instead a static visual engagement with one page spread. Recent exhibitions such as Photobook Phenomenon (Centre de Cultura Contemporània Barcelona 2017) and Undercover (Erarta Museum St  Petersburg 2013–14) experimented with presenting the photobook through more varied modes of experience. Yet, finding novel ways to display the threedimensional photobook remains problematic and costly, confining the majority of displays to the non-interactive book-in-vitrine or book-on-table format with some details or highlights pre-selected for the viewer (e.g. 50 Years, 50 Books at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2019). Nonetheless, the monumental, public environment of the museum confers dominant or hegemonic practices of behaviour, which Jay Rounds observes as ‘choreographed’. Visitors move with ‘careful formality’ and ‘strike a contemplative pose  – stylized, a bit more rapt than strictly necessary’, performing their familiarity with the museum’s coded behaviours. This applies to the National Art Library (NAL): the procedure for ordering books requires readers be sufficiently informed to request their choices in advance, eliminating opportunities to judge a book by its cover. In the NAL the librarian places the book upon a special cushion and, aware of supervision, visitors sit up straight and turn the pages with delicacy, embodying the rules by which the museum regulates its public (see plate 1). The resulting etiquette frames the preciousness of the interaction and how the reader interprets it. The lengthy access procedure inspires a heightened quality of attention in the viewer by the time they finally sit down with the book, showing how the power of the institution shapes the reader’s intentional perception. Visitors to the Aperture Photobook Award display at Paris Photo (2018) likewise displayed ‘choreographed’ behaviours, where certain viewers demonstrated

37

38

Part I: The photobook market

a concentrated and studious encounter, despite the busy surroundings. In the art fair, where entry is by ticket or VIP pass, these initiated visitors were performing their experience within the photobook genre through the practised behaviours by which they examined their tactile elements and the time they spent consulting each interpretive text panel. This can be contrasted with the Photographers’ Gallery bookshop in London, where motivations of visitors entering this book store are less specific, as the majority enter following an exhibition visit upstairs. In the shop, visitors may be conscious of the expectation that products are there to be bought: although staff are friendly, knowledgeable and happy to talk books, the display furniture maximises stock and discourages leisurely perusal (at the time of observation, 2017). Interactions are further inhibited by conversation or having to juggle looking at a book with holding a handbag or a jacket, with no surface to support them, again giving the message that it’s a shop, not a library. Situational context is also a limiting factor in the encounter because of the question of accessibility. Who has access? It is easy to discuss the ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’ as an imagined participant, but they are context-specific. Photobooks are a niche class of object most commonly found in cultural forums with particular demographics: the museum, the art bookshop, the fair, are classed, gendered and/or racialised (or racialising) spaces, which may inhibit some individuals from entering them, precluding a photobook encounter altogether. The extent to which the individual reproduces the behaviours associated with such places, and the degree to which they perceive certain intended meanings in a photobook, are factors mediated by the individual and their habitus (Bourdieu 2010). An individual’s intellectual world, formed hermeneutically through lived experience, also informs their gaze and the ways in which they connect meaning or perceive narrative in the photobook they engage with. It is thus important to briefly acknowledge that the interpretations we form in these situated encounters are also filtered through a sediment of dispositions, tastes, knowledges and subjectivities, formed through socio-cultural background, identity and experience. For example, participants in one focus group responded diversely to For Every Minute You Are Angry, You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness by Julian Germain (Mack 2005). One participant related the ‘groovy’ cloth cover with other cultural reference points from a white Western experience such as the Swinging Sixties and her grandmother’s kitchen décor. She identified that this design invited a mildly melancholy response of nostalgia for a specific era of British pop culture, as also felt by the book’s subject. By contrast, a Chinese student in a focus group commented that the book was about a ‘gardener who is always happy, because of the happy flowers’, showing their differently nuanced interpretations according to cultural familiarity. In the engineered environment of the focus group, in which few participants had prior interest or experience with photobooks, differences in habitus and perception became more evident than in my natural observations of photo world



Encounters with contemporary photobooks

audiences. The research environment brought different people into contact with photobooks, people who, in their everyday lives, may not normally access them in usual spaces such as museums and libraries, thus showing how the situation of the encounter can facilitate different kinds of interactions, though it may also prohibit engagement altogether.

The embodied encounter This return to the individual participant in a photobook encounter brings us to my second point: occurring in a real-world situation, the encounter also involves a real, physical body. This leads us to identify the encounter as embodied, in terms of both manual bodily practices, and sensuous perception. As mentioned, the holistic, tactile experience is what distinguishes the photobook from broader photographic practice. However, the experience of holding, looking and reading is frequently absent from photobook criticism. In engaging with a book, we are negotiating the physical relation between the thing and ourselves (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 91–92, 143–144)  – can we reach it, how heavy is it, can we pick it up? These perceptions seem automatic. Yet, to pick up and open a book is not innate knowledge, but a kind of ‘embodied habitus’ (Wetherell 2012: 103–105), a skill culturally acquired through social experience and mediated by an individual’s physical strength or (dis)ability. For example, in cultures of languages with right-to-left script, people are predisposed to open books with a different orientation to left-reading people. The visitors I described looking with systematic care at the photobooks in the Aperture Award exhibition area also demonstrated embodied habitus in their handling of the books on display. Observing these manual practices illuminates the subconscious value judgements that occur when picking up a book, before properly looking at it. While our bodily practices vary culturally, they can also be consistently shaped by a book’s dimension and design, similar to what in literary analysis Wolfgang Iser calls ‘response-inviting structures’ (Iser 1978: 34), or Gerard Genette terms ‘paratext’ (Genette 1997): the surrounding contextual information, whether it be delivered by the colophon, binding, supporting essays, pull-out pages, or even the weight of different paper stock, can command certain manual behaviours and interpretive associations. A heavy photobook might connote worth or seriousness, requiring the reader to sit at a table or rest it upon a surface. Thinking expansively about a book’s materiality can also show us the physical and economic organisation of the photobook world. Large books require more funds to produce, they cost more to post, so are less portable. They must be accommodated by special bookshelves in shops and library storage, such as the NAL, where for space economy, books are ordered by spine height rather than subject, showing that the material requirements of the book exert agency upon its spatial organisation and collections care. The special edition of Sebastião

39

40

Part I: The photobook market

Salgado’s book Genesis (Taschen 2013) was so large it came with its own stand. A large book therefore aspires to a similar affect of permanence and importance that Carol Duncan identifies in the authority imparted by monumental museum architecture, or the affect of reverence that Chris Whitehead remarks in the sanctifying use of a spotlight in a dark gallery (Whitehead 2012:  27). Interestingly, reception of Salgado’s book focused upon the epic, ‘god-like’ nature of the artist’s oeuvre and formal image elements such as the vastness of composition (e.g. Manzoor 2013). Such responses are clearly aided by the book’s large dimension, yet they omit any reference to its physicality. The reason haptic perceptions are often overlooked is we have a tendency towards occularcentrism when reflecting on our art experiences, something that can be traced back to Enlightenment modes of thought. Constance Classen’s and David Howes’s studies of eighteenth-century museum visitors chart how the body and the haptic realm have gradually disappeared from cultural appreciation and criticism, in favour of signs that read ‘do not touch’ (Howes 2005; Classen 2007). Nevertheless, some of the most vivid responses to photobooks in focus groups were sensory reactions. Having commented on the pleasurable ‘book smell’ of one photobook, participants turned their attention to Mark Duffy’s Vote No. 1, and somebody immediately exclaimed, ‘Ugh, I don’t want to smell this one.’ In this book the images of political campaign posters are printed on plasticky-feeling paper, shiny, like a tabloid magazine, and spiral bound, making it feel more disposable. I asked the participant to explain her ‘bad smell’ reaction and she immediately identified the images as having ‘a political aesthetic’. It transpired this response was an intangible mix of visual perception, texture, sense memory, her political convictions, media coverage, as well as the contrast with the previous subject matter, all of which influenced this encounter and response. The participant’s response to ‘smell’ the book with her eyes echoes eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, who asserted the ‘visual apprehension of materiality, distance and spatial depth would not be possible at all without the cooperation of the haptic memory’ (c.f. Pallasmaa 2005: 42). The photobook’s affective and artistic effect therefore lies in its synesthetic encounter: neither as a detached artwork nor a conventional book, it fuses a hybridised, hermeneutic sensory experience that links inextricably with memory and cognition.

The plural encounter The consideration of single, situated and embodied photobook encounters is complicated by the fact that photobooks, as published products, are physically numerous, with many copies existing in different locations, for different purposes. This fact conjures to mind a plurality of encounters, happening in the past, present and the potential futures, all leaving their trace on the photobook and its reader.



Encounters with contemporary photobooks

Douglas Crimp charted the volatility of where books can be transported to and how they can be used (or abused) in his profiling of the filing of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) in diverse public libraries (Crimp 1989: 3–13), a task continued by Ian Walker, who sought to position his own re-edition alongside the university library’s copy of the original book. Walker imagined them both as originally identical, but recounting how the latter ‘was subject to all the rigours and accidents of bedsit life’ during the decades students could check it out of the library. He continues, ‘the two copies of the book can be seen as a kind of physical analogue of the ways that its meaning has shifted and turned over the past 40 years’ (Walker 2012: 125). He goes on to chart latter variations of ‘Gasoline Stations’ projects by artists that expand upon Ruscha’s concept to reflect changing human geographies elsewhere (Walker 2012: 124). This consideration helps us to imagine an object biography of a given photobook, and provides a starting point from which to map the networks of production and consumption surrounding one book in its many copies (Appadurai 1986). While still ignorant of Crimp’s and Walker’s explorations, I often looked at the white cover of my 1988 first edition of In Flagrante by Chris Killip, bought second-hand, and wondered about the smaller book or bookend that had stood beside it in a former life, leaving its trace in a negative shadow of sun discolouration. I imagined a dialogue between my copy (at home) with other real and imagined copies of the book without discoloured covers, such as the reference copy in the V&A curatorial office (at work), or the NAL’s edition (available on special request), which I expect is pristine. In my encounter I am also reliving my first engagement with the book in Side Gallery in Newcastle a decade ago, and the memory of my delight in finding a bargain copy in a charity shop. Engaging with my In Flagrante recalls multiple other In Flagrantes from different times and contexts, together and simultaneously in the same encounter. The encounter is an experience that is, in the words of Marilyn Strathern, ‘more than one, and less than many’ (Strathern 1991: 35), actualising and re-enacting many imagined, othered ‘books’ in each interaction with the single physical book. This notion of plurality aligns with Annemarie Mol’s view that ‘objects come into being – and disappear – with the practices in which they are manipulated. And since the object of manipulation tends to differ from one practice to another, reality multiplies’ (Mol 2002: 5). Other multiple realities are acting in my encounter, too. Noticing the affective sequencing of images implies the agency of the book’s dummy, now in the Martin Parr Foundation archive. Without the precedence of this separate physical object, the book I hold may have been realised differently, eliciting different narrative associations and rhythms. Admiring the depth of the blacks, I think of the chemical development of the deep black ink and the scarti pages used to clean the press between printing, material traces of which were likely destroyed long ago. More could be said too about the impact of reeditions of In Flagrante acting upon a contemporary encounter with the original book. Following the Errata Edition in the series ‘Books on Books’ (2008), with an essay by Gerry Badger, Killip published In Flagrante Two, with photo publishing

41

42

Part I: The photobook market

powerhouse Steidl (2016), in much larger dimensions and hardback, undoubtedly encouraged by the sustained interest in the book: in this later edition, the images each take up a single page, no longer ‘in the gutter’ (losing a little of the poetic connotation of that phrase), and gone too are the essays, leaving the images to speak for themselves. These factors in the book’s history are what allows the encounter to occur exactly as it does, meaning in a tangential, abstracted way, they are also present in the interaction. We see that beyond its physical form, each photobook also exists as a cognitive, ‘platonic’ concept (Walker 2012:  125), which multiplies across immaterial sites such as the internet, in reviews, in peoples’ memories. Although these are not physical existences, they are agential in influencing a reader’s interpretive encounter. From this divergent mode of thought, we can acknowledge the magnitude of factors that could tacitly act in the encounter. Photobooks are made in the world: the process of their invention and production is temporal, progressive, collaborative, linked to many agents and stakeholders, budgets, logistical or technical possibility. Dominant narratives about the artist’s biography or the subject matter need to be pluralised with broader research into the role of multiple agents in each photobook’s art world. For example, the extent of the input of the designer is often under-discussed, though it can range from laying up the photographer’s mock-up into Adobe InDesign, to enormous creative influence in making decisions about sequencing, tone, etc. An example is Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1956), which many celebrate for its ‘cinematic’ sense of motion, principally created by the layout and use of many snapshots of the same scene. When compared to earlier and subsequent books by van der Elsken, this distinctive aspect of the book appears to be largely due to van der Elsken’s collaboration with designer Juriaan Schrofer, whose pencilled instructions can be seen on the book’s final dummy (Berghmans 2017). However, while the book’s innovative design is still celebrated today, Schrofer’s name rarely appears. Thus, considering only the finished photobook product is insufficient: to understand the medium and its agency it is important to view the ultimate book object as inherently connected to the tangle of people, processes and ideas that produced it and preceded it. Visualising photobooks in this more conceptual, connected manner allows us to form more nuanced understandings about how they cross-pollinate, circulate, are talked about and reviewed. It also directs our attention to consider the sites in which – and the attitudes with which – they will ultimately be consumed in individual encounters.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated lateral ways of engaging critically with the photobook through its situated and embodied encounter, aiming to pluralise its discourse beyond conventional forms of criticism adopted from general



Encounters with contemporary photobooks

photographic history. Our interactions with photobooks are the platform from which we identify and pursue our lines of inquiry when conducting research; they could be the moments that inspire the research altogether. Therefore when writing about or exhibiting this photobook research, it is important to communicate what meaningful insights can be learned from simply considering the material encounter itself. We can learn a great deal from looking at images, and at photographs, but as photobook practice becomes more self-conscious and diverse, works in this medium deserve specific attention to their materiality beyond their representational content. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, ‘the medium is the message’, and indeed media are not transparent. We can gain greater understanding of the photobook genre and the nuanced ways in which it works through looking at how the holistic photobook experience facilitates the forming of particular relations to its images. Here I have focused upon the haptic qualities of the photobook encounter, and omitted any discussion of the role of text content in the encounter. The same argument could be made that discussions of books that fail to give thoughtful consideration to the role of written content also neglect to engage with the complete creative product. The connecting thread throughout the encounters I have profiled here is a social consideration of who is interacting with a material photobook, in what way, in what situation, and how they respond accordingly. This consideration would advance developing discourse on photobooks by enabling greater understanding of photobook audiences, the photobook as a technology and how our relations to cultural products are constantly in flux.

Works cited Anderson, Ben (2009). ‘Affective Atmospheres’. Emotion, Space and Society 2.2: 77–81. Appadurai, Arjun (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Howard (2008). Art Worlds, 25th Anniversary Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Berghmans, Tamara (2017). ‘Love on the Left Bank: A Photo-Novel that is Really a Film’. The PhotoBook Review 12: 12–13. Bourdieu, Pierre (2010). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984; London: Routledge. [First French edition 1979.] Classen, Constance (2007). ‘Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum’. Journal of Social History 40.4: 895–914, 1072. Crimp, Douglas (1989). ‘The Museum’s Old / The Library’s New Subject’. In The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge: MIT Press. Duffy, Mark (2015). Vote No. 1. Vienna: Anzenberger Press. Duncan, Carol (1995). Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge.

43

44

Part I: The photobook market Genette, Gerard (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [First French edition 1987.] Howes, David (2005). Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Iser, Wolfgang (1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Æsthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Killip, Chris (1988). In Flagrante. London: Martin Secker & Warburg. McLuhan, Marshall (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT. [First published in 1964.] Manzoor, Sarfraz (2013). ‘Sebastião Salgado: A God’s Eye View of the Planet’. The Telegraph. (12 April). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Mol, Annemarie (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy. Rounds, Jay (2006). ‘Doing Identity Work in Museums’. Curator: The Museum Journal 49.2: 133–150. Strathern, Marilyn, and Maurice Godelier (1991). Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van der Elsken, Ed (1956). Love on the Left Bank. London: André Deutsch; Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain des Prés. Amsterdam: Bezige Bij. Walker, Ian (2012). ‘A Kind of “Huh?”: The Siting of Twenty-six Gasoline Stations’. In The Photo Book: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, ed. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir. London: I.B. Tauris. Wetherell, Margaret (2012). Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London and Los Angeles: SAGE. Wetherell, Margaret (2013). ‘Affect and Discourse – What’s the Problem? From Affect As Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice’. Subjectivity 6: 349–368. Wetherell, Margaret (2016). ‘How To Analyse Museum Display: Script, Text, Narrative’. CoHere Critical Archive. http://digitalcultures.ncl.ac.uk/cohere/wordpress/wp-con​ tent/uploads/2016/10/WP1-CAT-1.2.pdf (accessed 7 December 2019). Whitehead, Chris (2012). Interpreting Art. London: Routledge.

Part II Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

Wonder Woman and other fantasies: Joan Lyons and the photo-based artists’ book Jessica S. McDonald American artist Joan Lyons (b. 1937) has worked in a remarkable variety of media over the last sixty years, and has produced more than forty artists’ books. A tremendously influential teacher as well, she was on the faculty of the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), an independent, artist-run organisation with a graduate programme in Rochester, New York, for nearly thirty-five years.1 Alongside her work as an artist and educator, Lyons has played a critical role in ­supporting – and perhaps defining – the field of artists’ books in America. As head of the VSW Press from 1972 to 2004, Lyons oversaw the production of more than 450 titles, many by artists whose ideas took shape with the design and printing expertise, the facilities, and the distribution channels of VSW.2 In a short introduction to an interview with Lyons conducted in 1976 and published in Photography Between Covers: Interviews with Photo-Bookmakers (1979), Thomas Dugan noted that ‘Amazingly, she is as involved in other people’s book projects as she is in her own, and sometimes, it seems, more involved. Her energy and selflessness is continually directed toward books, and the possibilities inherent in that medium’ (Dugan 1979: 92). Building on the momentum of an independent art publishing conference held at VSW in 1979, Lyons edited the groundbreaking volume Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, in 1985. Examining the ‘origins, attributes, and potentials’ of what she called a ‘highly independent and under-acknowledged art form’, Lyons’s anthology stands as a foundational text informing the historiography of artists’ books (Lyons 1985: 8). Lyons’s brief introduction to the anthology, with its modest attempt to codify the ideas and energies that unified the nascent field of artists’ books, has since served as a springboard for contemporary writers on the subject. In a frequently cited passage, Lyons wrote: Artists’ books began to proliferate in the sixties and early seventies in the prevailing climate of social and political activism. Inexpensive, disposable editions were one manifestation of the dematerialization of the art object and the new emphasis on art process. Ephemeral artworks, such as performances and installations, could be documented and, more importantly, artists were finding that the books could be artworks in and of themselves. It was at this time too that a

3

48

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90 number of artist-controlled alternatives began to develop to provide a forum and venue for many artists denied access to the traditional gallery and museum structure. Independent art publishing was one of these alternatives, and artists’ books became part of the ferment of experimental forms. Many saw the book as a means for reaching a wider audience beyond the confines of the art world; others anticipated the appropriation of images and/or techniques of mass media for political or aesthetic reasons. (Lyons 1985: 7)

Though Lyons was writing about a loosely formed community, her text aptly describes her personal trajectory as a book artist. Lyons had produced twenty artists’ books by 1980, yet early on she had been denied access to traditional publishing structures as well as museum structures, all of which were still overwhelmingly controlled by men. Ultimately produced outside those institutional confines, the books Lyons made in the 1970s served as vehicles for her own political and social activism, and helped her find a new audience of women. She told Dugan in 1976, ‘I spent the first part of my life trying to reach an audience of men. I didn’t even realize women were an audience. That’s the kind of awareness that’s come to a lot of women lately’ (Dugan 1979: 98). Printed in small editions, Lyons’s books were noticed by other interested artists and writers, especially when those interests intersected with the women’s movement. When Printed Matter co-founder Lucy Lippard listed some of her favourite visual books for the feminist journal Chrysalis in 1977, for example, she started off with ‘Everything I’ve seen by the virtuoso Joan Lyons’ (Lippard 1977: 80). This first decade of Lyons’s prolific bookmaking is the subject of this chapter, originally prepared in response to an invitation to discuss Lyons’s work as part of a conference panel titled ‘American Photobooks as Feminist Self-Fashioning, 1970–1990’.3 Published interviews and discussions of Lyons’s pioneering role as a book artist often focus primarily on The Gynecologist (1989) and My Mother’s Book (1993), exemplars of her sophisticated book design and most compatible with the narrative and diaristic modes associated with feminist art. Yet her earlier books are perhaps most revealing in tracing the progression of Lyons’s ‘feminist self-fashioning’. This chapter examines the feminist underpinnings of the photobased artists’ books Lyons made in the 1970s and tracks the evolution of her books over that single decade. It begins by considering her bookmaking practice as an act of self-empowerment, circumventing male-dominated museum and publishing structures. It follows Lyons’s increasing engagement with ‘women’s issues’ through overt themes and imagery, and finds that by the end of the 1970s, her books assert the legitimacy of women’s experience as a subject for art. Through it all, this chapter emphasises the very circumstances of her book production, requiring Lyons the artist to navigate competing demands on Lyons the wife and mother. Lyons (née Fischman) grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, as the only child of second-generation Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. Lyons’s lively presence throughout the Lafayette High School yearbook for 1953 suggests that she had identified herself as an artist and aligned herself with



Wonder Woman and other fantasies

the struggle for women’s equality by the time she graduated at age 16.4 That year she was art editor of the yearbook – designing the cover and contributing illustrations throughout – and was captain of the ‘Twirlers’, a group that performed a baton-twirling routine ‘symbolizing the campaign for women’s suffrage’ (Epstein and Fischman [Lyons] 1953: 22). After graduation, Lyons left the city for the rural environs of Western New  York to enrol in the ceramics programme at Alfred University. There she was exposed to a range of media in art foundation courses, including painting, sculpture, graphic design and photography. She found a mentor in John Wood, a young graduate of the Institute of Design in Chicago who joined the Alfred faculty in 1954. Through him she studied image sequences, made experimental books and developed a strong interest in printmaking. She completed her undergraduate degree in 1957 and accepted a graduate fellowship at Mills College in Oakland, California, but at the end of her first semester her father died, and she returned to live with her mother in Brooklyn. Over the next year and a half Lyons explored a variety of entry-level design jobs in Manhattan and, hoping to learn more about printing, went to work for a few job printers. As she later told British oral historian Cathy Courtney, however, ‘It was hard because they definitely did not want to hire a woman, and, as they would not let me near a printing press, I worked in the prepress department’ (Courtney 1999: 43). In December 1958 Lyons married photographer Nathan Lyons, whom she had first met in 1955 at Alfred. She left New  York City to join him in the mid-sized city of Rochester, New York, where in 1957 he had begun working at George Eastman House. Though she found some freelance design work there, the equipment necessary for her own art making was largely unavailable to her. She later recalled, ‘I didn’t have access to a kiln and didn’t have access to printmaking facilities […] I started painting and drawing a lot and remained a frustrated printmaker’ (Dugan 1979: 93–94). In addition to these practical limitations, the demands of marriage and motherhood had a profound impact on her aspirations as an artist. Reflecting on those early years in Rochester more than three decades later, Lyons recalled feeling isolated and often angry. ‘It was difficult for me coming into Nathan’s life because I felt disconnected’, she told Courtney. ‘The people we knew were all photographers and all men. To them I was Nathan’s wife. It’s not easy to be somebody’s wife. […] We had three children in five years. Suddenly I was wife and mother and caretaker of photographers’ (Courtney 1999: 44). Nathan Lyons was promoted to curator and associate director of Eastman House in 1965, making the Lyons residence a bustling meeting place. The workshops Nathan Lyons had established in 1959 also continued two or three nights each week in the Lyonses’ living room. In an interview in 1976, Joan Lyons recalled quietly resenting the ‘hordes of photography students who came through, that I was waiting on all the time’, while she struggled to find time for her own work (Tucker 1976: 5). Throughout the 1960s, Lyons maintained her studio practice almost exclusively in the two hours her children napped each afternoon. Remarkably productive nonetheless, she showed paintings, drawings

49

50

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

and collage in solo exhibitions at the well-respected, woman-run Schuman Gallery in Rochester in 1965 and 1968,5 and at the Arts Center at Nazareth College in 1969. Yet as was the experience of many women working at the time, especially those living outside major art world centres, she did not feel she was being taken seriously as an independent artist. Lyons’s early exhibitions were more often discussed in the ‘Women’s World’ section of the local newspaper than reviewed by art critics. In 1968, in a feature article published to coincide with a solo exhibition of her paintings  – and printed alongside a story titled ‘Mayors in Skirts’  – Lyons was identified as the wife of Nathan Lyons and a mother of three (Nizzi 1968: W1). Circumstances abruptly changed for Joan Lyons in August 1969, when Nathan Lyons left George Eastman House and founded the Visual Studies Workshop. Though well known by then as a photographer, Nathan Lyons had, like Joan Lyons, studied with John Wood at Alfred University, and conceived of visual studies very broadly. From the beginning Nathan Lyons had, according to Joan Lyons, ‘understood that a focus on making, collecting, and viewing visual books is indispensable to visual studies – and that print is a necessary tool for artists and photographers’ (Lyons 1985: 8). With her children now of school age, Lyons gradually began teaching printmaking and non-silver photographic processes and, starting with the acquisition of a used 11 × 17 Chief offset printing press at the end of 1971, oversaw the establishment of the Visual Studies Workshop Press. It is worth noting here that Lyons, while retaining her domestic responsibilities, was now also formally employed by her husband. This paradox did not escape her, and emerged years later as a theme in her book Twenty-Five Years Ago (1998). The book catalogues the contents of a wallet stolen from Lyons in 1972 and recovered years later. Lyons notes that her cards and documents were all in her husband’s name, adding that ‘Even my paycheck, $42.50, was signed by him.’ Yet while Nathan Lyons worked as director and taught the graduate photography seminars at VSW, Joan Lyons ran the print shop with a great deal of autonomy. And as an artist, Lyons capitalised on her newfound control of equipment traditionally operated by men, and began making books almost immediately. Lyons’s first editioned books, Self Impressions (1972) and In Hand (1973a), were process-driven experiments, testing the capabilities of VSW’s new printing equipment and early photo-based copy technologies. The visual elements of Self Impressions were created during a workshop in November 1971. As part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Generative Systems programme, artists Sonia Sheridan and Keith Smith brought a 3M Color-in-Color copy machine to VSW and encouraged faculty and students to explore its image-making potential (Sheridan 1972: 2–4). Lyons made images of her face and body on the copy machine, and later recalled the overwhelming impulse, seemingly shared by ‘everybody’, to record traces of their bodies (McDonald 2019). Production of each image was complex, relying on several intermediate transfer sheets including three zinc-coated black-and-white separation copies. Ostensibly waste products, these intermediates stood out to Lyons for their silvery surface and unusual



Wonder Woman and other fantasies

grain structure. At the conclusion of the workshop, she retained several of these intermediates for an undetermined future project. When the Visual Studies Workshop acquired the Chief offset press weeks later, Lyons revisited her Color-in-Color experiments and created the sequence of twenty-eight images that became Self Impressions. She took advantage of the unusual texture of the intermediates she had gathered, photographing them directly and making offset prints without introducing a screen into the process (Freeman 1995: 11). Printed in a rich shade of purple-black, the images appear to be etched in delicate detail. The internal sequence of Self Impressions, punctuated by seventeen blank pages, begins with images of Lyons’s face and hair and moves to her hands and her feet, with unexpected glimpses of her husband’s hands and face appearing near the mid-point. Bracketing the principal sequence are three introductory images of Lyons’s hands holding a favourite Zuni necklace, and five images of her hands and body alongside a palm frond, a sand dollar, and the bones of a tiny sea creature. Lyons’s second book, In Hand, takes the latter visual theme as a point of departure, comprising thirty-three images of personal objects held in Lyons’s hands. The titles of these first two books readily refer to their immediate subjects as well as to an oblique form of self-representation. Moreover, they subtly point to Lyons’s ability to take the means of production into her own hands, and to ‘do it herself’ from start to finish. The next books Lyons made exhibit an increasing awareness of, and solidarity with, the politics of the women’s movement that was gaining traction in the early 1970s. She pursued print and book projects simultaneously while exploring these themes, and understood there to be fluidity between the two forms. Indeed, her print portfolios were sometimes collected as art in book form; thus, it is useful

Figure 3.1  Joan Lyons. Self Impressions. Rochester (NY): Visual Studies Workshop, 1972, 52 pages. Offset from 3M Color-in-Color intermediaries, adhesive with paper covers. 8.25 × 10.5 in. Edition of 75.

51

52

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

to consider the portfolio Artifacts (1973b) as a bridge connecting In Hand with the books that followed.6 Artifacts was Lyons’s response to the everyday objects and structures imbued with significance by male Pop artists, like Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations or Andy Warhol’s soup cans. These men understood printing, advertising and commercial art, and so did Lyons, but she wanted to investigate the intersection of commercial art and fine art from a woman’s perspective. She  recalls asking herself, ‘What would my iconography be if I were trying to isolate objects that I felt had a kind of power and importance in my world?’ Each of the ten offset lithographs in Artifacts monumentalises one of the ‘personal power objects’ of her domestic and occupational sphere – each made of fabric – including her daughter’s newspaper delivery bag, her own printer’s apron (see plate 2), and a shop rag used for press cleanup. Around this time, Lyons has recalled, she was ‘just beginning to see that it was ok to draw from your life’ (McDonald 2019). In the books Wonder Woman (1974) and Bride Book Red to Green (1975) Lyons took a more pointedly feminist stance, ‘drawing from her life’ to protest traditional gender roles. Lyons created Wonder Woman in collaboration with Juliet McGrath, a poet who had been editor of the Chicago Review before accepting an appointment as assistant professor of English at the University of Rochester in 1971.7 Once the two had agreed to work together on a book project, Lyons studied a sampling of McGrath’s poems and selected one called ‘Wonder Woman’. Lyons had long been a fan of the comic book character, one of the few female heroes in popular culture during her childhood in the 1940s. Wonder Woman had re-emerged as a feminist icon on the cover of the debut issue of Ms., the magazine that helped galvanise the burgeoning women’s movement, in July 1972. Perhaps this is why, in 1974, McGrath’s ‘Wonder Woman’ struck Lyons as ‘a feminist macho poem’ (Dugan 1979: 96). In it, McGrath speculates about the pick-up lines a woman might use to entice famous men if she were in a position of social power (Walsh 1976: C2). In McGrath’s role-reversal fantasy, the female narrator tells bodybuilder Charles Atlas that she has dreamed of him standing on a beach, trousers rolled up, staring pensively out to sea. Atlas replies, ‘At last – someone who loves me for my mind.’ Around these satirical scenarios, Lyons designed a flipbook with lines of McGrath’s poem printed in letterpress on five translucent parchment leaves interspersed throughout the book’s twenty-nine images. The sequence begins with photographs of Lyons, standing in for the conventional American housewife, labouring at an ironing board with an unraveling hairdo and unhappy face. As the sequence progresses, Lyons slowly transforms into the Wonder Woman of the original comic – and the 1972 issue of Ms. – and finally runs away. The image of a brassiere, sewn by hand from an American flag by Lyons, wraps around the cover of the small, square book, with its stars on the back and stripes on the front. Wonder Woman’s subversive critique of the American Dream becomes more complicated – and perhaps even more potent – when one considers the original context in which its photographs were made. When Lyons was photographed at



Wonder Woman and other fantasies

the ironing board in the late 1960s, she was not posing for the camera; she was finishing her family’s laundry, minding her three young children and tending to an overnight house guest – photographer Dave Heath, whose negatives she later borrowed for this project. Lyons laughed about these contradictions in 2019, commenting that, ‘As a good feminist, I came home and did the laundry and cooked dinner. It was a different time’ (McDonald 2019). Like so many homemakers expected to do it all, Lyons embodied the everyday ‘wonder woman’, yet running away wasn’t a realistic option. Foregoing the triumphant finale of Wonder Woman, Bride Book Red to Green is a bleak meditation on marriage. A formal portrait of a woman in a wedding gown is repeated on each of the book’s forty-two pages, gradually fading from one colour to the other and nearly vanishing in the process (see plates 3 and 4).

Figure 3.2 Joan Lyons. Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974, 74 pages. Offset and letterpress, adhesive with paper covers. 5.25 × 5.75 in. Edition of 100.

53

54

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

Figure 3.3  Joan Lyons. Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974, 74 pages. Offset and letterpress, adhesive with paper covers. 5.25 × 5.75 in. Edition of 100.

Lyons described the printing technique used to make the book to Courtney: ‘I made Bride Book Red to Green using a “found” bride (looking very unhappy) and explored what I could do with the plates on the offset press if I turned the ink off and kept running paper through. The “bride” faded […] Many of my books at this time were concerned with ideas that evolved out of the process of making them as well as being based on feminist/political ideas’ (Courtney 1999: 47). In this book, process is as important as image in visualising the bride’s gradual loss of identity. Lyons later referred to this book as ‘a one-liner, a somewhat tonguein-cheek contribution to the serious and theoretical feminist practice prevalent at that time’ (Lyons 2006). The books Lyons made after Bride Book are less overtly provocative, instead exploring the cultural significance of ‘women’s work’ and the legitimacy of women’s experience as a subject for art. The print portfolio Prom (1975) is



Wonder Woman and other fantasies

Figure 3.4  Joan Lyons. Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974, 74 pages. Offset and letterpress, adhesive with paper covers. 5.25 × 5.75 in. Edition of 100.

instructive as another transitional work, linking the preceding and subsequent books (see plate 5). When the six lithographs that make up Prom are assembled in a 2 × 3 grid, they form a life-sized reproduction of the prom dress Lyons made for her daughter Elizabeth in 1975. That year Lyons received a New York State grant to fund a print project,8 and when that project was delayed by her daughter’s urgent request for a handmade dress, she decided to let go of the ‘pretense’ of separating her life from her work and turn the dress into her project (‘Some Words’). In its physical presentation the portfolio suggests both the book form and a family keepsake; as Lyons has noted, the dress itself appears to have been pressed into a book like a corsage. The portfolio memorialises the dress, a product

55

56

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

of ‘women’s work’, as an important symbol of a rite of passage. Lyons felt that making the portfolio was risky – that it would be regarded as too personal, too sentimental and too pastel. She told Courtney in 1996, ‘I assumed I couldn’t show it to anyone and then I thought, “This is what my life is about. Cloth and recipes are what women’s lives are measured in. This is culturally significant and I’m going to get it out there”’ (Courtney 1999: 49). The conviction that women’s lives are culturally significant motivated Lyons’s next book, Abby Rogers to Her Grand-daughter (1976). Lyons based her book on a letter, written in 1925, marking the day that an heirloom quilt was passed from grandmother to granddaughter. The letter, spread over sixteen of the book’s thirty-two pages, is a lovingly detailed remembrance of Abby Rogers’s nineteenth-century childhood. Writing to her granddaughter Harriet, Rogers recalls her family’s grand home and the surrounding landscape, their household routines and holiday traditions, and her needlework lessons and formal education. She also describes the quilt itself, made from scraps of silk from the linings of dresses worn by generations of Rogers women. Transcribed over pages that Lyons printed to appear hand stitched, the letter is presented alongside quilt blocks sewn in traditional star, flower and maple leaf designs and reproduced in vibrant shades of red, green, blue and violet (see plate 6). The letter came to Lyons’s attention through a VSW student who was documenting her own family’s history. The student’s research was almost entirely based on newspaper articles, business records and other materials associated with the family patriarchs, whose milling and mining operations sustained the economy of their small Upstate New  York town for over a century. Lyons recognised the letter as a significant historical document of the same family, but one told from the perspective of the women who were absent from the public record. When her student elected not to incorporate the letter into her project, Lyons asked if she could use it as the basis for a book. In the same way she had ‘given a voice’ to the anonymous bride and the housewife at the ironing board, Lyons felt it was important to give a voice to the woman who had written the remarkable letter (McDonald 2019). Lyons concluded Abby Rogers to Her Grand-daughter by thanking her student’s family, and acknowledging that printing the letter allowed her ‘to make public one more thread of documentation affirming the existence of women in human history’. That statement signifies the culmination of a vibrant, exploratory period of Lyons’s bookmaking in the 1970s, which was foundational in shaping her identity as an artist. At first demonstrating self-empowerment, her books subsequently served as clever, cutting indictments, and grew into unapologetic celebrations of women’s lives and ‘women’s work’. She not only took the tools of photography, printing and bookmaking into her own hands, but also accepted the inseparability of that work from her lived experience. The aim of ‘affirming the existence of women’, so often absent from history – and from the history of art – is ultimately the powerful refrain uniting the vital body of work Lyons has since created.



Wonder Woman and other fantasies

Notes 1 Graduate degrees offered in association with the State University of New York at Buffalo (1969–87) and the State University of New York at Brockport (1987 to present). 2 For a history of VSW Press, see Joan Lyons (ed.), Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1971–2008. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2009. 3 ‘American Photobooks as Feminist Self-Fashioning, 1970–1990,’ panel chaired by Ellen Handy and Mary Panzer at the conference ‘The British, American, and French  Photobook:  Commitment, Memory, Materiality, and the Art Market (1900–2019)’ organised by Paul Edwards at Maison Française d’Oxford, Oxford, UK, 14–16 March, 2019. 4 I am grateful for research assistance provided by Deborah Tint at the Brooklyn Public Library. 5 Jackie Schuman operated the Schuman Gallery at 267 Oxford Street, Rochester, New York, from 1961 to 1972. 6 For example, Lyons’s portfolio Prom (1975) is catalogued as an oversize artists’ book in the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, call no. 60 F72a. 7 McGrath was the poet’s married name in 1974. She has since returned to her family name, Mattila. Email to author, September 3, 2019. 8 Lyons was awarded a grant from the New  York State Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS), 1975.

Works cited Artists’ books and portfolios by Joan Lyons

Lyons, Joan (1972). Self Impressions. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 52 pages. Offset from 3M Color-in-Color intermediates, adhesive with paper covers. 8.25 × 10.5 in. Edition of 75. Lyons, Joan (1973a). In Hand. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1973,  64  pages.  Offset from paper plates, adhesive with paper covers. 10.5 × 8 in. Edition of 50. Lyons, Joan (1973b). Artifacts. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1973. Portfolio of ten colour offset lithographs. 26 × 19 in. Edition of 10. Lyons, Joan (1975a). Bride Book Red to Green. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1975, 42 pages. Two-colour offset, Japanese stab binding. 9 × 7.75 in. Edition of 20; second printing, edition of 29, 1975. Lyons, Joan (1975b). Prom: A Six-Sheet Offset Lithograph. Toronto, ON: Coach House Press, 1975. Portfolio of six, four-colour offset lithographs. 23 × 17 in. Edition of 24. Lyons, Joan (1976). Abby Rogers to Her Grand-daughter. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1976, 32 pages. Three-colour offset, saddle stitched. 10 × 7.5 in. Edition of 500; second printing, edition of 500. Lyons, Joan (1989). The Gynecologist. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 32 pages. Two-colour offset, saddle stitched. 8.5 × 6 in. Edition of 900. Lyons, Joan (1993). My Mother’s Book. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 48 pages. Offset, double saddle stitched. 8 × 5.75 in. Edition of 800.

57

58

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90 Lyons, Joan (1998). Twenty-Five Years Ago. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 24 pages. Black-and-white Xerox Docutech with colour copier covers, saddle stitched. 9 × 8 in. Edition of 250. Lyons, Joan, and Juliet McGrath (1974). Wonder Woman. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 74 pages. Offset and letterpress, adhesive with paper covers. 5.25 × 5.75 in. Edition of 100. Photographs by Dave Heath.

Other works cited

Courtney, Cathy (1999). Speaking of Book Art: Interviews with British and American Book Artists. Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace. [Interview conducted 1996.] Dugan, Thomas (1979). Photography Between Covers: Interviews with Photo-Bookmakers. Rochester, NY: Light Impressions. [Interview conducted 1976.] Epstein, Barbara, Joan Fischman (Lyons) and Audrey Altholz (eds) (1953). Legend [yearbook]. Brooklyn, NY: Lafayette High School. Freeman, Brad (1995). Interview with Joan Lyons. Journal of Artists’ Books 4: 11–17. Lippard, Lucy (1977). ‘Surprises: An Anthological Introduction to Some Women Artists’ Books’. Chrysalis 5: 71–84. Lyons, Joan (ed.) (1985). Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press. Lyons, Joan (ed.) (2009). Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1971–2008. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press. Lyons, Joan (2017). ‘Some Words’. Received by Jessica S. McDonald. September 19. Email. Lyons, Joan (2006). ‘Project Statement’. Artists’ Books Online. Johanna Drucker, director. www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/bbrg.xml (accessed 25 January 2019). McDonald, Jessica S. (2019). Interview with Joan Lyons. Conducted January 26. Nizzi, Carolyn (1968). ‘Art Starts with an Idea’. Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester, NY] (29 March): W1. Sheridan, Sonia (1972). ‘Generative Systems’. Afterimage 1.2: 2–4. Tucker, Anne Wilkes (1976). Transcript of unpublished interview with Joan Lyons. Conducted July 26. Walsh, Sally (1976). ‘Poet: Let Words Work on You’. Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester, NY] (6 February): C1–2.

Mothers of invention: Barbara Norfleet, Elsa Dorfman, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas Mary Panzer This chapter goes to the rich and chaotic era of photographic book publishing in America during the 1970s, in order to call attention to the work of five who fundamentally changed the way we conceive of photographic books today.1 These books established a fresh relationship between photographer and reader, which grew out of the author’s fundamentally new understanding of what to photograph, how to make the pictures, how to create the text, and how to understand the meaning of the whole. The Champion Pig by Barbara Norfleet, Elsa’s Housebook by Elsa Dorfman, Events in the Water and Events in the Sky by Bea Nettles, What’s the Matter With Momma? and Reading Dick and Jane with Me by Clarissa Sligh, and Carnival Strippers by Susan Meiselas are among the most significant works of an era that opened genuinely new territory for artists, photographers, readers and publishers. Not by accident, all these authors are women. The paths they opened are available to all. I argue that these women broke the rules out of necessity. For many reasons, including the opposition culture that characterised the spirit of the age, these women had to change the assumptions about photographs, books, authorship and art, in order for their work to happen. Many labels have been assigned to the adversary against which this larger cultural struggle was waged, ‘modernism’ being the most prominent and popular, with ‘post-modernism’ used to describe the cultural era that followed. Though such labels appear abstract, in fact the defiance of modernist traditions took concrete form. Barbara (‘Bobbie’) Norfleet began her career by excavating photographic collections consigned to the basement of the Le Corbusier designed Carpenter Center at Harvard. Bea Nettles made her colourful, autobiographical images when her teacher Art Sinsabaugh, upholder of aesthetic conventions established by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, locked her out of the darkroom. Elsa Dorfman’s photographic career emerged in Cambridge despite the reigning influence of Minor White, direct disciple of Stieglitz, teaching the zone system to students at MIT. Clarissa Sligh marched outside the Whitney’s brutalist Breuer building, to protest an absence of art by women of colour. At the Democratic National Convention, Susan Meiselas, a novice journalist, lacking recognised press credentials, rejected a

4

60

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

stranger’s offer to borrow his official pass to the convention floor. She didn’t want access, she said, ‘I want to change the system’ (Estrin 2018) (she couldn’t know that the stranger was a member of Magnum, who would soon endorse her membership in the elite corps). Too many photography-laden books appeared in the 1970s to obey any historian’s effort to impose order, but their great number proves the significance of this time for future study. Alongside new books, Dover Press conducted a reprinting programme that issued photographic facsimiles of books that had long been out of print, including Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War by Alexander Gardner; when Dover issued How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, they added numerous new images from Riis’s original negatives in effect creating a new book. Another photography book form new to the era was devoted to issuing photographs made from glass negatives recovered or re-found after many decades, effectively another set of workers to the historical canon (Coleman 1971).2 From the publishers’ point of view, all these books occupied the same shelf, so that in 1971 a responsible photography round-up in the New York Times Book Review could (and did) include a how-to book by Ansel Adams, a scholarly book by Richard Rudisill, thematic books based on secondary work by Cartier-Bresson and Eisenstaedt, rediscovered portraits of prostitutes by early twentieth-century photographer E.J. Bellocq, beautifully printed by Lee Friedlander, beautifully printed monographs by new workers such as Larry Clark and Neal Slavin, and less beautifully printed books of historical interest on Ellis Island, the history of press photography, and portraits of American Indians. None of these photographers were women, and the one book devoted to female subjects, Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits, showed prostitutes, many naked (Vestal 1971). (This calls to mind the question posed by the Guerrilla Girls, ‘Does a Woman Have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?’)

The Champion Pig and others Barbara Norfleet started working with photographs as an extension of her work in the Harvard Sociology Department. She earned a PhD, and was the first woman to get tenure in the department. She taught alongside David Reisman (one of America’s best-known public intellectuals), notably sharing his popular lecture class, ‘American Character and Social Structure’. In 1971, she moved to the Visual and Environmental Studies Department, where she taught a studio course, ‘Photography as Sociological Description’, and a lecture course, ‘America Seen’. That year, Norfleet also became the second curator of photographs for The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Designed for galleries, classrooms and offices, The Center did not officially collect art or photography. But it had become the university’s repository for material other departments had thrown away: landscape images of India and American West from the Geography Department, plates from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion from the



Mothers of invention

Zoology Department, and six thousand images originally collected by the Social Ethics Museum (established 1906) given to the Sociology Department when the museum closed in the 1930s, and transferred to the Carpenter Center when it opened. In 1973, working with Harvard Art Librarian and photographic historian William S. Johnson, Norfleet assembled about two hundred photographs from the Ethics Museum Collection for ‘The Social Question: A Photographic Record 1895–1910’ showing photographs associated with the early twentieth-century social reform movement, including images by Lewis Hine, as well by his less well known colleagues; the following year, a smaller version of this exhibition travelled to the Museum of Modern Art (Johnson 1990). Preparing that exhibition called Norfleet’s attention to the fact that this body of work received little attention from photographic history, best known through the work of Beaumont Newhall, who built his narrative around a (modernist, again) concept of progress defined in terms of technology, through which photographers achieved ever more sophisticated results. Newhall’s history had even less to say about the generations of professionals who worked through the t­wentieth century to make photographs of ordinary events before most Americans could afford cameras of their own  – despite the common notion that Kodak put cameras in the hands of everyone by the First World War, it was not until the 1960s inexpensive, fool-proof ‘Instamatic’ that photography was  truly affordable for all (Tobin 2013). So began Norfleet’s quest to find examples of work that history had left out, made by professionals who worked outside their studios to create what the industry called ‘candids’, images ‘bridging the work between the studio and the street’. She got help from Bradford Bachrach, whose family had photographed the Boston elite for a century, and consulted the ‘Outstanding Professional Photographers of America’ directory from 1940, finding many still in business. With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Norfleet made visits, and once on site, worked mostly from the negatives kept on file after clients had purchased prints. (This first search did not lead her to studios run by or for photographers of colour, a lack she later remedied.) Eventually Norfleet acquired work from sixteen studios for the American Professional Photographer’s Collection which by 1991 included roughly forty thousand images (prints and negatives) (Norfleet and Johnson 1974). In 1979 Norfleet produced The Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life, the first of four books created from the Social History Collection over the following twenty-five years (see plate 7). By bringing the eye of a social scientist to the problem of how to see, exhibit and publish photographs, Norfleet was among the first university-based scholars to abandon the art museum as the arbiter of value – whether aesthetic, artistic or historical. Norfleet’s introduction to The Championship Pig describes a method for looking at and analysing photographs as evidence about the society from which they come, and about the necessity of becoming aware of the social context of the observer:

61

62

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90 My intention is simply to explore the rich complexity of American life. […] It would be a mistake to think that these pictures can provide any definitive truths about America. Photographs are better at raising questions than at answering them; they can reveal what you do not understand, and also what you take for granted. It is possible to analyze a photograph as a work of art or for its information on material culture because all the information you need is in the photograph, but to interpret the picture’s meaning requires information outside the photograph. Like the historian who edits his raw material, the photographer chooses his subject, frames it to include and exclude, and at the moment he sees fit, clicks the shutter. The result of this interaction between a person with a camera and a subject at a particular time and place is then seen by the viewer, who also edits the photograph as she filters it – unconsciously – through her frame of reference. Most of us, of course, do not think about what we are bringing to a photograph when we look at it, but rather respond to it as a simple copy of nature. (Norfleet 1979: n.p.)

She explained that she especially looked for photographs that would demonstrate to any viewer ‘how difficult it is to unriddle what we see’ (Norfleet 1979: n.p.). Found images, commercial images, vernacular images, all by non-canonical workers, were, until The Champion Pig, essentially invisible to the museum, and to visual history in all but the most cursory way. Thanks to Norfleet’s ability to question the assumptions of collectors (including herself and her institution), she was able to move past the unseen gates of taste and value to bring new work to the attention of historians, institutions and, eventually, collectors. Norfleet’s research began quite literally by hauling the Social Ethics collection out of a Harvard basement. It was an idea whose time had come. When she applied for a second NEH grant to fund additional travel in search of new studios, she got turned down. There was too much competition from others who had applied to do similar kinds of work (Norfleet and Johnson 1974). Elsa Dorfman published Elsa’s Housebook in 1974 with publisher David Godine, a 79-page book that combined portraits of her friends and family with handwritten titles, alongside a deceptively simple autobiographical text, in which the subject is the book itself, how it came to be, and how the author became the woman who could write it (see plate 8). In 1959, as a young college graduate, Dorfman moved to New York in order to escape the confines of her Boston family and was working at Grove Press when it published Robert Frank’s The Americans (which didn’t sell out its first printing), and the Evergreen Review, where the work of now canonical, then fringe, poets such as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Charles Olson appeared. Dorfman eventually settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts (near Boston, but far enough away to maintain independence), worked (briefly) as a teacher, learned to use a camera, taught a noncredit course for Harvard students, and indexed books for Cambridge publishers, among many other part-time jobs. When her poet friends passed through town, they became her first photographic subjects. Dorfman remained happily distant from Boston’s photo scene, then dominated by Minor White, teaching photography to (male) graduate students, with a method that emphasised the zone system,



Mothers of invention

astrology and mysticism. Slowly Dorfman’s images and chapters appeared in small literary magazines, feminist journals, newspapers and galleries, including in New York City. In the fall of 1972, about five years after she picked up a camera, Dorfman started selling her work from a wheeled cart in Harvard Square, where she enjoyed direct encounters with the people who bought her pictures. As she saw that her work had a public life, she recognised that photography was her profession (Dorfman 1974: 70). Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal came about when Dorfman won a grant from the Radcliffe Institute, an office within Harvard University designed to make awards to women artists and scholars. Dorfman frankly acknowledged she has gotten ‘enormous help’ from the women’s movement itself. ‘It’s made being unmarried less freakish; it’s challenged the notion that only life with children is complete’ (Dorfman 1974: 66). But readers expecting an ordinary magazine picture story about a year in the life of a single woman living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1970s would be sorely disappointed. Instead, the text and photographs together present a way of thinking about friendship, how to survive as a single, self-sufficient person within a society organised for couples and families, how to accept the burden and gift of your family ties, how to face uncertainty and welcome change. Dorfman’s sunny affect almost masks her clear understanding of the risks inherent in this way of life. She attributes her ‘superficial easiness’ with having grown up in an apartment house where she was at home on every floor. Sent to buy bagels on Sunday mornings when she was aged 4, ‘I asked strangers to [help me cross the street] and got used to finding what I needed out in the world’ (Dorfman 1974: 78). Elsa’s Housebook is full of tiny details like this. Sometimes we are nearly overwhelmed by the particulars associated with each new person, each encounter. Here is feminist Andrea Dworkin when they were both at the beginnings of their respective careers, whom Dorfman brought back to Cambridge the night they met, and excitedly photographed in the morning without loading the film properly (three images survived) (Dorfman 1974: 62). Here is editor Eilla Kokkinen, who couldn’t keep working when she ran out of cigarettes on a day too cold to walk to the store – so they called a taxi to run the errand, just like Charles Olsen did once – and his photograph is on the facing page (Dorfman 1974: 40–41). In the end, one can see that neither pictures nor text include a single superfluous detail. ‘In the particular lies the universal’, says a quote attributed to James Joyce. But in this case, the particular being is a woman who welcomes all her readers. Today’s memoirists who raise quotidien detail to transcendent significance are in her debt. A casual student of Barbara Norfleet, and partner of Harvard-based documentary film-maker Dick Rogers, Susan Meiselas also honed her approach in the early 1970s, as a student in the Education Department at Harvard. Over three summers in the early 1970s, Meiselas and Rogers travelled together to document small circuses and state fairs around New England, and in the process discovered the girl

63

64

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

shows that were set up in the back lots, ‘alongside the cotton candy, the rides and the games’ (Bouveresse 2019: 155). Meiselas described herself as ‘mesmerized’ by the scene, which revealed a universe that she had never imagined, much less encountered. She was roughly familiar with the American documentary tradition that had begun nearly a century before when Jacob Riis used quickly made snapshots to illustrate his own text about ‘How The Other Half Lives’. She was aware of contemporary ‘street photographers’ who turned brief public encounters into art. Using an approach that closely echoes that of the informed sociologist, Norfleet, Meiselas considered the shows from ‘all perspectives, not just the women’s but the managers’, the clients’, the girlfriends’ the boyfriends’’ – and not incidentally, her own. She brought a tape recorder along, and transcribed hours of conversations (Bouveresse 2019: 155). She established relationships with the women she photographed, showed them her proof sheets, made portraits for them to give away. She hung out back stage, and even once crossed before the lights, naked under a raincoat, which she briefly flashed open (Wolf 2009). Meiselas also dressed as a man to record the show as the audience saw it, in a space that admitted ‘No ladies and no babies’ (Meiselas 1976: 11).

Figure 4.1  Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976: front cover. Halftone and letter press.



Mothers of invention

Meiselas declined to approach her subjects as a glamour photographer, or a scientific investigator; both methods require lots of light. Instead she used only what light was available and pushed her film to its limit. The material was difficult, not because it was grainy, blurry and dark, but because Meiselas’s method, combining her images with words from her subjects, forced viewers to see themselves in the picture. Viewers are forced to identify with the men in the audience, with the managers and hawkers, and with the young women performers, and the older women who manage the shows. Few magazines wanted to publish the work; few galleries would show it. A book was the obvious solution. Even so, reviews were mixed at best. Yet the portfolio won Meiselas admission into Magnum, the elite journalism collective where her career has flourished. Abigail Solomon Godeau has called her project a product of its time when the emergence of ‘feminism and […] the women’s movement’ posed ‘searching questions about about real women in the real world (including complicated issues around sex work, pornography, and the commodification of women and their bodies)’. And it is hard not to feel nostalgic for the urgency and optimism of that time, as opposed to the prevailing permissiveness of today’s image world, where ordinary advertisements feature pictures that earlier eras would have censured, and no one sees any reason to campaign for change (Godeau 2017: 105). The book itself as first published in 1974 still allows us to recover the disconcerting state of observing, or being observed, or being human under the patient, impassive gaze of a camera, and even of finding pleasure in the darkness that nearly obscures the most vicious aspects of the scenes shown and talked about. Bea Nettles and Clarissa Sligh belong to a different corner of the photobook world, associated with artist-run presses and artist-based organisations. As teachers and activists their book work challenged the same artistic and cultural limits that Norfleet, Dorfman and Meiselas addressed. As photographers and book creators, their work reached many of the same audiences. They too used cameras to expand our ability to represent everyday life, bringing dignity and visibility to the world we could not value, because we could not see it. Bea Nettles credits her free uses of the photographic medium to having trained first as a painter while an undergraduate in the Art Department at the University of Florida at Gainesville.3 She knew about photography as a medium for art from faculty members Jerry Ueslmann, who combined negatives to create fantasy images that were often compared to dreams, and Robert Fichter, who mixed photography with various media throughout his career. Fichter became her mentor, while she considered herself a painter, and pursued graduate study in painting at the University of Illionis. Under Fichter’s influence Nettles began her long relationships with Penland School outside Asheville, North Carolina, founded in 1929 to teach traditional crafts, later expanding to include printing, bookbinding, paper making and metalwork. There she was exposed to a wide variety of materials, learned to consider craft a serious occupation, and was encouraged to experiment. She also worked alongside people who were much older than she, whose commitment to art extended beyond the

65

66

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

scope of any institution. (Penland continues to be an important place for the education of many photographers working today.)4 As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Nettles first came into direct conflict with the reigning photographic establishment in the person of Art Sinsabaugh, a well-known photographer and teacher. He employed classical photographic technique, using a view camera, shooting black and white only, and specialising in landscape, all of which placed him in direct line with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Nettles’s own unconventional materials, her interest in colour, and her will to experiment violated every rule of art photography orthodoxy. And at a time when many photographers still anxiously sought recognition as artists from a reluctant art establishment, Nettles’s approach seemed both disrespectful and dangerous. Eventually, Sinsabaugh banned Nettles (and her experimental work) from the department darkroom. But before Nettles graduated in the Spring of 1970, Peter Bunnell, then a curator in the Photography Department at MoMA, had included two of her pieces in ‘Photography into Sculpture’ (MoMA 1970). Soon after, while teaching art at a small college in upstate New York, Nettles met Lionel Suntop, who became her lifetime partner. Suntop was co-founder of Light Impressions, an early publisher and distributer of what we now recognise as photobooks. The book form immediately appealed to Nettles. It used her craft education from a quiltmaking grandmother, from the printers and bookbinders at Penland and met her needs: ‘Books allowed me to work in sequences, to incorporate words and images, and to have my work reach an alternative audience.’ Her early books include Events in the Water and Events in the Sky which incorporated family photographs and her own snapshots printed in the form of offset lithographs, stitched into sequence, in a vinyl slipcase. Nettles created a series of books with her mother, a poet, which incorporated images printed in offset, on paper and on vinyl, in various colours. Her art always has a playful side. She used photographic images to create games and books for children, full of puns.5 As the graduate of an art school Nettles made use of the rigid constraints that accompanied her formal training. She became known for exploring alternative processes, as declared in the title to her classic book on alternative processes, Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook (first published in 1977, now in its third edition). In the case of Nettles, history has too easily consigned her practice to the fringes  – either the ghetto for ‘women’s work’ because of its formal properties (notably colour and mixed media) and subject matter (mothers and children), and her constant, impatient, play with materials. Or to the history of artists’ books, only recently receiving value in the marketplace, now recognised by libraries at Yale, Harvard and the Whitney Museum. But at the time Nettles started, there were no such special categories, only artists working with cameras and photographic materials to make it new. In her case, reductive essentialism can be seen as a tool of the same establishment which she first used her books to defy – namely the museums, dealers, collectors, curators who still make and



Mothers of invention

Figure 4.2  Bea Nettles. Breaking the Rules. 2nd edition. Rochester, NY: Inky Press Productions, 1977: front cover. Halftone.

enforce the canon. What did not fit still does not fit, or not easily. She recently received a major retrospective exhibition and catalogue (Nettles 2019). Clarissa Sligh was an activist from her teens, when, in 1955, her family became part of the legal case that forced integration of the Virginia public schools. As she

67

68

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90

explained, ‘The historical events took on a significance that seemed much greater than my life. Being part of that stream, I saw how the everyday actions and decisions of numerous unknown ordinary people are what change the course of history.’ This story became the basis for a book (Sligh 2006). In the early 1970s, Sligh was a single mother in New York, with an MBA and a secure job on Wall Street. Always an artist, but without the means to turn art into a profession, the growing feminist movement provided her with a home, through organisations such as the Women’s Caucus for Art, and the publishing collective that produced Heresies, an annual book of art, fiction and political writing that began in 1977, and continued through the early 1990s. Sligh studied printmaking at the North Carolina craft school Penland, and attended photographic workshops with independent teachers, including Bea Nettles. From her base in New York City, she joined the many public demonstrations that called for recognition of women artists and artists of colour, alongside Bettye Saar, Faith Ringgold and the rebel group known as the Guerrilla Girls.6 I include Sligh’s work in a discussion of 1970s book works because of her important contribution to 1970s art and feminism, and because that movement was notoriously slow to accept and include the work and voices of women of colour. In 1987, Sligh became a co-director of Coast to Coast, a national exhibition of artist books by women of colour, a series that continued until 1996. Sligh’s contribution was an artist book that incorporated photographs, What’s Happening with Momma? which depicts childbirth as a family event seen from a child’s point of view. Sligh makes reading difficult, using eccentric shapes and folding parts that the reader must manipulate in order to follow the story (see plate 9). She made the book in the shape of a house, a small safe space in which to relay a traumatic event in a child’s life (mine). For me the house structure connotes the safety and comfort of home, yet [a place where] dramatic and terrifying events occur […] I wanted the viewer to become physically involved with the book by reading the words on the steps from page to page and to relate to the child’s experience of going up and down the steps while running in and out of the house. Closing the accordion style book relates to closing the door of the house to reveal the house façade of a ‘home’.7

The following year at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, Sligh produced Reading Dick and Jane with Me (see plate 10). Its title refers to the learnto-read books all American schoolchildren encountered in the 1950s and 1960s. Sligh’s book reproduced her own family snapshots alongside the printed pictures of unnaturally clean, blonde Dick and Jane. Her text expresses the reactions of Sligh and her friends to the world they see in the books. Through reactions to Dick and Jane’s world we can easily see how learning to read also taught you that if you and your family look nothing like this one you belong somewhere else.8 Sligh’s work makes visible the essential role race plays not by making it the centre of her work, but by making clear that race forms an essential



Mothers of invention

part of any individual’s story. The particular that becomes universal can be female and Black. In every case, these books help define a genre that combined words and pictures in sequence, in a form intended to be a multiple, distributed through a wide network of bookstores (in the twentieth century still a common and easily accessible choice for distribution), available to a general audience. They all enlarge the reader’s view, not simply by exposing them to content that is fresh – though before these books appeared, few imagined how interesting a champion pig, Elsa’s kitchen, a flying man, a young, lumpy stripper or a group of anonymous Black children could catch and hold their interest. These books and their authors show us how to look beyond our expectations, how to challenge our assumptions, how to see and represent what had once been invisible.

Notes 1 I am honoured to acknowledge the initiative of Dr Ellen Handy who organized the panel for the Conference on the Photobook in Oxford in the Spring of 2018, where this material first appeared, and our fellow panelist Jessica MacDonald, for her work on Joan Lyons. I also wish to thank Paul Edwards, who made the conference possible, and who has edited this volume. Andrew Eskind’s comments have greatly improved this text. Most of all, I acknowledge Elsa Dorfman, Bobbie Norfleet, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas for their inspiring work. 2 Photographers revived through recovered negatives include E.J. Bellocq, Michael Disfarmer, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and also Frances Benjamin Johnston, through use of her voluminous archives at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 3 See Allen 2019, Lahs-Gonzales 2019, Powell 2019. Also conversation with author, January 2019. 4 Conversation with the author, January 2019. 5 Thanks to Becky Simmons, Librarian, Archives of Rochester Institute of Technology, for access and guidance to the Bea Nettles Collection. 6 Clarissa Sligh CV, http://clarissasligh.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Clarissa​Sligh​ CV_2016.pdf. 7 Clarissa Sligh. ‘What’s the Matter With Momma?’ Vamp and Tramp. www.vam​pan​ dtramp.com/finepress/s/clarissa-sligh.html. 8 Clarissa Sligh. ‘Reading Dick and Jane with Me’ Vamp and Tramp. www.vam​pan​ dtramp.com/finepress/s/clarissa-sligh.html.

Works cited Allen, Jamie M. (2019). ‘Overcoming Constraints’. In Jamie Allen and Olivia LahsGonzales, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory. Allen, Jamie M., and Olivia Lahs-Gonzales (eds) (2019). Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory, with additional texts by Bea Nettles and Amy L. Powell. Austin: University of Texas Press, and Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum.

69

70

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90 Bouveresse, Clara (2019). Femmes à l’œuvre, femmes à l’épreuve. Unretouched Women: Eve Arnold, Abigail Heyman, Susan Meiselas, Arles: Actes Sud. Coleman, A. D. (1971). ‘Faces from the Past’. New York Times (4 July). Dorfman, Elsa (1974). Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal. Boston: David R. Godine. Estrin, James (2018). ‘Breaching Boundaries in Photography’. New  York Times (3  July). www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/lens/susan-meiselas-mediations.html. Godeau, Abigail Solomon (2017). ‘Caught Looking’. In Sarah Parsons, Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre, History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson, William (1990). ‘Interview with Barbara Norfleet’. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop. Lahs-Gonzales, Olivia (2019). ‘Bea Nettles, Artist/Mother’. In Allen et al., Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory. Meiselas, Susan (1976). Carnival Strippers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Meiselas, Susan, Deirdre English and Sylvia Wolf (2009). Carnival Strippers. Goettingen: Steidl Verlag. Museum of Modern Art (1970). ‘Photography Into Sculpture’. Press Release and Checklist (April 8). www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326678.pdf. Nettles, Bea (1973). Events in the Water. Self-published. Nettles, Bea (1973). Events in the Sky. Philadelphia: Self-published. Nettles, Bea (1992). Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook, 3rd edition. Rochester, NY: Inky Press Productions, 1977. Nettles, Bea (2019). Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory. Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum and Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Norfleet, Barbara (1979). The Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life. Boston: David R. Godine. Norfleet, Barbara and William Johnson (1974). ‘Photographs from the Harvard Social Ethics Collection’. Museum of Modern Art Press Release 55 (21 June). Parsons, Sarah (ed.) (2017). Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre, History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Powell, Amy L. (2019) ‘Photographic Objects/Institutional Artifacts’. In Jamie Allen and Olivia Lahs-Gonzales (eds) (2019). Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory. Sligh, Clarissa (1988). What’s Happening with Momma? Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop. Sligh, Clarissa (1989). Reading Dick and Jane with Me. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press. Sligh, Clarissa (2006). It Wasn’t Little Rock. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop. Sligh, Clarissa. CV, http://clarissasligh.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ClarissaSligh​ CV_2016.pdf. Sligh, Clarissa (n.d.). ‘What’s the Matter With Momma?’ Vamps and Tramps, www.vam​ pandtramp.com/finepress/s/clarissa-sligh.html. Sligh, Clarissa (n.d.). ‘Reading Dick and Jane with Me’ Vamps and Tramps, www.vam​ pandtramp.com/finepress/s/clarissa-sligh.html. Tobin, Tom (2013). ‘Kodak Instamatic Camera Turns 50’. USATODAY.com (29 March). Vestal, David (1971). ‘Photographs’. New York Times (12 December). Wolf, Sylvia (2009). ‘Behind the Ballyhoo’. In Susan Meiselas, Deirdre English and Sylvia Wolf (2009). Carnival Strippers. Goettingen: Steidl Verlag.

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 Taous R. Dahmani

Thinking the photobook: limitations in recent studies In recent years, the multiplication of books by photographers has led to the development of their study (Neumüller 2017). The main players – collectors, photographers, experts, academics – have made a return to the historiography a necessary first step in legitimising this field of research (Roth 2004; Di Bello 2012), inducting pioneers of the photography book such as Anna Atkins (British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843) or Henry Fox Talbot (Pencil of Nature, 1844–46), and paying tribute to the first photobook historians such as Elizabeth McCausland (1942), Alex Sweetman (1986) or Carol Armstrong (1998). Each of the contributors, in their own way, discussed denominations, definitions, historical and geographical issues, and almost all offered specific case studies. In 2004, born out of the collaboration between author Gerry Badger and photographer Martin Parr, the three-volume anthology The Photobook: A History quickly became reference books. What this short summary wishes to emphasise about the birth and growth of photobook studies (Schaden 2012) is the necessary inclusion of these projects in a complex ecosystem where the publishing sector, its economy and its market, are the main agents and decision-makers governing the emergence or evaporation of a new book. If we consider for a moment this economics of the photographer’s book as an ‘art world’, according to Howard S. Becker’s conception, then it participates in a cooperative network where the ‘members […] coordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice and in frequently used artifacts. The same people often cooperate repeatedly, even routinely, in similar ways to produce similar works, so that we can think of an art world as an established network of cooperative links among participants’ (Becker 1982: 34–35). More precisely, what is

5

74

Part III: Commitment and visibility

exposed in the history of books by photographers is the existence of a regulated, hierarchical microcosm. As a world in miniature of our society, the photography book is also the site of struggles. Thus, if the advent of photobook studies attempts to create, define and extend the study of books of photographs as a new field of research, it is necessary, as Bourdieu advises, to understand the opposing forces at stake (Bourdieu 1992). We must pierce the network of objective relations and subjective choices: the relationship between social structure and agency. We must deconstruct the tensions between dominant and dominated, dismantle the struggle between consecrated authors, newcomers and authors who have been forgotten, dismissed, or whose voices have been stifled. Through this political conceptualisation of the historiography of books by photographers, I suggest in this chapter a symptomatic reading, that is to say, a critical reading which tries to detect the deficiencies of previous writings. The idea is not to engage in a reading which merely casts suspicion, but to bring up new issues and new objects. The method of symptomatic reading  – as used by Althusser  – shows that we must be wary of the face-to-face contact between connoisseurs and the field of knowledge, and that we should instead investigate thought processes and the objects they produce. It is a question of discovering latent or dormant structures under evident and dominant ones.

Methods for a social and inclusive history of the photobook A critical reading of the history of books by photographers reveals a fundamental tension: on the one hand, there is a universalising narrative that is gender and colour blind; on the other, is an under-representation of women and racialised people. The result is a double invisibilisation, first, factual or societal, but also historiographic. In this chapter, I invite the reader to pay as much attention to the many lists and bibliographies available as to the books that were not included in them – to look at the ecosystem of photobooks while paying attention to its blind spots, because the history of the photobook is firmly based on a Western European cultural history. Similarly, François Brunet argues for the urgency of leaving behind universalist methods in writing the history of photography, and states that ‘the kind of oppositions that matter most in the contemporary critique of visual culture are supra-national (North/South, West/East) as well as infranational and societal (race, class, gender), rather than (inter-)national’ (Brunet 2011: 98). Thus, if one agrees to take the ecosystem of books by photographers as both an ‘art world’ (Becker) and a ‘social fact’ (Durkheim), then it seems obvious that, in times when history dismissed some protagonists and when society cut them off, their photographic works did not see the light of day due to failing networks and for financial reasons, or they were rejected because they did not respect the dominant dogmas, or else because they did not inspire photographers to persist, since they were aware that their work did not respect the unspoken rules and accepted



Missing photobooks

forms. Needless to say, the limited scope of this chapter does not permit anything like a full treatment of a potentially immense subject. What I propose here is merely to suggest the relevance of a shift of paradigm in the specific context of the photographic and editorial production by Black British photographers in the 1970s and 1980s (excluding exhibition catalogues). These photographers evolved in the complex society of post-war Britain. After 1948, the diversification of the British population materialised in the construction of political identities; Stuart Hall wrote that politically, this is the moment when the term ‘black’ was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalisation in Britain and came to provide the organising category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions and ethnic ­identities. […] Culturally, this analysis formulated itself in terms of a critique of the way blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible ‘other’ of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses. (Hall 1992: 441)

Indeed, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s many Black British photographers were professionals and practised a manifold and heterogeneous photography; yet society’s structure – and therefore structural racism – shaped their work and its reception. Hence hardly any of these photographers have published photobooks. Badger nevertheless defended the idea that the book was the ‘natural home’ of photography (Badger 2013: 16), but I would argue that this rhetoric represents a danger, since it invalidates photographers who did not publish. While the bulk of the historiography defends this ‘natural relationship’ between photography and the book – based on nineteenth-century practices – I wish to slightly modulate this ‘organic argument’ by relying instead on an analysis of gaps, invisibilities and even ‘nothingness’, sometimes drawing conclusions from data that remains unknown. If the photobook is a prerequisite, as stated by the commentators, then what went wrong? How is this (non) phenomenon to be studied? How can it best be explained? With this ‘natural home’ argument, the ‘right way of doing things’ becomes fixed, and we are dealing with the constitution of an institution or the creation of a standard. How can we explain the missed opportunities, and the limitations of a position that is, moreover, supposed to be intuitive? The ‘photobook’  – as it has recently come to be called  – is described as a custom and even as a rite of passage, the crowning glory of any ‘good’ photographer or aspiring photographer, practice in its absolute form. It is interesting to note that the expression ‘rite of passage’ was developed by the French ethnologist and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep in 1909 and serves to explain many social facts. As such we should consider the publication of a book as the baptism of the photographer who is thus introduced and accepted by the photographic community. It seems then that we can already hazard our first hypothesis and emphasise that deprived – for whatever reason – of this initiatory rite, Black British photographers are not accepted by the dominant photographic community, this same community that today writes the story of the photobook. Oscillating between a

75

76

Part III: Commitment and visibility

fetishisation of the object (Parr and Badger 2004, 2006, 2014) and a traditional and conservative conception (Roth 2004), the mainstream promoters of the ‘cause’ of the photobook want to register this object as ‘high art’; this kind of approach, however, may ultimately appear vain and counter-productive. Within this universalising approach it is the very notion of the margin that is evacuated. By wanting absolutely to propose a monolithic and normative analysis, alternative practices are discarded or ignored completely. The methodologies offered by these encyclopaedic schools, surveys and bibliographies aim to establish authoritative, canonical works, one of the results of which is to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ photobooks, a distinction based on subjective criteria largely admitted by the authors (Finlemstein and McLeery 2002:  103). Hence, a crucial element is overlooked as, noted by book historian Don McKenzie, bibliographers too often ignored the sociological context within which the production of texts operated (McKenzie 1986). It is not a question here of refusing the real and necessary history of the original link between photographs and books, as Ute Eskildsen explains in her essay ‘Photographs in books’: ‘The album, the portfolio, and the book have been the traditional forms for presenting photographs since photography was invented’ (Eskildsen 2004: 11). It is rather a question of the context and the structure in which the photobook evolves. The book is above all a circuit – of production, distribution and dissemination. In 1994, photographer Roni Horn wrote: ‘a book is not a simple object; within its particular identity it harbors the path of its assimilation into society. The book is distributed’ (Eskildsen 2004: 11). The introduction into society of the photobook must confront the groupings, relationships and affiliations that make up our society. So to think about this object – and before addressing its occasional absence – it is interesting to look at what book historians do, when they engage with what Robert Darnton, former director of Harvard University Library calls ‘the social and cultural history of communication by print’ (Darnton 1982: 65). The history of books has considered its object of study as a multifaceted enterprise encompassing social, economic, political and intellectual conditions, and we must demand the same for the history of the photobook. In his article ‘What is the history of books?’, Darnton asks many questions that seem transposable to the analysis of the photobook: Who and what mediates activity in the complex path taken by books and texts from producer to consumer? What is the place of strategic cultural alliances and ‘literary fields’ in shaping the promotion and reception of particular texts? Who plays a part in aiding some books and authors to become cultural touchstones, while others in the same era fail to make a mark in cultural and economic terms? What role does mass print media play in shaping social discourse? (Darnton 1982: 65)

Inspired by the thinking of book historians, the photobook and its ecosystem can be seen as being part of our society, and it seems necessary in this context to



Missing photobooks

confront it with its failures. To regard the photobook as the result of decisions made by human beings is to think of it with its flaws and limits. Thus, to begin to reflect on the reasons for the absence of photobooks by British Black photographers is to point out the structural racism present in the institutions in our society and therefore in the immutable flow of Darnton’s ‘communication circuits’  – ­circuits that demonstrate that the material production of a book depends entirely on the conditions in which it was conceived (McKenzie 1969).

Thinking the absence of the photobook: geographical, chronological and ideological hypotheses As Armstrong points out, the photobook is an English tradition: ‘Not only was it on the English side of the Channel that the photograph was first made ready for the book, it was in an English book that the paper photograph was first described and published as a new kind of book-ready image’ (Armstrong 1998: 17). Indeed, since the nineteenth century, London has been a fertile ground for the photobook with, to give just one notable example, the publication in 1878 of Victorian London Street Life by photographer John Thompson and journalist Adophe Smith. In the twentieth century, especially in the 1970s, the publication of photobooks was dominated by Magnum photojournalists with the publication of Vietnam Inc. by Philip Jones Griffiths (1971), The English by Ian Berry (1978), or The Teds by Chris Steele-Perkins and Richard Smith (1979). The question of identity was obviously central in the publications of that period. However, as with the societal problems in Britain at that time, it failed to be inclusive, and the photobook tradition failed to encompass all the variegated forms of Britishness. Thus, the photographer’s book, which can be considered a reflection of society in the 1970s, inevitably eliminated different voices. In stark contrast, the political stakes and identity politics of the photobook are more appropriately grasped when we cross the Atlantic, where the photobook has become an eminently political form, as evidenced by the publication of The Americans by Robert Frank. It is worth remembering how anodyne the front cover of the first French edition (Delpire 1958) appears compared to the US edition (Grove Press, 1959) bearing the photograph Trolley: New Orleans, 1955, which, by addressing segregation, makes it overtly political. So much so, that in his article, ‘Photography and Sociology’, Howard S. Becker draws a parallel between the book and the analysis of American institutions by Alexis de Tocqueville (Becker 1974: 9). Thus, Frank’s The Americans embodies an interesting paradox: it is constantly held up by contemporary photographers as a landmark publication, but not for its political radicality. As David Bate explains, The Americans was ‘a new form of photowork, the critical essay’ (Bate 2013: 68). The use of the photobook as a political weapon, first by white photographers such as Frank and then by African American photographers, is a strength of the United States, where photobooks are objects of contestation, often directly addressing

77

78

Part III: Commitment and visibility

questions of identity. Numerous examples come to mind, including The Sweet Flypaper of Life by photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes (1955), the journal The Black Photographers Annual (1973–1980) and Black in America by Eli Reed (1997). Back in the British context, I wish to establish three hypotheses to explain the absence of photobooks addressing changes in society and identity politics, as well as the vacuum left by Black British photographers in the field of photobooks. I aim to shed light on three elements: first what I call ‘politicide’, the will to eliminate protesting voices; then the general marginalisation of the photobook as a practice at that time; and finally the refusal to grant the status of author to these photographers. As mentioned, photobooks, by their very publication, ‘step into’ society, as it were, create society, even, and their circulation makes them interesting ‘social facts’ (Durkheim 1894): the modus operandi around the photobook acts as an external constraint for the photographer. Thus, one possible hypothesis is politicide: that is, the physical destruction of a materiality that shared the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement. The creation of a ‘non-place’ (Nora 1997) allows the long-term erasure of ideas and beliefs. What would have been the impact of the Civil Rights movement without its photos? The refusal to recognise a movement or a history, and the strong opposition met by the photographers but also the intellectuals of the time, reinforces the single ideology and univocal national narrative, the consequence of which is to enforce silence. Photographers are denied the possibility of creating objects that last, objects which are distributed, disseminated, discussed. As Fred Ritchin explains, the photobooks could have been: ‘a potential counterbalance to the tendency of the mass media to subsume individual voices’ (Ritchin 2016: 6). So, if we consider the photobook as a photographer’s book (Edwards 2016: 9), the author, when an individual at the margins of society, is excluded from the phenomenon. This desire for physical suppression also becomes a symbolic cancellation. The destruction of a movement and of a political thought is also an artistic assassination: without materiality, an author is not recognised as an author and is deprived of a name. While ‘The photobook allows a photographer the potential to tell a story, the possibility of constructing a narrative’ (Badger 2013: 16), these photographers, however, are prohibited from expressing their ‘point of view’ (Nesbit 1985: 132); worse, putative manifestoes that could have been created by the photographers of the British Black Art Movement are simply missing, nonexistent. If the hypothesis of political invisibilisation seems to me important and necessary, I must nevertheless qualify this approach with an understanding and analysis of the economy of the photobook over the relevant decades. As Molly Nesbit recalls, photobooks have been ‘periodically used’ (Nesbit 1985: 132); as for David Campany, he reminds us that ‘the most important period for the form [was from] 1920 to 1970’ (Campany 2014). Thus, professional photographers working after the 1970s and before the ‘photobook mania’ of the the early 2000s were active during a lean period for the photographer’s book.



Missing photobooks

Armet Francis’ photobooks: new member of the ‘Salon des Refusés’1 As we have seen, a quantitative method is impossible in our case, and so I would like to focus on a qualitative assessment of Armet Francis’s photobooks. In spite of the seemingly omnivorous treasure hunts driven by the collector’s passion, some photobooks have escaped all recognition. Those by Armet Francis seem to have slipped through the net. Born in Jamaica in 1945, Francis arrived in London in 1955, left school at the age of 14 and found a job as a photographer’s assistant in the West End, enabling him to start a career in photography. Francis began working as a professional photographer in the late 1960s. His pictures were published in Time Magazine, West Africa and The Sunday Times. In 1974, The Commonwealth Institute housed his first solo exhibition. In 1983, Francis was the  first Black photographer to have a solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery. His first book, The Black Triangle: The People of the African Diaspora (Francis 1985) is a real collaboration with author Ron Ramdin. Ramdin is from Trinidad and emigrated to England in 1962 where he has lived and worked ever since. In 1982, he had published From Chattel Slave to Wage Earner: A History of Trade Unionism in Trinidad and Tobago (Ramdin 1982), followed by The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Ramdin 1987); between these two editorial projects Ramdin teamed up with Francis to produce the text for The Black Triangle. In his preface, Francis explains the intention behind the publication: ‘The Black Triangle for me is a deep feeling, and it is necessary, politically, culturally and socially, to be presented. I hope this book will be the sharing of my experience, which was a very deliberate one: to satisfy a great need in me to see my people in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas’ (Francis 1983:  v). If at that time the most popular photobooks were built around travel, with The Black Triangle, Francis and Ramdin tackled another type of displacement, starting with the history of the slave trade, then the creation of diasporas and, finally, the migrations of the 1980s to cities such as New York and London. What is interesting about The Black Triangle is the radical ideas it conveys, the strong politics and revolutionary thoughts; indeed, Francis concludes his preface with the following statement: ‘There has been no revolution in the conscious state of the people who perpetrated colonisation, and consequently the structure of slavery, of exploitation, persist’ (Francis 1983: v). But even more interestingly, The Black Triangle, as an editorial project, does not obey the standard codes of ‘protest books’ (Badger 2017). A colour photograph on the cover represents the portrait of a woman most likely from Africa, recalling the photographic style of National Geographic publications, and none of the revolutionary visual and textual propositions are conveyed either by the cover photograph or the graphics. Following the photographer’s preface, the reader can peruse about ten maps that summarise the history of colonialisation and slavery, before embarking upon a lengthy historical introduction by Ramdin, clearly inspired by his research and

79

80

Part III: Commitment and visibility

other publication projects. The substance of the introduction continues into the paragraphs of text that feature in the visual chapters, thus helping to contextualise the images. Other textual forms exist (a chronology and bibliography are also included), but most noticeable are the poems written by the photographer. Francis’s photographs are divided into three chapters: ‘Africa’, ‘Caribbean’ and ‘UK/USA’. His images reveal a complex understanding of the picture-taking experience, as he recounts: ‘taking photographs involves a great striving for trust and mutual understanding, because the camera is a massive intrusion on our experiences. There has to be faith by the people being photographed that the images captured by the camera will be truthful, and that they will be used correctly’ (Francis 1983: v). In my opinion, perhaps the most interesting chapter is ‘UK/USA’, which forms a transatlantic dialogue between the representation of the fight for freedom and the rights of African Americans, and that of Black British people. The photograph of a demonstration in England is juxtaposed with a quote from Kwame Nkrumah, giving life to the pan-African vision of the authors. Francis looks back on his experience of difference as a source of inspiration for this project and writes: ‘As a black person living in Britain from the age of eight, I learnt to be conscious of myself in a very negative way; I later came to see how this negativity can destroy all other feelings – except hatred. I had to go though many changes and transpositions before I understood that love is crucial’ (Francis 1983: v). Under cover of a didactic, educational, historical book, Armet Francis introduced images related to the problems of the Black population and Black British youth, particularly with the police. Francis’s second book of photographs was even more overtly political. Published in 1988, a few years after the events of April–July 1981 and September 1985 during which England experienced serious and crucial uprisings across many major cities and inner cities, Children of the Black Triangle includes quotes by Marcus Garvey, Walter Rodney and Haki R. Madhubuti. This time the introduction was written by Djibril Diallo, a choice that once again anchors the publication in a tangible and pressing political reality. Born in Senegal, Diallo was at the time of publication a member of the United Nations: Chief Spokesman for the UN Famine Relief Office, Information Officer for Africa and the UNDP, and Special Assistant to the Director of African Bureau of the UNHCR. In this book, Francis’s text takes on the appearance of a manifesto. He writes: ‘The Protagonist or Antagonist in the struggle for dominance is the state, whose systems of oppression, laws and weapons are directed at our children. It must strike fear in the hearts of those in power of whatever persuasion, for them to send their armies against defenceless children’ (Francis 1988: 9). Children of the Black Triangle is an ode to an inspired and complex youth, summarised by Maya Angelou on the back cover as such: ‘Francis must have asked where are the Black Children in the World’s archives. Finding no records, he has supplied a wonderful collection for us to relish’ (Francis 1983: back cover). The publication of these two books would certainly not have been possible without the crucial action of the Greater London Council (GLC) first, and then of



Missing photobooks

the Arts Council. Active from 1965 to 1986, the GLC was controlled at the time by the opposition, and Labour members wanted to implement concrete actions, through the funding of projects, including artistic projects, to support the city’s diversity. The abolition of the GLC in 1986 would have a significant impact, as it cut off most of the grants for cultural projects for and by the Black community (Hylton 2007).

1990s photobooks by Autograph ABP: a necessary anachronism In 1988, Francis became a co-founder of the Association of Black Photographers, a photographic arts agency (now under the name Autograph ABP) which aimed to help and develop the careers of Black photographers. In 1991, the arrival of Mark Sealy as director marked the beginning of the development of the agency as a publishing house with the launch of eighteen photobooks in the 1990s. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of other publishers: Heretic Books bringing out Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Black Male/White Male (Fani-Kayode 1988), and Olympus Cameras printing Dennis Morris’s Southall: A Home from Home (Morris 1999). Autograph’s editing action was, in my opinion, a programme of survival, and can be seen as a mission to document erasures. The French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, in his book Peuples Exposés, Peuples Figurants, writes about the appearance, birth or rebirth, and the attempts to disclose disappearances: ‘giving it a face – a written figure – in the eyes of others, of us, of all of us; […] Dignity being given back’ (Didi-Huberman 2012: 13.) In its project to defend photographers, Autograph ABP was aware that the book remains the main way to publicise the work and projects of photographers, be they historical or contemporary figures (Badger 2013: 7). It is interesting to note that Nesbit is one of the only photobook commentators who recognises the object as a ‘privileged space’, explaining that the photographer’s book is also a necessity for trying to gain recognition; she writes that, with the photobook, ‘the author-photographer [is] fighting his death’ (Nesbit 1985: 133). This notion of a privileged state is to be found in Michel Foucault’s essay, ‘What is an author?’, where the French philosopher writes that: ‘The coming into being of the notion of “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization’ (Foucault 1979: 281). It seems to me that Autograph’s publishing action can be understood as creating the conditions for a ‘privileged space’ hitherto denied Black photographers. So when Badger writes ‘Publishing photobooks is an act of faith, on the part of both photographers and publishers’ (Badger 2013: 16), he is not wrong, but beyond the economic risks, it is also about ideological stakes. Since 2001, witnessing the craze for the photographer’s book, Autograph has redoubled its efforts and published twenty-seven photobooks: these books are a balance between retrospectives, contemporary productions and emerging scenes,

81

82

Part III: Commitment and visibility

often in collaboration and always in tandem with exhibitions held in venues like the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham or the Photographers’ Gallery in London. The rise of the market for photographic prints has also been a contributing factor. Consequently, the photographer’s book has increasingly taken the form of the monograph or the exhibition catalogue. However, these photobooks do not seem to be recognised by the photobook ecosystem, nor are they recognised by collectors and the market. These works populate the shelves of libraries and facilitate research for, and the writing of, an inclusive history of photography, but they have not become cherished, valued or prized objects. We may safely guess that the emphasis on retrospectives and/or monographs, and the corresponding lack of focus on any particular project, must weigh heavily. Indeed, in an interview with Aperture about his photobooks history project, Martin Parr explained: ‘Gerry and I also do not much like monographs – greatest hits books – and, with the honorable exception of Diane Arbus, we omitted those entirely. We went for project-based books, strong statements’ (Parr and Haworth-Booth 2005: 73). This quote reintroduces the questions I asked at the beginning of this chapter: who writes about photobooks and why? Another reason could be their graphic design, inspired by ‘coffee table book’ aesthetics. There is confirmation of the hypotheses put forward here: in 2018 one of the founders of Autograph ABP published a photobook entitled Christopher Street 1976; it was based on a 1970s project, but in being edited by Stanley/Barker and designed by the Entente studio, the publication followed the accepted rules of popular photobooks and received great attention – which, of course, does not detract from the quality of Gupta’s project. In this chapter, I emphasise the importance of re-politicising the history of photobooks and propose adapting the postures of the history from below. Georges Didi-Huberman writes, about Walter Benjamin’s conception of history, that ‘History as is readable by the greatest number is firstly written by victors, by this “enemy (who) has not yet finished prevailing” and whose “loot” is very likely to become identified with everything which is called “cultural property”’, and he adds: ‘facing this tradition of victors who lie to us, or on the margins of it, is a less obvious “tradition of the oppressed” which resists, survives and persists. Tradition of the peoples of whom the historian, the thinker, as well as the artist should, “against the grain”, re-form its imperatives’ (Didi-Huberman 2012: 32). The story of the photobook will not have its limits pushed back, nor will its doors be opened, until we cease to draw up ‘canons’, and no longer talk about the ‘best’ or the most ‘iconic’ (Roth 2001). If the history of photobooks continues to be written as national narrative, diversity will be defeated.

Note 1 The first ‘Salon des refusés’ opened in Paris on 15 May 1863 on the sidelines of the Salon Officiel; here the author refers to artists whose vision does not correspond to ‘official taste’.



Missing photobooks

Works cited Armstrong, Carol (1998). Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT. Badger, Gerry (2013). ‘It’s All Fiction. Narrative and the Photobook’. In Imprint. Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond, Gerry Badger, David Bate, Bettina Lockemann and Michael Mack (eds). Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing; Gothenburg: Academin Valand/Göteborgs universitet/Hasselblad Foundation: 15–47. Badger, Gerry (2017). ‘Propaganda vs. Protest Books’. In Photobook Phenomenon, Moritz Neumüller (ed.). Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona/Fundació Foto Colectania/RM Editores, n.p. Bate, David (2013). ‘The Syntax of a Photowork’. In Imprint. Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond, Gerry Badger, David Bate, Bettina Lockemann and Michael Mack (eds). Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing; Gothenburg: Academin Valand/Göteborgs universitet/Hasselblad Foundation: 49–75. Becker, Howard S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Becker, Howard S. (1974). ‘Photography and Sociology’. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1.1 (fall): 3–26. Bourdieu, Pierre (1992). Les règles de l’art. Paris: Le Seuil. Brunet, François (2011). ‘Nationalities and Universalism in the Early Historiography of Photography (1843–1857)’. History of Photography 35:2: 98–110. Campany, David (2014). ‘The “Photobook”: What’s in a Name?’ The PhotoBook Review 7, Aperture (winter). https://davidcampany.com/the-photobook-whats-ina-name/ (accessed 17 December 2019). Darnton, Robert (1982). ‘What is the History of Books?’ Daedalus 111.3: 65–83. Di Bello, Patrizia, Wilson Colette and Shamoon Zamir (eds) (2012). The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2012). Peuples Exposés, Peuples Figurants. L’oeil dans l’histoire, 4. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Durkheim, Émile (1894). ‘Les Règles de la méthode sociologique’. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 38: 14–39. Edwards, Paul (2016). Perle Noire. Le photobook littéraire. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Eskildsen, Ute (2004). ‘Photographs in Books’. In Andrew Roth, The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present. Gothenburg: Hasselblad Center: 11–29. Fani-Kayode, Rotimi (1988). Black Male/White Male. London: Heretic Books. Finlemstein, David, and Alistair McCleery (2005). An Introduction to Book History. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1979). ‘What is an Author?’ Screen 20.1 (spring): 13–34. Francis, Armet (1985). The Black Triangle. The People of the African Diaspora. London: Seed Publications. Francis, Armet (1988). Children of the Black Triangle. London: Seed Publications. Hall, Stuart (1992). ‘New Ethnicities’. In ‘Race’, Culture and Difference, James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds). London: Sage: 252–259. Hylton, Richard (2007). The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976–2006. Bath: The Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts–ICIA, University of Bath.

83

84

Part III: Commitment and visibility McCausland, Elizabeth (1942). ‘Photographic Books’. The Complete Photographer 8.43: 278–394. McKenzie, Don (1969). ‘Printers of the Mind’. Studies in Bibliography 22: 1–75. Morris, Dennis (1999). Southall: A Home from Home. London: Olympus Cameras. Nesbit, Molly (1985). ‘Photographers’ Books’. Art History 8.1 (March): 13–28. Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2017). Photobook Phenomenon. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona/Fundació Foto Colectania/RM Editores. Nora, Pierre (1997). Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Parr, Martin and Gerry Badger (2004, 2006, 2014). The Photobook: A History, Vols I–III. London: Phaidon. Parr, Martin and Mark Haworth-Booth (2005). ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Photography Books’. Aperture 179 (summer): 66–73. Ramdin, Ron (1982). From Chattel Slave to Wage Earner: A History of Trade Unionism in Trinidad and Tobago. London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe. Ramdin, Ron (1987). The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. London: Gower. Ritchin, Fred (2016). ‘Questions, Hidden by the Answers’. In Magnum Photobook: The Catalogue Raisonné, Fred Ritchin and Carole Naggar (eds). London: Phaidon: 6–16. Roth, Andrew (2001). The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC. Roth, Andrew (2004). The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present. Gothenburg: Hasselblad Center. Schaden, Markus (2012). ‘Introduction to Photobook Studies’. The PhotoBook Review  2 (spring): 11. Sweetman, Alex (1986). Photographic Book to Photobook Work: 140 Years of Photography in Publication, California Museum of Photography Bulletin, 5.2: 132.

The photobook as event Jessie Bond

A video clip plays on my phone, which I’m holding above an open photobook. In the video a woman carrying a similar book approaches a boy. She says in Spanish ‘we’re looking for a man who’s in a photo I took ten years ago’, showing him the photograph in the book. He identifies the man as his uncle Augusto. The same photograph of Augusto is on the page of the photobook in front of me. In it, Augusto holds a rifle in his left hand and with his right gestures in the same direction as his weapon, his index finger forcefully extended. Augusto is in my copy of the book, he is in the book in the video clip, and then he appears in the video clip ten years older than in the photograph. Later, Augusto’s wife shows the woman a newspaper which features a black and white version of the same photograph. A young girl, gathered close, looks down and points proudly at the image, ‘That’s my papa.’ The fragility of the tattered newspaper contrasts with the thick white paper and the colour reproduction of the photograph of Augusto  – her father, his uncle – in the photobook that is open in front of me. Susan Meiselas’s photobook Nicaragua, first published by Pantheon Books in 1981, was republished by Aperture in 2008 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the insurrection and to coincide with a retrospective of Meiselas’s work at the International Centre for Photography, New York. A further edition was published by Aperture in 2016. Both are near facsimiles, although the 2016 edition varies from the original in that it includes an interview with Meiselas and  integrates additional audiovisual material through an augmented reality (AR) app. By scanning certain photographs with the app, the reader can access video excerpts from Pictures from a Revolution (1991), Meiselas’s documentary made when she returned to Nicaragua to find the people she had photographed during the Sandinista-led uprising against the Somoza dictatorship, and Reframing History (2004), which documents Meiselas’s return to Nicaragua with large prints of her photographs that she placed within the environment where they had been taken. While looking at the photographs in Nicaragua taken between June 1978 and July 1979, the reader can simultaneously watch clips in which the subjects of the photographs recount their experiences of the revolution and its subsequent

6

86

Part III: Commitment and visibility

impacts on their lives. The inclusion of additional content recognises the need to recontextualise the project over time but also interjects Meiselas’s subjective experience, making more apparent the way the photographs and events are framed through her authorship. The addition of moving image material made after the initial publication of the book also creates a palimpsest effect of different ‘pasts’, unfolding in the reader’s present, and emphasises the complex ways in which time is experienced in the photobook – or the dual ways that a photobook can also be understood as an event: first as a ‘dramatic event’, in which photographs are combined to create narrative, or a sense of time unfolding; and second, following Alain Badiou’s understanding of the event as a rupture that proposes a possibility for change, as a proposition that can be acted on, with a longer duration that unfolds over and across time.

The photobook as narrative event An event is something that takes place, happens or occurs in time. The linearity of a book’s physical structure implies a progression with the turn of a page. Through the sequencing of images within this structure, the photobook creates a feeling of time passing or unfolding. This sense of duration is acknowledged by Ralph Prins, who claims that in the photobook, ‘photographs lose their own photographic character as things “in themselves” and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book’ (cited in Badger and Parr 2004: 7). But through what mechanisms does the individual photograph become part of the dramatic event? The photographic image is characterised as something that can arrest, embalm or freeze to create fragments, fractions or slices of time; photographs are understood as moments removed from time’s flow (Sontag 2008 [1977]; Barthes 1993 [1980]). But looking at the photograph of Augusto, his daughter does not say that was my papa, but that is my papa. Past and present are superimposed in the video, whereas in the photobook, slices of time are placed in a constructed ‘flow’ of time, by being given ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ within the book. John Berger argues that a photographed instant acquires meaning because the viewer has read into it ‘a duration extending beyond itself’ by ‘lending it a past and a future’ (Berger 2013: 89). The photobook provides an environment in which meaning is created through the sequencing of photographs and other materials that implies a past and potential future for the viewer. In Nicaragua this additional material is made up of captions included at the end of the book, quotes from various sources and factual information about the revolution, including statistical figures and a map. While this contributes to the narrative and understanding of the book, here I focus on the photographs (which are placed together separate from this contextual material) and the narrative that can be read and experienced through them alone. Considering the individual photograph as a moment, then the photobook expands beyond that moment, creating a new, complete work with its



The photobook as event

own duration. The reader can play out the photobook event every time they look through its pages; it presents moments of time stitched together to create a longer unfolding temporal event, to a certain extent comparable to a film. However, rather than the passive consumption of a film, the photobook requires an active form of spectatorship; on a literal level the reader must turn the pages in order for the event to play out, but they must also actively engage with the book to create meaning between the images, and for a narrative to unfold. One model for structuring narrative within the photobook, suggested by Gerry Badger, is musical composition, ‘because the way a piece of music unfolds equates better to the frequently semi-abstract, and non-programmatic way most photobooks are constructed’ (Badger 2013: 18). He suggests that photographs are put together in a photobook through a causal, or intuitive process, working with groups of photographs that become ‘the building blocks of the sequence, and by extension, the narrative’ (Badger 2013: 23). To further understand how this might work, he turns to literature, suggesting that narrative schema are borrowed or reworked from popular literary devices – the journey, dream, diary, confession and memorial – with the journey being the most popular, as it mimics the way a photographer moves from one subject to the next, but also the way a reader moves through the photobook itself (Badger 2013: 25). The photographs in Nicaragua are organised chronologically and could be considered to follow the journey schema. The reader travels with Meiselas from knowing little, as she did when she first arrived, to being driven by curiosity to find out more, constructing a duration that supports the idea of a linear lived experience of time. At the start the viewer is presented with the inequalities of life under the Somoza regime, at the end they see the Sandinista’s victory on 20 July 1979, in the central plaza of Managua. It is also possible to identify blocks or phrases within Nicaragua that follow Badger’s suggestion that photobooks are structured ‘in sections, combining pictures into “verses” or “phrases” or “chapters”, which are then incorporated into the whole’ (Badger 2013: 20). Nicaragua is divided into three major sections that are listed at the start of the book as: ‘June 1978 The Somoza Regime’, ‘September 1978 Insurrection’, and ‘June 1979–July 1979 The Final Offensive’, although these sections are not demarcated by headings within the book. The photographs appear in one continuous block, predominantly across double-page spreads, with blank pages used throughout to place particular emphasis on single images and pace the book by subtly delineating the three sections, then breaking them down into shorter sequences or phrases. Within the three sections, each smaller phrase could be seen to show a distinct narrative element or represent a particular theme. In the first section, ‘June 1978 The Somoza Regime’, the first phrase illustrates the wide gulf between rich and poor in Nicaraguan society. The next, longer phrase shows Somoza’s national guard in training and the tensions felt through the militaristic presence in society. The final phrase, the longest of the section, starts with one of the most well-known images from Nicaragua, ‘Cuesta Del Plomo’, a photograph of a dismembered

87

88

Part III: Commitment and visibility

body on a hillside outside of Managua, in a location that was known to be where the National Guard carried out assassinations. It is followed by the rest of the phrase which shows increasing violence, student protests and public funerals. Positioned at the start of the phrase, ‘Cuesta Del Plomo’ introduces the increasingly intolerable situation that citizens were living under, implying a cause for what is shown in the photographs that follow, but also showing the lethal consequences and risks associated with public displays of resistance. Nicaragua is clearly designed to follow a logical structure implying a particular causality or unfolding of events, with these thematic phrases continuing throughout the book and gradually building a context for the insurrection. To a certain extent, this reading of the book relies on the reader knowing what the photographs show, as described by the captions, or having a certain degree of prior knowledge of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Another model for the creation of narrative between photographs, suggested by Peter Wollen, does not rely on knowing the significance of what a photograph shows, but on being able to decipher duration within one. Although photographs may appear to have no duration, Wollen suggests that this does not mean ‘the situations that they represent lack any quality of duration or other qualities related to time’ (Wollen 2007: 109). He uses grammatical aspect to define whether a photograph shows an event, state or process, claiming: first, that news photographs signify events – something changing and dynamic but seen from the outside as conceptually complete; second, that art photographs and most documentary photographs signify states – something stable, complete and unchanging; and third, that some documentary photographs signify processes  – a changing, dynamic situation, seen from inside as ongoing. He suggests that these types of photograph can be combined to create narrative, with ‘an ideal minimal story-form’ consisting of ‘a documentary photograph, then a news photograph, then an art photograph (process, event, state)’. In this way ‘different genres of photography imply different perspectives within durative situations and sequences of situations’ (Wollen 2007:  109–110). While all of the photographs within Nicaragua could be described as documentary, or when published contemporaneously as ‘news’ photographs, they can be seen to take on all three ‘durative situations’ sequenced within the photobook to narrate what Meiselas witnessed in Nicaragua. At the start of the book there are states, showing what it was like when she arrived – shown as complete and unchanging; then there are processes, the ongoing moments or events of the insurrection that were aiming to change those states; and then the event – the Sandinista victory – a dynamic but (at the time) complete situation. These models of narrative depend on the photobook being encountered from start to finish. However, a reader might encounter a photobook’s pages in any order, making associations between the content in both a forward and backward direction. In this active engagement with the photobook, certain photographs may be paused over, returned to and looked at again and again, others only partially glimpsed or skipped entirely – something that Badger acknowledges makes



The photobook as event

the photobook ‘a collaboration between photographer and audience’ (Badger 2013: 23). The narrative or meaning of the photobook is not fixed, but open and particular to each reader, or open to change upon each viewing. Although structured in a linear way, the photobook can also be meaningfully encountered in ways that are not necessarily linear. For Berger ‘meaning is discovered in what connects’ (Berger 1995: 89) and what connects within a photobook could occur across photographs at any place within the book, as much as through their adjacency in the book’s sequence. David Bate’s application of syntax offers a way to understand how meaning in the photobook might emerge in the moment of encountering combinations of photographs; thus narrative can form at any point within a photobook, whether reading the whole book methodically or viewing only selected pages. Bate states that as photographs have no ‘chronological “unfolding”’, showing the subject, object and verb all at once, ‘we cannot equate the syntax of language to a single picture’ (Bate 2013:  51). He does forward, however, that the way meaning is created between individual photographs may be understood to be a form of syntax: ‘Visual syntax […] is where pictures are arranged together to perform a meaning-sense across them’ (Bate 2013: 71). Like Wollen’s use of aspect, this performance of meaning across images suggests the possibility of a narrative that does not necessarily rely on a fixed or agreed-upon understanding of what each individual photograph might signify, but rather emerges when the viewer or reader interacts with or plays out the photobook. This active occurrence of meaning between photographs takes the spectator outside the photograph’s frame to contemplate the photobook as a whole work. It also moves beyond understanding the individual photographs as a record or document of past events, to experiencing them as part of a narrative event in the moment of encounter. This emergence of meaning, whether linear or more complex, adds another temporal dimension to the photographs as part of the reader’s present.

The photobook event as proposition In its capacity to be played out or activated by every viewer in their own present moment, the photobook event can be understood to produce the possibility for future encounters. In this sense, it can be seen as a proposition to be acted upon. To highlight this longer temporal reach within Meiselas’s work, Terri Weissman uses the idea of ‘durational aesthetics’, emphasising the latent durational experience in still photograpy and ‘the simultaneous singularity and ongoingness of the photographic as well as the historical event’ (Weissman 2016: 296). The photographic event happens once before the camera, but the photograph through its publication or distribution can be endlessly repeated. In this repetition it gains an ongoingness but can also be seen as ongoing in the relationships it enables, and the consequences that come from these encounters. In the case of Nicaragua, Meiselas has fostered ongoing relationships through repeated returns to that

89

90

Part III: Commitment and visibility

body of work, and the places where it was made. But any photobook, in the way that it circulates, is kept and encountered over an extended duration, has the capacity to bring about these continuing interactions. It could be inferred that the idea of the photobook transcends its physical or material properties; however, it is in part these physical qualities that enable the photograph to extend beyond its initial moment. In Pictures from a Revolution, Meiselas’s copy of Nicaragua appears as a prop, or even a character. Looking at the 2016 edition of the book, accessing clips through the AR app, the viewer can see Meiselas holding the photobook and the reactions that people have to it, while also looking at photographs of these people in their own copy of the book. This emphasises the importance of the materiality of the photobook as something that endures. The photobook is made of substantial or even luxurious materials, it is a persisting object intended to withstand years of use but also to be actively kept and valued – to be entered into libraries, or institutional collections. The newspaper will be thrown away, the webpage updated, the photograph posted on Instagram soon superseded, whereas books are designed to be kept and to maintain the same framing for the photographs they contain. Interacting with a newly published book, its design connotes this intention for lasting, for posterity, or a life beyond the moment when it is published and in this sense can be understood as a bridging device between the present and future, as well as a record of the past. Michael Bhaskar states that it is inadequate to define publishing simply as making public, but rather, ‘At the heart of publishing are two mutable activities: filtering and amplification’ (Bhaskar 2013:  103). While the process of producing a photobook is not without filtration – whether that be finding a publisher in the first instance, or the editing of a manuscript once accepted – it could be argued that a photographer has more control over this process than when their images are published within other media, such as magazines or newspapers. For Meiselas, the publication of her photographs from Nicaragua in the global news media gave them a public life, but this only presented what she felt was a dispersed portrayal of the conflict. Publishing a photobook was a way for her to ‘gather them back, make sense of them and give them coherence – as well as permanence’ and present a version of the revolution that more accurately reflected what she had witnessed and been a part of (Meiselas 2008: 116). Bhaskar defines amplification as ‘acting so that more copies of a work or product are distributed or consumed’, not just making more copies of a work, but ensuring there is ‘a movement from lesser to greater exposure’ (Bhaskar 2013: 114–115). While it could be argued that the publication of a photograph in a newspaper would gain greater amplification, its duration, however, would be limited, because of the newspaper’s ephemeral quality. The coherent statement authored by the photographer in the photobook has the potential over time to be amplified if not louder, then more broadly, to different audiences in the future. Framed as an event, with this extended or expanded duration, the photobook can be seen as a cause or start of a process, rather than a conclusion, outcome or



The photobook as event

result. This conceptualisation of the photobook corresponds with Alain Badiou’s idea of the political event as a proposition to be acted on: an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists that has been ignored. The event is, in a certain way, merely a proposition. It proposes something to us. Everything will depend on the way in which the possibility proposed by the event is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world. (Badiou 2013: 9–10)

Within a political context, the consequences of ‘the rupture that is the event’ relies upon a group effort ‘to become real; that is, for it to be inscribed, step by step, in the world’ (Badiou 2013: 10). The idea of the event as something revelatory that ‘brings to light’ the invisible, parallels an understanding of documentary photography or photojournalism as having the capacity to reveal wrongs or inform viewers of atrocities being committed that otherwise would remain unseen. In the late 1970s and early 1980s doubts were cast on the political effectiveness of this revelatory aspect of photography, including by Sontag who wrote that ‘“concerned photography” has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it’ (Sontag 2008 [1977]:  21) and Martha Rosler, who claimed ‘since the 1930s there has been an inundating amount of information about the horror of war and there are now more wars than ever’ (Rosler 2004: 251). Evaluating this critique, Jacques Rancière suggests that this ‘general suspicion about the political capacity of any image’ is ‘generated by the disappointed belief in a straight line between perception, affection, comprehension and action’ (Rancière 2011 [2008]: 103). Following Badiou, the photographic event that brings things to light should not be expected to have this straight line of direct consequences, as the onus for change lies with what is done with the event to inscribe it in the world. It is not what the photograph can do, but what is done with it that matters. How the photograph is published or distributed, affects how it can move within the world and create and connect audiences. Whereas the newspaper gains its value through its communication of today’s news, the book is made with the possibility to be encountered later, when it will be looked back on as past, forming a part of cultural and social history. In comparison to the idea of the historical event – as complete, with a beginning, end and defined temporal boundaries – the photobook event is one that if acted upon, can continue to have ramifications. It can continue to be grasped, elaborated and incorporated into the world beyond the initial distribution of the photographs it contains. Alongside Rancière, other recent reappraisals of documentary photography include Ariella Azoulay’s which makes the claim that the ‘moment of the photographic act, which is said to reach its end when incarnated in a final product, a print or digital file, is in fact a new beginning that lacks any predictable end’ (Azoulay 2008:  137). The same sense of a new beginning could be ascribed to the moment a photobook is published or experienced as a dramatic event for a

91

92

Part III: Commitment and visibility

viewer. Azoulay proposes a theory of photography that ‘takes into account all the participants in photographic acts  – camera, photographer, photographed subject and spectator  – approaching the photograph (and its meaning) as an unintentional effect of the encounter between all of these. None of these have the capacity to seal off this effect and determine its sole meaning’ (Azoulay 2008: 23). As discussed, the photobook’s meaning is a creative or collaborative act in which the reader plays an active role, in this sense the photobook remains open to the possibility of transformation and a plurality of meaning from which photographs emerge, which for Azoulay is an important part of ‘the civil power of being a spectator’ (Azoulay 2005: 43). The photographic event is one that has occurred in front of the camera; the photobook event is one that has been constructed, over time, through the collaborative effort of those involved in its production  – the photographer, editor, designer, printer, publisher, bookseller, reader, and so on. The creation of the photobook in this sense can be seen as a collective act. And as none of the participants in the photographic act can determine a sole meaning for the photograph, so none of those involved in the production of a photobook can seal a sole meaning into the photobook. Additional layers of meaning are also added to the photobook as it persists through time. On its initial publication, at the time of the US-backed contra wars, Nicaragua had a political urgency and gained a particular significance through being published by Pantheon Books, a publisher associated with intellectual and often politically left-orientated works. Nicaragua’s reception adds a further layer and positions the book within contemporaneous debates around art and photojournalism and the critique of documentary photography. It was reviewed by Rosler, who considered the book ineffective in terms of mobilising and informing opinion, but praised by Andy Grundberg, who defined Meiselas as part of the New Photojournalist movement. A further layer is added through Meiselas’s own treatment of the book, which she deconstructed in exhibitions such as Nicaragua: Mediations, at Side Gallery, Newcastle-on-Tyne, just one year after the book was published, but also returned to for subsequent bodies of work. A final layer is provided through the inclusion of Nicaragua in the emergent photobook canon: it featured in the second volume of Badger and Parr’s The Photobook: A History (2006) and was then republished by Aperture, a publisher and proponent of photobooks, both opening up the book to new audiences and additional framing. While the physical character and structure of the book remain, each of these layers adds to the interpretation of both the photographs within the book and the work as a whole. Recognising the photobook as an event acknowledges the capacity for these layers to become part of its meaning over a longer duration. Berger argues that for a photograph to have a social or political use, it needs to be situated within a continuum or a living context (Berger 2013: 57). ‘The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images’ (Berger 2013:  59). The photobook could be



The photobook as event

understood to present an ideal form of this ongoing text of photographs, not only because of its form and contents, but also for the way that it can be understood as an event over time. Berger stresses the vital role of memory in creating this living context, and importantly, points out that the way memory works is radial rather than linear: ‘an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event’ (Berger 2013:  59). This radiality of memory, Berger claims, must be respected in order to put a photograph back into the context of social experience and memory. ‘We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is’ (Berger 2013:  59). It could be argued that the photobook can create these numerous associations through the multiple ways it is engaged with or ‘read’, leading the reader to arrive at the same event – the work’s meaning. The photobook, as an event for a reader to discover in which meaning is performed between the collected photographs, provides a space for this surprising conclusiveness. But also, marking a point in time, the photobook event creates a particular nexus from which various social experiences or encounters extend. As demonstrated by Nicaragua, the photobook provides a living context because of the social relationships it generates, the way it can be returned to by its creator and the various interactions with different audiences through time that add to and complicate its reading.

Works cited Azoulay, Ariella (2005). ‘The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography’. Afterimage 33.2: 38–44. Azoulay, Ariella (2008). The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Badger, Gerry (2013). ‘It’s All Fiction – Narrative and the Photobook’. In Imprint: Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond, H. Hedberg et al. (eds). Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing: 15–47. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2004). The Photobook: A History. Volume  1. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2006). The Photobook: A History. Volume  2. London: Phaidon. Badiou, Alain (2013). Philosophy and the Event. Cambridge: Polity. Barthes, Roland (1993). Camera Lucida. English translation by Richard Howard. London: Vintage. [First English language edition 1981. First French edition 1980.] Bate, David (2013). ‘The Syntax of a Photowork’. In Imprint: Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond. H. Hedberg et al. (eds). Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing: 49–75. Berger, John (2013). ‘Uses of Photography’. In Understanding a Photograph, Geoff Dyer (ed.). London: Penguin: 49–60. Berger, John, and Jean Mohr (1995). Another Way of Telling. New York: Vintage Books. Bhaskar, Michael (2013). The Content Machine: Towards a Theory of Publishing from the Printing Press to the Digital Network. London: Anthem Press. Grundberg, Andy (1987). ‘Art; Photojournalism Lays Claim to the Realm of Esthetics’. The New York Times (12 April).

93

94

Part III: Commitment and visibility Meiselas, Susan (1981). Nicaragua. New York: Pantheon Books. [First edition.] Meiselas, Susan (2008). Nicaragua. New York: Aperture. [Second edition.] Meiselas, Susan (2016). Nicaragua. New York: Aperture. [Third edition.] Meiselas, Susan (2008). In History. New  York: International Center for Photography/ Gottingen: Steidl. Rancière, Jacques (2011). The Emancipated Spectator. English translation by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. [First English language edition 2009. First French edition 2008.] Rosler, Martha (2004). ‘War and Metaphors’. In Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001. Cambridge, MA: MIT: 245–258. Sontag, Susan (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin. [First American edition 1977.] Weissman, Terri (2016). ‘Impossible Closure: Realism and Durational Aesthetics in Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua’. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49.2: 295–315. Wollen, Peter (2007). ‘Ice and Fire’. In Documents of Contemporary Art: The Cinematic. David Campany (ed.). London: Whitechapel Gallery, 108–113.

Camden, NJ, 2013: a digital photobook Nicolas Baudouin

At the end of 2012, I received as a birthday present the French edition of Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012b). Chapter 2, ‘Days of Siege’, is set in the city of Camden, New Jersey, which used to be a very wealthy and dynamic suburb of Philadelphia, booming with industry (The Campbell Soup Company was established there in 1869), until it slowly started declining in the 1950s and became a dying city. Between 2004 and 2011, Camden had been identified as one of the most violent cities in the United States. Now I had never heard of Camden, but after learning from Hedges and Sacco’s investigation how a large part of the population lived in extreme poverty and despair, I decided to go see for myself what such a city looked like. As I had neither the time nor the money to travel there physically, I decided to use a very useful tool, and what’s more available for free: Google Street View. I had previously used Street View to explore the potential of doing ‘street photography’ without employing a traditional camera, but this time I had a more concrete objective, which was to discover the city of Camden, and check for myself to what extent it was visually consistent with the description I had from the book. Progressively, systematically, I ‘drove’ the Google car through the streets of the city, and I was able to appreciate to what degree the city was truly in a dire state of abandonment. I suddenly realised that I had to do my own documentary on this city I’ve never been to and will never go to by putting to optimum use the objectivity of Street View. I started to take pictures (screenshots) with the intention of illustrating the depressing statistics given in the book with my own vision of those abandoned houses and factories situated next to large empty lots which have been reclaimed by nature. Discovering a place like Camden using Street View is very easy. Camden is not very big and you can ‘drive’ through the city looking around for places that deserve to be photographed. You never feel uncomfortable or threatened, because you are sitting at home in front of your computer; but at the same time, it feels as if you are really walking around with a camera in your hand looking for a good picture to take.

7

96

Part III: Commitment and visibility

Figure 7.1  Camden, NJ, 2013. Screenshot from Google Street View, taken by Nicolas Baudouin.

Figure 7.2  Camden, NJ, 2013. Screenshot from Google Street View, taken by Nicolas Baudouin.

The Google car that took the pictures of the city performed like a robot, shooting every twenty metres with the 360° camera on the roof, without any aesthetic or political criteria. Pure objectivity. It is I, the photographer, who will go through this huge number of images and choose, frame and capture what is



Camden, NJ, 2013

politically and aesthetically interesting, according to my own criteria and what I wish to communicate. The camera on the Google car never lies, besides blurring faces and licence plates; it shows abandoned streets lined with half-demolished houses, recording empirically how the city of Camden is suffering from an extremely violent economic and social crisis. Some houses look like cages on account of the heavy fences protecting patios and front steps from burglars and intruders. I chose to capture such arresting urban landscapes, as they confirm the observations made in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and validate the research conducted by Hedges and Sacco, as communicated in their book. But I built up the documentary evidence in my own way, using this new tool that is Google Street View. After compiling more than one hundred photographs, I proceeded with the selection and ordering, and finally determined to publish the series as an e-photobook on the Internet (on my personal website) so as to make it accessible to everyone. I chose the Internet because the images I produced came from a screen and I thought they should keep their original quality although I did correct the brightness, contrast, sharpness, and so on, for each image. This e-photobook is also very similar to a printed book, because I chose to allocate one webpage to each picture, on which the viewer has to click in order to go to the next one. Unlike the original book by Hedges and Sacco (2012a), the emphasis is much more on the illustrations than the text, as the photographs are accompanied by the shortest, factual pieces of written information quoted from the book. I started the series with images taken downtown, inviting the viewer to progressively discover the damaged neighbourhoods, the abandoned houses and factories and the overall misery of the people living there. The result is a 30-page digital portfolio or e-photobook (http://nicolas.baudouin.pagesperso-orange.fr/cam0.html) made up of screenshots carefully composed using Street View as a way to gain access to the streets of the city: it is a practical example of pure street (post)-photography!

Works cited Baudouin, Nicolas (n.d.). www.nicolasbaudouin.com. Baudouin, Nicolas (2012). Camden (NJ). e-photobook: http://nicolas.baudouin.pages​ perso-orange.fr/cam0.html (accessed 17 December 2019). Girardeau, Astrid (2009). ‘Le monde à portée de “View”’. Libération (12 October). www. liberation.fr/ecrans/2009/10/12/le-monde-a-portee-de-view_954229?page=article (accessed 17 December 2019). Hedges, Chris, and Joe Sacco (2012a). Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Navayana, Indianapolis: Nation Books. Hedges, Chris, and Joe Sacco (2012b). Jours de destruction, jours de révolte. French translation by Sidonie Van den Dries and Stéphane Dacheville. Paris: Futuropolis.

97

Part IV Institutional v. clandestine

Photographing race and madness: annual reports of psychiatric hospitals in the US South in the early twentieth century Élodie Edwards-Grossi From the 1860s onward, public psychiatric institutions were created in the US South to treat Black patients with mental disorders: some of the establishments had segregated wards, such as the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana in Pineville, which was created in 1902 (later changed to the Central Louisiana State Hospital in 1924); others restricted their intake to Black patients. The first asylum to be set up entirely for Black patients opened its doors in 1870, in the city of Petersburg, Virginia, under the name of the Central State Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane. Other institutions soon followed in other Southern states, such as the Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum, which was established in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1877. Although more than fifty institutions opened between 1870 and 1920, the motivations that lay behind their creation were not of one stamp, but wideranging and sometimes contradictory. In a first phase, institutions were opened during the Reconstruction era (from 1865 to 1877), when the federal government set up a series of measures to provide new Black citizens with the beginnings of public assistance, notably through the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau (Goldberg 2007: 35). These institutions were thought by nineteenth-century citizens to represent the epitome of scientific modernity and public assistance (Grossi 2019: 204), though they also became sites for the surveillance and control of marginalised populations, as was the case with similar institutions in Europe (Szasz 1961; Foucault 1972, 2003; Castel 1976). These complex political dynamics need to be unravelled when looking into the history of hospitals and psychiatric treatments in the US South. In this chapter, my aim is to explore the documentary photographs published in their annual reports, which were presented to the governor of each state to prove their proper functioning.1 Photographs were taken in these institutions between the 1900s and the 1930s, and I look at two specific series taken in two institutions in Louisiana. First, those that picture the medical staff both at the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, which was created by the

8

102

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Louisiana Legislature in 1847, and at the Central Louisiana State Hospital. And second, the photographs showing the patients, both Black and white, at the Central Louisiana Hospital in Pineville, Louisiana. These documentary artefacts have received no critical attention from historians of medicine, nor have these institutional photobooks attracted any attention from photobook historians. Comparing several institutions goes towards painting a broader picture of how asylums in several Southern states functioned. There is also a particular advantage in studying the Central Louisiana State Hospital: it allows us to observe the ways physicians set up different therapeutic activities for Black and white patients. In this chapter, I argue that the photographs taken in Louisiana establish a public image of the asylum. The medical staff and the photographer construct an image of the asylum as committed to the curative regime of moral therapy, while catering to the tastes, proclivities and activities of white patients. The photographs featured in the annual reports also include images of Black patients. Yet, at a time of segregation in the US South, Black patients received differential treatment. They were assigned supervised tasks which involved physical labour, under the pretext that it was occupational therapy. The discourse of cure and recovery in such a regimen of treatment was justified according to an ideological belief in the Black patient’s ‘natural’ ability and desire to work. Finally, I analyse the epistemological limitations of these photographs, since they are staged, and result from an arranged display of bodies with a rhetorical purpose.

Previous work on photography and asylums in the United States My work is indebted to various scholars, especially historians of photography such as Rory du Plessis (2014), who has written on a South African asylum at the end of the nineteenth century, and Susan Sidlauskas (2013), for her work on an English asylum in Holloway, Surrey, likewise at the end of the nineteenth century. Most work on medical portraits, psychiatry and photography has been produced by historians of Great Britain and the British Empire, with little focusing so far on photographic practices in asylums located in the United States. Other studies have centred on photography and racial physiognomy in asylums or other medical institutions. Historian Sharrona Pearl (2009) has continued on from Sander L. Gilman’s pioneering work on Hugh W. Diamond (1976), a physician and alienist who daguerreotyped his patients in the 1850s, while Mandy Reid (2006) and Molly Rogers (2006) have investigated Louis Agassiz’s commissioning and use of Joseph Zealy’s daguerrotypes of South Carolina slaves in the 1850s. Diamond practised diagnostic photography, or photographic physiognomy, at the Surrey County Lunatic asylum in England. Many of his photographs were before-and-after sequences (Pearl 2009: 290, 298), charting the process of cure through physiognomic improvement. Diamond was



Photographing race and madness

also interested in typifying madness, and he was convinced that signs of madness could show on the bodies of his patients – hence the recourse to photography. He even created public displays of his photographs, including a series entitled ‘The Types of Insanity’ (1852) (Pearl 2009: 291). With these pictures, Diamond was inserting himself into a tradition of medical illustration, as practised by physicians themselves, such as Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol in France, who produced sketches to depict his patients’ physiognomies at the Salpêtrière for his Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, translated and published in English in 1845 (Gilman 1977 [1976]: 7). Likewise, naturalist Louis Agassiz used daguerreotypes of slaves to exemplify what he took to be distinct races, and to add credence to his polygenist theories (Reid 2006). This chapter does not discuss medical illustrations or diagnostic photographs but focuses instead on documentary photographs published in the annual reports of mental institutions, starting from the 1900s. Although we do not know whether the photographer was a member of the medical staff or an outsider, these photographs allow historians to see the staged representations that asylum officials used to publicise their institutions at the beginning of the twentieth century. In their reports, superintendents and other alienists would write at length about the current situation of the asylums, the health and progress of the patients, their increasing numbers, and would often request greater financial support from the state, for example when construction or other public works became necessary, and, of course, they included photographs. These photographs served to document the state of the institutions, made visible their potential needs, as well as showing where the patients lived, and worked, as these annual reports were directly addressed to the office of the state governors. Of great historical interest to us today, these administrative photographs unveil the differential treatments and separate living/working spaces of Black and white patients. They fill a void in the archives, as such archives are often fragmentary, and rarely let the voices of the patients be heard (Grossi 2020).

Institutional photobooks: creating a public image of the asylum The photographs included in the annual reports of these institutions are often group portraits of white medical staff in front of tidy-looking buildings. Figure 8.1 shows white male and female attendants of the East Louisiana State Hospital in the early 1930s dressed in suits or aprons and posing in an orderly manner, displaying a kind of discipline that is consonant with the walls of the institution they are pictured in. Similarly, Figure 8.2 shows white female attendants at the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana in Pineville in the 1910s wearing their white pinafores and short caps and posing quite stiffly, having been carefully positioned on the steps so that all their faces can be seen. For Susan Sontag, photography was used in psychiatry (and other medical fields) as a tool

103

104

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Figure 8.1  Anon. ‘Group of Employees’. State of Louisiana Thirty-first Biennial Report of the Board of Administrators of the East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson, Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period March 1st, 1930 to February 29, 1932: 50.

Figure 8.2  Anon. ‘Group of Female Attendants’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1910. Baton Rouge: The New Advocate, Official Journal, 1910, plate inserted between pages 34 and 35.



Photographing race and madness

for social control and surveillance, as it was in other state institutions in the ­nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Sontag 1977: 5; Tagg 1993). These first two photographs are already enough to prompt the contemporary viewer to meditate on the intrusions, discipline and conditions under which the patients were cared for. All the staff are white, which illustrates the stark imbalance of power between the all-white asylum authorities and the racialised patients. Photographs included in the annual reports could also serve as proof that the asylums were inadequately funded. Superintendents would often publish pictures of overcrowding while voicing their concerns about not being able to provide proper care for their patients. The photographs acted as documentary evidence in their urgent request for more funding from the state and were a direct appeal to the Governor. The Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana in Pineville, created in 1902, was overcrowded by 1912: the hospital had been built to accommodate 550 patients, but was home to 639 within ten years, then 685 in 1913, and 690 in 1914. Only a few years after the opening of the institution, Black women and white men slept on the porches (with canopies acting as makeshift walls) for lack of space in the dormitories. Furthermore, it was not uncommon for patients to be held in wire pens and cribs. These installations had finally been removed by 1930, as Superintendent Clarence Pierson conceded in the 1930 report, writing that ‘mechanical and physical restraint to inmates was unpardonably excessive’, and that ‘all the newer modern facilities for an up-to-date hospital were absent’.2 Forty single rooms originally built in the Black patient wing had been converted in the 1910s into a 90-bed dormitory. Overpopulation would last until the 1960s, when the institution was desegregated. It is therefore fair to hypothesise that these images were included in the 1930 annual report to the Governor of Louisiana by Superintendent Pierson to inform the state administrators and the ex-officio president of the board of administrators, Huey P. Long, of the dire situation within the hospital, and to argue that a greater share of public funding was needed to care for the patients: ‘modern up-to-date methods, with adequate equipment, must be provided by the State if we expect to do our duty by so large a proportion of the population of Louisiana that demands our response and succor’.3 It is worth noting that the photographs in these and other annual reports are not strictly speaking illustrations as they do not accompany specific texts (apart from their captions) and are not directly commented upon by the physicians or the superintendent; they are printed full page and appear as independent images that provide the reader with documentation of the institution and the patients’ activities.

Picturing whiteness and social class in the asylum In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Western alienists believed that moral therapy was a cure for madness. Moral therapy, or ‘moral management’

105

106

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Figure 8.3  Anon. ‘Wire Pens and Cribs, Before their Removal’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930: 32.



Photographing race and madness

Figure 8.4  Anon. ‘Individual Rooms being Converted into Dormitories’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930: 42.

as it was also called, consisted of a set of activities, and the asylum was correspondingly organised into distinct spaces in which certain activities could routinely take place: playing games, gardening, exercising, resting and so on (Pearl 2009: 293, 300–301; Levin and Gildea 2013). The patient’s environment, too, was thought to directly impact their mental condition: by offering the patients aesthetically pleasing spaces, meant to convey values such as order, calm and productivity, the alienists hoped to strengthen the therapeutic potential of the activities and work sessions. Although moral therapy had been developed in the early 1800s, in countries such as France and England, therapeutic forms of occupation were still very much in fashion in the early twentieth century in the US South. In the light of the racial segregation practiced in those state asylums, one can therefore ask whether all patients were offered the same leisure activities,  or  if systemic differences existed according to whether the patients were white or Black. Figure 8.5 is a typical example of the images commissioned for the annual reports. The photograph shows a few well-dressed men and women in the interior of a well-decorated room in the 1930s that does not call to mind an asylum. These individuals are patients, and we see them in the company of their children, invited to fête Mardi Gras, a popular celebration in Louisiana (one of the only US states with a Catholic majority). Clarence Pierson, Superintendent of the Hospital, shows his pride to Governor Oscar Kelly Allen in displaying such a picture:

107

108

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Figure 8.5  Anon. ‘Mardi Gras Festival’. Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital, Pineville, To his Excellency, the Governor, Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1934: 9.

In an examination of this report you will observe a number of pictures which we have especially presented to represent the vocational and employment features of our hospital. Long since, it has been recognized that aside from preliminary steps in the examination, treatment, and conduct of the insane, nothing has yielded to the individual patient a more beneficial influence than his being employed in the vocation and amusement departments of the hospital. I might incidentally recall to your attention the field and garden work, the construction work by our patients’ labor, the lawn and park work in which so many patients are pleasantly employed, the beauty parlor, the barber shops, the hydrotherapy department and the Occupational Department, the amusement hall for weekly moving picture shows, musical entertainments and dances, and other entertainments, especially such outstanding entertainments as the Mardi Gras ball picture herewith ­presented.4

The focus on wealth and class in this Mardi Gras photograph is evident. Institutional photographs did more than construct a public image of the hospital as curatively orientated, it was the psychiatric profession that was to be valorised, and first and foremost its practitioners. Doctors were preoccupied with imagemaking processes because photography was seen as a powerful way to popularise their work and the treatments they were putting in place in those state institutions, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth (Bogdan and Marshall 1997; Guyatt 2004). Creating a positive and modern image was important in promoting and popularising the hospital as the best option for white patients. Therefore, the indoor social activities of the white patients are photographed to



Photographing race and madness

confirm that the care on offer is of a high standard, and that attention is lavished to meet white patients’ material needs. The hospital officials were effectively trying to show a connection, a correspondence between life inside the institution and life lived outside, according to the same social norms, in an environment of relative material abundance. As a matter of fact, not all amusement activities could be accessed by Black patients: some of them, if not most of them, were reserved for white patients only. The institutional photobooks provide us with a glimpse into the kind of restorative, occupational activities that were organised for white patients. These activities centred on sport, self-care and, most importantly, social interactions. Figure 8.6 shows white men taking part in an outdoor repair workshop, enjoying the sun and sitting in small groups so as to be able to cooperate and interchange with one another. They are free to sit on the grass or on chairs, and they are pictured in the luscious, green park surrounding the hospital, where they fix wooden chairs and the like. These environmental group portraits serve the medical staff ’s aim to show to the (all white) state administration that occupational therapy was running smoothly and that they were taking care of the white patients’ needs. Although photographed in state institutions, none of the male or female patients show any of the stereotypical expressions of madness. Instead of giving madness visual expression or attempting a typology in the manner of Hugh Diamond, the medical staff and the photographer (presumably a member of the medical staff) sought to lay emphasis on the normalcy and civility of the patients. Such had been the case too with Frederick Gutekunst’s portraits of white patients

Figure 8.6  Anon. ‘Male Occupational Therapy Department’. Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital, Pineville, To his Excellency, the Governor, Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1934: 22.

109

110

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

photographed at the Philadelphia asylum for Isaac Newton Kerlin’s book The Mind Unveiled (1858), likewise published for fund-raising purposes and to ‘stress the normalcy of the subjects’ appearance’ (Gilman 1982: 172). The photographs of white patients in Louisiana institutions communicate the curative aims of the asylum, while going against the dominant myth that madness is readily visible in the individual. As demonstrated by art historian Rory du Plessis, the representation of madness in nineteenth-century photographs usually focused on the external appearance of the patients (du Plessis 2014: 18). Wild, unkempt hair, stained clothing, wide-open eyes, angry attitudes, animalistic stares, and so on, were elements featuring in the photographs taken by physicians such as Diamond, who aimed to record the physiognomy of insanity in the 1850s, and who considered that his relatively calm portraits were already a vast improvement over previous illustrations: ‘[photography] presents also a perfect and faithful record, free altogether from the painful caricaturing which so disfigures almost all the published portraits of the insane’ (Diamond, 1856, quoted in Gilman 1977 [1976]:  24). Diamond had postulated that photography was a perfect, faithful, objective medium for recording expressions of madness scientifically. In the photographs from the Louisiana hospitals’ annual reports, madness is normalised, since the photographic medium is used to provide a visual counter to the representations of madness as ‘difference’. The photographs used by physicians in Louisiana were not conceived as a diagnostic tool deployed by the clinical gaze to recognise and interpret the display of madness: indeed, they were not used in medical records at all. Instead, they were seen as political and social tools which could be used to persuade, to convince administrative state officers and elected officials that the hospital was under a regime of well-regulated order. These photographs assisted in constructing a public image as curatively orientated and well run, with the aim of securing better funding each year. The unspoken enterprise behind such photographs was to prove that the white patients had the potential to interact with each other in society – since this was already happening within the i­ nstitution – and that the cure was working: in a little while, it could be expected that they could become part of wider society again. The photographs were therefore utilised to prove the transformative aspect of the asylum. In other words, the photographs publicised the events that were orchestrated inside the institution in order to suggest that patients would soon be fit to participate in any social events, in ordinary life.

Photographing madness and race: docility and forced labour in the age of Jim Crow The photographs published in the annual reports were not representative of the treatment offered to all patients. How were Black patients photographed? Could Black patients be accommodated in the public image of the hospital that was created by photography? How did the institution officials portray the treatments imposed upon Black patients? Finally, how did the treatment apparatus



Photographing race and madness

organised for Black patients relate to the broader American segregationist ­ideology of the early twentieth century? As shown in Figures 8.7 and 8.8, the activities of Black patients at the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana in Pineville in the 1910s were mostly limited to physical labour, which was defined as occupational and therapeutic. Unlike the photographs featuring white patients, the Black patients are not sitting in the garden or gazing at nature, nor are they positioned in such a way as to facilitate being engaged in conversation or indoor recreational pursuits: they are shown hoeing in open fields, growing crops or clearing trees. These photographs make up a visual archive, documenting how Black patients received a variant form of moral therapy, marked by exclusion from recreational pursuits and close social interactions. Briefly put, for the administrative officials, the Black patients provided unpaid labour for the operational running of the hospital. The hospital for Black patients was shaped around discourses of cure: designed as a workhouse, for sure, but it was thought the patients would be cured by labour, because hard, physical labour was seen as a transformative treatment. It was the sole medicine that was administered to them. The publicised image of the hospital that administrators saw fit to advertise was focused on values such as the curative, the transformative, and the restoration of good health and sanity. More importantly, physicians wished to depict how well the white patients were behaving (together), which showed that their treatments worked and that their patients

Figure 8.7  Anon. ‘Diversional Occupation – Clearing a Hillside for a Corn-Field’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1916. St Francisville: The True Democrat, 1916, plate inserted between pages 48 and 49.

111

112

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Figure 8.8  Anon. ‘Diversional Occupation – Patients Hoeing Cabbage’. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1916. St Francisville: The True Democrat, 1916, plate inserted between pages 50 and 51.

were ready to reintegrate into their former positions in the social order outside the walls of the asylum. By contrast, Black patients were shown as being ‘cured’ when they performed docile labour outdoors or indoors. In short, the visual representations of Whites and Blacks differed, in that cure for Whites was marked by middleclass leisure activities, while recovery for Blacks was conveyed by docility, labour productivity and, consequently, the suppression of newly acquired civil rights. Indeed, in the 1916 report, hospital administrators such as Superintendent John N. Thomas, Pierson’s predecessor, lamented the abolition of slavery in 1865, which according to him had had a negative impact on his Black patients’ mental health: in the Southern States the alarming increase of insanity among the negroes since the Civil War is recognized by all observers and is no doubt largely due to the fact that the negro in slavery was generally well cared for and his restrictions to liberty prevented the vices that have been common to the race since freedom. Thrown upon his own resources to earn a livelihood in the world of competition, thousands have succumbed to disease, which in turn has been a potent factor in the increase of insanity among the race.5

Therefore, Black patients’s work could be seen as a way to restore sanity to former slaves and their descendants, years after the abolition of slavery, during the Jim Crow regime, which installed segregation in the South after the 1870s.



Photographing race and madness

The display of Black docility in the annual reports was also a way for the medical staff to reassure public administrators and to show that cure was working, in the age of segregation. In the New South, ‘undomesticated’ Black men represented a potential threat to white society by disrupting work regimes and work relations, or by refusing the social roles that segregationist society assigned to them. Mentally ill Black men, who came to the notice of the authorities, were often those who had difficulties in work relations. Consequently, Black bodies were considered cured when they returned to a state of obedience and docility. Though these photographs and the annual reports unveil a system of control and coercion, surveillance, discipline and punishment, forms of resistance did, however, develop. To quote Sander Gilman’s work, historians must ‘examine the potential of the simultaneous, multiple and often contradictory meanings inherent in images of madness’ (Gilman 1977 [1976]: 225). Consequently, studying these photographs helps reveal the discrepancy between the representations of patients as passive agents (as conveyed by these pictures by white administrative officials), and the true capacities of resistance patients could display in their everyday lives, as a response to the institutional apparatus.

Conclusion The central concern in this chapter has been to show how the medical staff in Southern asylums constructed an image of Black patients for the public in relation to theories on labour, docility and race at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the institutions in Louisiana, the superintendence effectively created two hospitals, each with its own distinctive ethos. On the one hand, it offered white patients a milieu that was based on high social class values, with therapy based on sustained social interactions between peers. The form of moral therapy for Whites exhibited in their annual reports made provision for the comforts and activities associated with their social class. In other words, the hospital did not strip the white patients of the social privileges they enjoyed prior to institutionalisation. Rather, one can argue that moral therapy recognised the importance of maintaining the prevailing social norms, which is to say that it reproduced the hierarchy and division between Blacks and Whites in the Jim Crow era. However, patients’ resistance provides compelling evidence to reconsider the official images of the hospitals, which are better understood as visual fictions.

Notes 1 This chapter builds upon my doctoral work on the social history of race and psychiatry in the segregated South and the medicalisation of the Black body from the nineteenth century to the present (Grossi 2018). See also Élodie Edwards-Grossi, Mad with

113

114

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

2 3 4 5

Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity, and Civil Rights in the U.S. South, 1840–1940, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2022. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930: 8. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930: 25. Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital at Pineville, To his Excellency, the Governor, Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1934: 20. Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1916. St. Francisville: The True Democrat, 1916: 20.

Works cited Anon. (1910). Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1910. Baton Rouge: The New Advocate, Official Journal, 1910. Anon. (1916). Report of the Board of Administrators of the Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1916. St Francisville: The True Democrat, 1916. Anon. (1930). Report of the Board of Administrators of the Central Louisiana State Hospital of the State of Louisiana, To the Governor. Biennial Period Ending March 31st, 1930. Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Co., 1930. Anon. (1930–32). State of Louisiana Thirty-first Biennial Report of the Board of Administrators of the East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson, Louisiana. To the Governor. Biennial Period March 1st, 1930 to February 29, 1932. Anon. (1934). Report of the Board of the Administrators, of the Central Louisiana State Hospital at Pineville, To his Excellency, the Governor, Biennial Period Ending March 31, 1934. Bogdan, Robert, and Ann Marshall (1997). ‘Views of the Asylum: Picture postcard depictions of institutions for people with mental disorders in the early 20th century’. Visual Sociology 12.1: 4–27. Castel, Robert (1976). L’Ordre psychiatrique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Diamond, Hugh W. (1856) ‘On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity’, read before the Royal Society, 22 May; reproduced in Sander L. Gilman, 1977 (1976), The Face of Madness. Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography: 17–24. Edwards-Grossi, Élodie (2022). Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness,  Insanity, and Civil Rights in the U.S. South, 1840–1940, Baton Rouge: LSU Press. Foucault, Michel (1972). Histoire de la Folie à l’Âge Classique. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (2003). Le Pouvoir psychiatrique. Cours au Collège de France, 1973–1974. Paris: EHESS/Gallimard/Le Seuil.



Photographing race and madness

Gilman, Sander L. (ed.) (1976). The Face of Madness. Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography. New  York: Brunner-Mazel (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1977). Gilman, Sander L. (1982). Seeing the Insane. New York: J. Wiley/Brunner-Mazel. Goldberg, Chad Alan (2007). Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grossi, Élodie (2018). ‘“Bad Brains”: Race et Psychiatrie de la fin de l’esclavage à l’époque contemporaine aux États-Unis’. PhD dissertation in Sociology, under the supervision of Paul Schor and Dominique Vidal, Université Paris Diderot. Grossi, Élodie (2019). ‘A Patient Labor: le travail des patients noirs et les pratiques de résistance dans les asiles psychiatriques du Sud, 1870–1910’. Revue Française d’Études Américaines 160.3: 200–214. Grossi, Élodie (2020). ‘Behind the Hospitals’ Closed Doors: Medical Archives as Sites of  Racial Memory and Social (In)Justice’. Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 162.1: 35–50. Guyatt, Mary (2004). ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental asylum interiors, 1880–1914’. In Interior Design and Identity, Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (eds). Manchester: Manchester University Press: 48–71. Kerlin, Isaac Newton (1858). The Mind Unveiled; A Brief History of Twenty-Two Imbecile Children. Philadelphia: U. Hunt & Son. Levin, Len, and Ruthann Gildea (2013). ‘Bibliotherapy: Tracing the Roots of a Moral Therapy Movement in the United States from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present’. Journal of the Medical Library Association 101.2: 89–91. Pearl, Sharrona (2009). ‘Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond’. History of Photography 33.3: 288–305. du Plessis, Rory (2014). ‘Photographs from the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, South Africa, 1890–1907’. Social Dynamics 40.1: 12–42. Reid, Mandy (2006). ‘Selling Shadows and Substance’. Early Popular Visual Culture 4.3: 285–305. Rogers, Molly (2006). ‘The slave daguerreotypes of the Peabody Museum: Scientific meaning and utility’. History of Photography 30.1: 39–54. Sidlauskas, Susan (2013). ‘Inventing the Medical Portrait: Photography at the “Benevolent Asylum” of Holloway, c. 1885–1889’. Medical Humanities 39.1: 29–37. Sontag, Susan (1977). On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Szasz, Thomas (1961). The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Hoeber-Harper. Tagg, John (1993). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

115

9

Photobooks and the architectural imagination of California Volker M. Welter

When architects and architectural historians think about California architecture of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, at least three sources of inspiration for architectural designs typically come to mind: memories, missions and movies. This chapter argues that architectural photobooks are another important source that sheds light on the imagination of early twentieth-century California architects and their clients.

Memories, movies, and California architecture The architectural historian Harold Kirker proposed, as early as 1960, the thesis of California as an architectural frontier (Kirker 1960). Kirker claims that ‘California architecture is colonialism’ (Kirker 1972: 289) as all settlers in California were, historically considered, immigrants who brought with them memories of buildings, construction methods and architectural cultures of their societies and countries of origin. Kirker points, for example, to the indigenous Indian societies that had immigrated via the Bering Strait to the northern Pacific coastline on either side of today’s border between California and Oregon and whose wooden buildings were derived from Siberian vernacular traditions. Other examples were the Spanish colonisers who brought vernacular building methods and classically inspired architectural ideas to California, migrants directly arriving from Europe bringing with them national and regional architectural knowledge, and East Coast citizens of the young United States who imported East Coast construction methods, building types and architectural styles to California. According to Kirker, the architectural frontier, at which wave upon wave of immigrants arrived with their memories of their home countries’ architectural traditions, came to an end in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when Californians  – ­established and newly arriving ones, architects as well as others – began looking at the state’s Spanish-Mexican colonial architecture as ‘their’ architectural heritage. California’s missions are a shorthand for the colonial architecture the Spanish introduced into upper California between 1769, when the first mission was



The architectural imagination of California

erected in San Diego, and 1823, when the last mission was founded in Sonoma, two years after California had become a province of Mexico in 1821. With the secularisation of the missions by the Mexican government in 1832 some of their buildings fell into ruins. When in the late 1880s Californians rediscovered the colonial architectural heritage of their state, the appreciation of the remains of the missions changed. The Arts and Crafts movement began to study the historical buildings, and the Mission revival style emerged (Weitze 1984; Longstreth 1998). As a building type, colonial missions were used to organise spatially entirely different institutions; for example, the design from 1886 by Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–86) and his successor firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge for Stanford University evoked arcaded mission courtyards. Other architects borrowed individual details such as scalloped gables and quatrefoils or four-leaf windows for new architectural designs. Whereas missions provided historical inspiration, movies directly appealed to the realm of the imagination. Movie theatres were often designed as fantastic buildings, as exemplified by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The theatre was designed in an inventive neo-Chinese style between 1926 and 1927 by Raymond Kennedy from the architectural firm of Mendel Meyer and Gabriel Holler. Since 1922 the theatre’s owner had already operated the nearby Egyptian Theatre clothed in a neo-Egyptian style; the Chinese Theatre added another venue dressed in a locally unusual architectural style intended to initiate and mimic the excitement of a night out at the pictures. Client and architect aimed for authentic Chinese architecture, employing Chinese craftsmen and builders and using for decoration original Chinese artefacts such as stone carvings and animal sculptures. Set designs for movies at times directly inspired the architecture of new buildings, allowing the clients (and even architects) to imagine themselves if not as a persona in a movie at least as inhabiting a comparable architectural setting. For example, the Santa Barbara architect Lutah Maria Riggs translated elements of the set of George Cukor’s 1936 movie Romeo and Juliet into a domestic architectural design she was working on in the same year. Her wealthy clients attempted that year to avert a looming divorce by rekindling their love through commissioning a ‘16th century Italian Villa of the Romeo [and] Juliet period’ (Welter 2019: 38). Whether through films, movie theatres, or movie sets, the movie industry appealed to the imagination of architects and their clients and significantly widened the horizon of which architectural traditions could be referenced in ­ contemporary California architecture.

Architecture and photography With the invention of photography, architecture became a possible motif for photographers and architects began to photograph architectural and urban scenes. At least from the late nineteenth century onward photography evolved

117

118

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

into a documentary tool, for example, for urban social reformers, the emerging town-planning profession, and the nascent architectural conservation movement. It was also used to capture buildings, architectural details and scenes that were aesthetically appealing; often such photographs were sold commercially and thus available to architects and others who did not own a camera or travel with one. For example, when the Santa Barbara architect George Washington Smith, his wife, and Riggs, Smith’s employee, were travelling in France and Spain in November 1924, Smith took his own photographs (as did Riggs) but Smith also purchased a large number of commercially available photographic prints of views of historical buildings and details thereof. Most likely Smith wanted these photographs as reference images, as illustrations of appealing architectural details or attractive silhouettes of buildings resulting from skilful handling of their masses. Whether the two architects planned a photobook is unclear, but Smith privately bound the purchased photographs into smaller albums, interleaved with ones he had taken himself (Smith box 18, folders 694–721). This chapter defines architectural photobooks as books that were photographed and compiled by architects, if not entirely, then at least to an almost complete extent. Sometimes, a non-architect may have provided a foreword, and sometimes several architects may have provided photographs. In addition, the architectural argument is visually presented by relying mostly on photographs, though the occasional architect-drawn sketch or measured drawing may be included. For example, Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten is an architectural photobook, as is Le Corbusier’s Aircraft: The New Vision, both books primarily offer photographs. Le Corbusier’s earlier, manifestolike Vers une Architecture is a borderline case, as it closely intertwines textual and visual arguments; the long passages of Le Corbusier’s seductive prose make it difficult to read the book by only looking at the images. Not an architectural photobook is Richard Neutra’s Wie baut Amerika? While the book is richly illustrated, the images are smallish and supplement an at times very technical text rather than making a stand-alone argument. Regardless, architectural photobooks originated in combined textual and visual explorations of architecture.

Illustrated architecture books Following the rediscovery during the Renaissance of the treatise De Architectura by the Roman engineer and architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (fl.  first century  bc), architects have regularly published their theories and philosophies of architecture in the form of books and treatises (Vitruvius 1931–34). They often illustrated these publications with architectural drawings that either reconstructed lost or historical buildings, presented views of existing buildings or envisioned edifices that only existed in the author’s imagination. These images became a source of inspiration for other architects and builders when it came to their buildings.



The architectural imagination of California

For example, an illustration from a 1787 Spanish translation of Vitruvius’s Ten Books (Vitruvius 1787: appendix plate  10) inspired the early nineteenth-­ century façade of Santa Barbara Mission church, nicely demonstrating the usage of illustrated architectural books. Another example is a plate that the British architect Andrew N. Prentice included in his book of measured drawings of Spanish Renaissance architecture, published in 1888, which inspired the façade of an early design for the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara on which Riggs began working in 1922 when she was in Smith’s office (Prentice 1888: plate 12). Early treatises were mostly illustrated with the occasional drawing; this changed with the proliferation of mass-printing technologies in the nineteenth century. Prentice’s Renaissance Architecture and Ornament in Spain: A Series of Examples Selected from the Purest Works Executed Between the Years 1500–1560, Measured and Drawn Together with Short Descriptive Text is an example of a book that completely reverses the relationship between text and images. It is representative of a type of illustrated architecture books that became popular in the later nineteenth century.

Architectural drawing-cum-photo books Compared to architectural books solely illustrated with drawings, architectural photobooks come in at least two types. Some books combine photographs with measured drawings and other books only present photographs with, perhaps, an occasional freehand sketch thrown in. Initially, photography offered an additional means to record buildings; ruins and (historical) buildings could now be measured, sketched and photographed, resulting in architectural drawing-cum-photo books that supplemented architectural drawings with photographs. The focus usually rests on individual buildings from one country or geographical or cultural region. The selected buildings are often portrayed from different angles with various drawings and photographs, a concentration that underlines the laborious work and time that went into producing measured drawings of a building and its details. The purpose of these images – drawings and photographs – was again their practical application by contemporary fellow architects. The architects Gerstle Mack (1894–1983) and Thomas Gibson (1865–1941), for example, open their book Architectural Details of Southern Spain with the statement that ‘the details selected for presentation in this book were chosen primarily from the point of view of their utility to the architect who undertakes to design modern buildings based on Spanish prototypes’ (Mack and Gibson 1928: [1]). The parallel presentation of the same building or detail in drawings and photographs casts light on the strengths and weaknesses of both media. Measured drawings offer architects access to the true dimensions of a building, show construction methods, and specify details such as ornaments. By comparison, photographs excel in making visible aesthetic effects of architectural and interior

119

120

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Figure 9.1  Gerstle Mack and Thomas Gibson. Architectural Details of Southern Spain: One Hundred Measured Drawings One Hundred and Thirteen Photographs. New York: William Helburn Inc., 1928: plates 64 and 65.

designs; effects architects know about and can therefore imagine but which are not easily made visible in measured drawings. For example, Mack and Gibson’s plate  64 shows four photographs of elaborately carved doors in the Spanish cities of Ecija, province of Seville, and Ronda, province of Málaga. The upper-left photograph of a door from the palace of the Marqués de Peñaflor in Ecija shows very well the play of light and shade on the deeply carved wooden surface. On the adjacent page, plate  65 reproduces an accompanying measured drawing of the same early eighteenth-century door that records the exact dimensions of the door including the depth of the carvings and details of the door’s construction (Mack and Gibson 1928: plates 64 and 65). Similarly, when the architect Austin Whittlesey (1893–1950) published The Renaissance Architecture of Central and Northern Spain: A Collection of Photographs and Measured Drawings, he stated that ‘no attempt has been made at an historical description, the book being offered solely as a collection of photographs and drawings which it is hoped will be of some practical value to the designer’ (Whittlesey 1920: vii). The value Whittlesey referred to is the architectural and historical accuracy that many revival-style architects aspired to when designing contemporary revival-style buildings. Whittlesey’s book, published in 1920, also indicates that the focus had begun to shift from drawings toward photographs as the more reliable method to record and portrait architecture. Many plates in the book reference drawings in



The architectural imagination of California

Prentice’s Renaissance Architecture and Ornament in Spain, as if Whittlesey felt compelled to photographically document that the buildings did indeed look as if Prentice had drawn them. Moreover, the close adherence to Prentice’s selection illustrates that photographs included in architectural drawing-cum-photo books were subordinated to the examples and limits set by measured drawings as the older method of representing buildings. This subordination changed with architectural photobooks that relied entirely on photographs.

Architectural photobooks Looking at architectural photobooks proper one finds a different architectural imagination. The author-architect’s gaze now often shifts away from selected, important, famous, in short, major works of architecture, and toward a more general survey that aims at a panorama of many more, average, everyday, and regional and local pieces of architecture – in short, what traditional architectural history once called minor architecture. The Boston architect Guy Lowell (1870–1927), for example, bemoans in the introduction to his Smaller Italian Villas & Farmhouses that guidebooks and art histories have recorded ‘the principal country houses and palaces’. He continues: ‘how much in the way of enchanting gardens and villas, how much that is stimulating in design and workmanship, has escaped the lens of the photographer, or has been overlooked or forgotten by the writer of guide books and histories of art’ (Lowell 1916:  i). Similarly, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869–1924) emphasises in his introduction to Whittlesey’s The Minor Ecclesiastical Domestic and Garden Architecture of Southern Spain that the photographing architect ‘has left the great monuments to others and has gathered together here pictures that will be found to be almost wholly buildings of minor importance, but in consequence, of greater direct, practical value’ (Whittlesey 1917: vii). That it was the shift from measured drawings to photography that refocused the architectural gaze is illustrated by an anecdote in Lowell’s introductory chapter to the first of his two volumes on Italian villas, houses and farmhouses in Italy. Lowell tells us that in Lucca a farmer and his dog chased him away from the ruin of a farmhouse that he was measuring and sketching. Lowell’s ‘DantesqueBerlitz Italian’ was of little help in explaining why an American architect had felt justified to trespass on private land in the pursuit of ‘a few simple measurements of the ruined farm’; that a working farm may have a ruined or less-than-perfectly maintained building on its grounds apparently did not occur to the eager architect. Lowell continues: ‘I retreated to my automobile beyond the garden wall – not, however, till Parthian-like, I had in retiring fired a few shots from my camera’ (Lowell 1916: v). While Lowell imagines himself in a quasi-military action harks back to his Red Cross service in Italy during the First World War, more important is that when

121

122

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

trying to reach the safety of his car he abandons sketchpad, pencils and measuring tools in favour of a camera to record, even in such adverse circumstances, a few impressions of the building. In this particular instance, the distance to the building meant safety; more generally, the distant gaze that a camera afforded a photographing architect indicates a new kind of efficiency in recording architecture. Rather than laboriously measuring buildings while crawling all over and around them, then preparing measured drawings, re-measuring if dimensions taken on-site do not add up on the drawing board, and so on, architects now could cruise through the countryside while taking photographs of buildings and edifices, even from the comfort of their cars if they so wished. Accordingly, buildings were often viewed, studied and photographed from a greater distance, resulting in a perception of architecture resembling more that which comes with plein air sketches than measured drawings. Another consequence was that with the camera (and a car), many more buildings could be recorded across a larger territory in a much shorter time. Lowell’s two volumes on small Italian villas and farmhouses illustrate the effect that exclusively photographic documentation had on the scope and the focus of architectural photobooks (Lowell 1916, 1920). Both volumes include mostly photographs with very few freehand sketches interspersed in the slightly longer introductory texts. Most illustrations stem from Lowell, although he also includes sketches and photographs taken by fellow travelling architects – more in the first than in the second volume. Page after page records small farmhouses and smaller villas, sometimes one photograph to a page, sometimes two, or even four. Lowell usually gives the approximate geographical locations (‘In the valley of Florence’, ‘In the valley of the Po’, ‘Near Lake Como’, ‘In Orvieto’, etc.), occasionally names the building (‘Villa Salviati’, ‘Villa Bondi’, etc.), identifies the type of building (‘house’, ‘farmhouse’, ‘modern tenement’, ‘pottery works’, etc.), or the detail (‘garden wall with window openings’, ‘loggia’, ‘well’, ‘fish pond’, ‘curving alley’, etc.), and then he and his readers are off to another set of edifices on the adjacent and following pages. Sometimes Lowell shows close-up shots, but more often he photographs buildings from some distance, emphasising their silhouettes, masses, relationships between closed wall surfaces and openings, and how they stand against and within the landscape or the urban scenery. The page spreads tend to mix photographs of small villas, farmhouses and utilitarian buildings. This layout appears as a haphazard mélange without an apparent ordering principle such as geographical focus or building type. However, the different edifices brought together on a page spread signify different socioeconomic aspects of a rural, agricultural economy. The juxtaposition of small villas and manor houses (almost certainly designed by an architect or an experienced, even if not architecturally trained builder) and vernacular buildings (more likely erected by nowadays often unknown farming families and builders) emphasise Lowell’s wish to create a comprehensive vision of a landscape with harmoniously integrated larger and smaller buildings. Lowell and other



The architectural imagination of California

Figure 9.2  A typical page spread from Guy Lowell. Smaller Italian Villas & Farmhouses. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 1916, reprinted 1922: 47–48. All photographs by Lowell except the lower left on the left page and the two bottom images on the right page, which were photographed by Charles Z. Klauder and Herbert C. Wise.

architect-authors of architectural photobooks shared this intention with many Californians, architects and otherwise.

Envisioning California in architectural photobooks As early as 1886, the development of California was predicted as ‘a region of peaceful homes where light labor would season leisure and add to the enjoyments of life’ (Hall 1886: 6). These words stem from the introductory part of a report on water supply entitled Irrigation Development: History, Customs, Laws and Administrative Systems Relating to Irrigation, Water-Courses, and Waters in France, Italy, and Spain, which W. Ham Hall, California’s state engineer, presented to the government in Sacramento in that year. The long-drawn-out title of this detailed study of historical and contemporary irrigation systems that had fostered the flourishing of regional cultures in France, Italy and Spain indicates that it is not exactly a thrilling read. However, the vision of a Californian regional culture of rolling hills, dotted with buildings supported by light labour, leisure and enjoyment of life caught on. It was made possible by plenty of water as the ‘charm of a life amidst a semi-tropical foliage’ demanded ‘the artificial spreading

123

124

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

and use of waters’ (Hall 1886: 6). Also required was, of course, the appropriate kind of architecture that could nestle in those rolling hills and rising valleys; the many architectural photobooks that were produced by California architects or circulated among them and their (potential) clients supplied illustrations stoking that imagination. The architectural vision for California was comprehensive, as the architectural photobook Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings: Photographs and Drawings by the Santa Barbara architect Winsor Soule demonstrates. Soule divides his photobook into three main sections – farmhouses, city houses, public buildings – and a final short section of architectural details. Each chapter opens with the black-and-white reproduction of one of Soule’s watercolour sketches, the only drawings in the book despite a title suggesting that it might be an architectural drawing-cum-photo book. The book provides a vision for regional cities, small towns and rural settlements; its title emphasises farmhouses and ‘minor’ public buildings as the subject matter – the term minor in traditional history of architecture refers to buildings of local and regional importance in contrast to major buildings of national or even wider importance. Traces of the practical application of Soule’s photographs can be found even today, for example, in Santa Barbara’s urban architecture. The varying heights of the eaves of the long street front on East Figueroa Street of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, designed from 1925 to 1929 by the architects William J.  Hershey (1894–1926) and William Mooser  III (1893–1969), appear to have been modelled on the Street of San Francisco in Ronda, province of Málaga, Spain. Soule’s photograph of that street illustrates how a long row of attached, two–three-storey city houses create a single, continuous façade; each roof is pitched in the same angle, but the heights of the eaves differ, resulting in a pleasantly undulating line when looking down the street (Soule 1924: 30). Similarly, the cluster of modest, two-storey houses that architect Mary Craig (1889–1964) built from 1925 to 1926 on Plaza Rubio, opposite Santa Barbara Mission, recalls the tight grouping of main house, stables and outbuildings that fascinated Soule when photographing a farm near Cuevas de Becerro in the province of Málaga, Spain (Soule 1924:  2). Somewhat comparable to Lowell’s two volumes, Soule’s photographs aim to capture the architectural manifestation of a regionally rooted, spatial and socioeconomic order; the resulting architectural photobook was accordingly an invitation to recreate that order by taking inspiration from the many illustrated edifices and rural scenes centring around buildings. Other architectural photobooks were conceived as far more pragmatic collections of reference images that primarily focused on the aesthetics of architecture. Two years before the travels through France and Spain, Lutah Maria Riggs had already journeyed with her boss, George Washington Smith, and his wife through Mexico. A photobook was planned but never published (Helfrich 2004: [4]). A mock-up copy that Riggs produced in order to select which of her nearly two hundred photographs to include and in what order is, however, instructive about



The architectural imagination of California

Figure 9.3  Winsor Soule. Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings: Photographs and Drawings by Winsor Soule. Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 1924: 30. The image on the right shows the street of San Francisco in Ronda, province of Malaga.

her intentions for the unpublished photobook. Like Soule and Lowell, Riggs also photographed mostly minor architecture, though she had pointed her camera far more often at urban than rural examples, in addition to street scenes and architectural details. She also photographed interiors of buildings, something Soule had ignored, and Lowell illustrated only rarely. And Riggs generally photographed from a point much closer to a building or groups of edifices than Soule or Lowell. Indeed, it appears as if she only used one standpoint for both her photographs and the sketches she often made of the same building or at least did not see much need to vary her standpoint according to the media she was using. Upon her return, Riggs arranged the images in a sequence of chapters that began with one on townhouses, then turned to chapters on shops, plazas, churches and patios, and ended with architectural details. This last chapter she divided further into sections on fountains, doorways, balconies, stairways and, finally, miscellaneous (Riggs box  18, folder  539). Riggs’s comprehensive overview of Mexico’s architectural tradition focuses much more on urban architecture and its details as models for (her) contemporary architectural designs, rather than teasing out a vision of a coherent regional architecture understood as signifying a spatial and socioeconomic order that architecture could transfer to California.

125

126

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Figure 9.4  Winsor Soule. Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings: Photographs and Drawings by Winsor Soule. Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 1924: 2. The bottom image shows the farmhouse near Cuevas de Becerro, province of Malaga.



The architectural imagination of California

The introduction to Soule’s photobook was written by the architect Ralph Adam Cram (1863–1942) who dedicated the book to the ‘students and creators of the real architecture of a people’. The envisioned audience was to be larger than professional architects because the photographs were ‘not for copying’  – measuring dimensions by drawing or digitally capturing them are even today the best method for making an accurate copy. Instead, Cram hoped that ‘mental and spiritual illumination’ would be the effect everybody would experience who contemplated the photographs (Soule 1924: III). The Pasadena and Los Angeles architect Myron Hunt (1868–1952) expressed a similar sentiment in a brief introduction to a photobook of southern Italian urban and landscape scenes that the photographer Marian O. Hooker – not an architect  – had assembled: ‘From the inspiration furnished by such books as this is developing the minor architecture of the United States, and particularly that of the Southwest’ (Hooker 1925:  vii). Hunt continues that ‘students of Italian ­architecture […] are day by day working out in this country an architectural solution which shall fit our method of living, our climatic conditions, and those necessities and opportunities that go with the result of modern invention’ (Hooker 1925: viii). It appears that in the opinion of California architects such as Hunt architectural photobooks were crucial for defining the architectural vision of modern-day California.

Conclusion Architectural photobooks of the types analysed in this chapter were part of the broader movement toward modern architecture that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century and gathered momentum in the early twentieth. The photographing architects were surprisingly keen to use photography, then the most modern technology to depict architecture in parallel with, if not in lieu of, measured drawings. Together with that new technology emerged a strong interest in studying and appreciating more vernacular and anonymous buildings, a tendency that represents a shift from focusing on major architecture as high art toward architecture and building as everyday activities. Finally, some architectural photobooks illustrate a regional if not environmental turn in the ways the photographing architects observed and analysed the buildings in their wider ­settings and context that they were about to photograph. For reasons of space, many interesting aspects of these early architectural photobooks had to remain unexamined, among them, for example, the history of the Architectural Book Publishing Company that was founded in New York in the late nineteenth century by two Central European German-speaking Jews; it published architectural photobooks well into at least the 1970s. Equally interesting are comparative studies of architectural photobooks as defined in this chapter with books illustrating architecture photographed by professional architectural photographers – Julius Shulman comes to mind in the California context – and

127

128

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

artists’ books that look at the built environment, for example, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Harold Kirker occasionally criticised American historian for assuming ‘all too frequently […] that a new land necessarily means a new culture, or at least a radically transformed one’. To counter such simplistic assumptions, Kirker preferably quoted the nineteenth-century sculptor Horatio Greenough: ‘We forget that though the country was young, yet the people were old’ (Kirker 1972: 289). A comparable contradiction afflicted the relationship between photography and architecture. The technology may have been new (or young), yet in order to photograph architecture one has to look at historical and old buildings, in short, edifices that exist. It is relatively easy to imagine a building that does not (yet) exist by drawing it. This advantage that drawing holds over photography makes it even more remarkable that architects such as Lowell, Soule, Riggs and many others captured their visions of a coming, modern-day architecture for California and elsewhere by photographing historical buildings in the old world and its (former) colonies.

Works cited and archival sources Hall, W. Ham (1886). Irrigation Development: History, Customs, Laws, and Administrative Systems Relating to Irrigation, Water-Courses, and Waters in France, Italy, and Spain. The Introductory Part of the Report of the State-Engineer of California, Irrigations and the Irrigation Question. Sacramento: State Office James J. Ayers, Supt. State Printing. Helfrich, Kurt G.F. (2004). Picturing Tradition: Lutah Maria Riggs Encounters Mexican Architecture. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of California Santa Barbara. Hooker, Marian Osgood (1925). Farmhouses and Small Provincial Buildings in Southern Italy. Photographs by Marian O. Hooker, Text by Katharine Hooker and Myron Hunt. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow. Kirker, Harold (1960). California’s Architectural Frontier: Style and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century San Marino: Huntington Library, n.d. [1960]. Kirker, Harold (1972). ‘California Architecture and Its Relation to Contemporary Trends in Europe and America’. California Historical Quarterly 51.4 (Winter): 289–305. Le Corbusier (1923). Vers une Architecture. Paris: Crès. Le Corbusier (1935). Aircraft: The New Vision. London: The Studio. Longstreth, Richard (1998). At the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lowell, Guy (1916). Smaller Italian Villas & Farmhouses. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, reprinted 1922. Lowell, Guy (1920). More Smaller Italian Villas & Farmhouses. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co. Mack, Gerstle, and Thomas Gibson (1928). Architectural Details of Southern Spain: One Hundred Measured Drawings One Hundred and Thirteen Photographs. New  York: William Helburn. Mendelsohn, Erich (1928). Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten. Berlin: Rudolf Mosse.



The architectural imagination of California

Neutra, Richard (1927). Wie baut Amerika? Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann. Prentice, Andrew Noble (1888). Renaissance Architecture and Ornament in Spain: A Series of Examples Selected from the Purest Works Executed Between the Years 1500–1560, Measured and Drawn Together with Short Descriptive Text. London: B.T. Batsford. Riggs, Lutah Maria, papers. Architecture and Design Collection, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Ruscha, Ed. (1966). Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Los Angeles: self-published book, offset lithography. Smith, George Washington, papers. Architecture and Design Collection, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, box  18, folders 694–721. Soule, Winsor (1924). Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings: Photographs and Drawings by Winsor Soule. With an Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow. Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus (1787). Los diez libros De Architectura. Translated by Joseph Ortiz y Sanz. Madrid: Imprenta Real. Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus (1931–34). On Architecture Volume  I: Books 1–5, Volume  II: Books 6–10. Translated by Frank Granger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weitze, Karen J. (1984). California’s Mission Revival. Los Angeles: Hennessy & Ingalls. Welter, Volker M. (2019). Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Whittlesey, Austin (1917). The Minor Ecclesiastical Domestic and Garden Architecture of Southern Spain: Photographs and Drawings by Austin Whittlesey. Preface by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow, 2nd edn. 1917. Whittlesey, Austin (1920). The Renaissance Architecture of Central and Northern Spain: A Collection of Photographs and Measured Drawings. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Paul Wenzel and Maurice Krakow.

129

10

Experimental confluence: Amazônia by Claudia Andujar and George Love Vitor Marcelino

One of the greatest symbols of Brazilian national identity is the Amazon River. The river receives different names along its course in the northern region of Latin America. One of them is Solimões. When the Solimões, with its muddy waters, meets the Negro River, with its dark waters, the stretch that we effectively call the Amazon River begins. This confluence of contrasting waters is one of the bestknown natural phenomena in Brazil. The river has over a thousand affluents that together create an organic pattern when this region is observed from an aerial view. The African American photographer George Love (1937–95) photographed a variety of these waterscapes. Some of them are present in the photobook Amazônia, put together in collaboration with Claudia Andujar (1931–), a naturalised Brazilian photographer, and released by the now defunct São Paulo publishing house Praxis in 1978, during the Brazilian military dictatorship (see plates 11, 12, 13 and 14). The book, like the river, is also the result of a confluence. A confluence not only of two photographers, but also involving several other people, interests, events, desires and, unfortunately, censorship. This chapter seeks to identify this complex network in order to investigate one of the few Latin American photobooks that has been given space in anthologies and exhibitions promoted in the Global North. The little that was known about the book contributed to the creation of a certain ‘myth’ about the publication, especially in Brazil. We knew that it had been censored and distributed semi-clandestinely. But after censorship had consigned the book to oblivion for years, its rediscovery raised it to the category of ‘masterpiece’ (following a scenario that owes much to the exponential recognition of the photobook in recent years). Even though its importance has been recognised, little has actually been written about the book. Therefore, this chapter aims to investigate in some detail the conditions and history of its production, as well as its belated recognition as a reference. We propose to remove the book from its pedestal in order to place it in its historical and political context. To conduct this investigation, we take as a starting point the reflections of Rosalind Krauss in her chapter ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’ (1982).



Experimental confluence

Krauss  shows how photography receives and transmits distinct discourses depending on the space where it is exposed. Thus, we propose an investigation that besides presenting how, and in which context, the book Amazônia was produced, also seeks to reflect on where the images in the book were previously shown and how this adds layers of meaning to it. In order to reconstitute this trajectory, we propose a study that we call ‘image biography’, that is, an investigation that takes as its central focus not merely the book as an entity closed upon itself, but more especially the spaces where the images were previously exhibited or published. We thus compare contexts, ideologies and interests. To reconstitute this path, we have undertaken archival research, as well as conducting interviews and investigations in the press of the period (this bibliographical search was carried out to help us contextualise the information that was found and so develop our reflections). Combining these three sources of information proved to be very fruitful. The absences we identified in the archives, the narratives created in the interviews, as well as the partiality of the press all complemented each other, sometimes reinforcing narratives, sometimes exposing their contradictions, and, in sum, they help provide a broader understanding of the book. Though lacunae remain, it has been possible to plot a trajectory of stories and partialities that open new perspectives for future research.

The canonisation of Amazônia It seems that the book Amazônia began to gain renown from the moment it was featured in the anthology The Latin American Photobook, edited by Horacio Fernández (2011). Amazônia, presented as ‘one of the foremost Latin American photobooks’ (Fernández 2011:  114), is the book with the greatest prominence in the anthology, both because of the number of pages devoted to it (including four full pages of illustrations) and because it is the only book mentioned in the opening text (by Marcelo Brodsky, Iatã Cannabrava and Martin Parr) (Fernández 2011: 7). If from the point of view of this photobook anthology the ‘author’ of the photobook is the photographer, then the anthology does not seem to attribute this notion of authorship equally to the two photographers of Amazônia. Love’s photographs, even though they occupy half the book, are presented as a mere introduction to Andujar’s photographs, not to mention the absence of commentary on George Love’s trajectory, images and process. This type of commentary is dedicated exclusively to Claudia Andujar. The Latin American Photobook follows the theoretical path laid out in The Photobook: A History, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s anthology. Martin Parr was, in fact, one of the three members of the advisory committee for the Latin American anthology. Unsurprisingly, Fernández’s definition of the photobook is based on Parr and Badger’s approach, that is, the understanding that to be considered a photobook there must be ‘the participation of the photographer in the

131

132

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

publication’ as an ‘indispensable requisite’ (Fernández 2004: 17), thus reinforcing the notion of authorship. In the third volume of Parr and Badger’s anthology (2014), Amazônia is part of the thematic chapter ‘From There to Here: The Photobook and Place’. The short textual presentation of the book summarises what was written for the Latin American anthology. Here yet again, more space is devoted to commenting on Andujar’s work rather than Love’s. This imbalance also appears in the catalogue of the exhibition Photobook Phenomenon at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània di Barcelona in 2017, organised by Moritz Neumüller and other curators. In the catalogue, we see that Amazônia was integrated into the ‘historical timeline of masterpieces’ (Neumüller 2014) formed by fifty-seven books selected by Martin Parr from his prestigious collection. In the text that comments on the book, Love’s images continue to serve as an introduction to Andujar’s images. Between 2020 and 2022, Claudia Andujar’s work was revealed to the European public through the travelling exhibition The Yanomami Struggle, curated by Thyago Nogueira and initially produced by the Instituto Moreira Salles in Brazil. These exhibitions have been increasingly defining Claudia Andujar’s place in international contemporary photography. This institutionalisation of her work has proven effective in transforming the activist Andujar into the artist Andujar, thus satisfying all the interests of the art system. In this process, the book Amazônia comes to be seen as a milestone in the photographer’s career. If we consider the way it has been presented in anthologies and exhibitions, we understand that there is a desire for the book to be Andujar’s ‘masterpiece’ and not so much Love’s, let alone that of several other people involved with the book. While Andujar’s figure as an artist grows exponentially in the art market, a shadow is cast that covers up the forgotten George Love, the team that worked on the book and an entire complex journey preceding the book. Let us therefore shine a torch to see who stands in the shadows.

The photographs by Andujar and Love at the service of military propaganda The first images produced of the Amazon rainforest by Andujar and Love were published as early as October 1971, in a special issue dedicated to the Amazon Forest of Realidade (‘reality’, in Portuguese), a national circulation magazine notable for its investigate journalism. The editorial set out the objective of the magazine, which was to inform the Brazilian people of the ‘real’ situation of the largest rainforest in the world, then still unknown to the majority of the population. The magazine aimed to calm anxieties surrounding the exploitation of the forest, stating that, in fact, the forest was undergoing the most ‘extraordinary’ moment in its history, due to the exponential development of its incalculable natural wealth.



Experimental confluence

In an optimistic tone, the texts in the magazine claimed that the forest was in the process of improvement with the opening of thousands of kilometres of highways and the establishment of hundreds of cattle ranches. Thus, the development project was to take the Amazon from a supposed condition of unproductivity and depopulation to a situation of high wealth and demographic density. For these and other reasons, it was urgent to ‘civilise’ the Amazon, declared the magazine. What was not taken into consideration was the catastrophic impact on the environment as well as on the hundreds of indigenous nations living in the territory. To give just one example, a large fire, deliberately started, was not only  recorded but publicly exalted. In October 1974, Volkswagen’s press office proudly reported that the company was responsible for burning four thousand hectares of forest as a symbol of economic development promoted by the company (Acker 2014: 22). Concerning the extermination of the indigenous population, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of deaths, as many cases were never recorded. Investigations currently set the figure at a minimum of 8,350 dead for the entire period of the military dictatorship (Comissão Nacional da Verdade 2014). The main cause of this extermination was an extremely deficient public health policy that was unable to treat the thousands of indigenous people contaminated by the white man’s virus (Valente 2017). It was therefore in a context of propaganda for the colonisation of the Amazon and, consequently, disinformation concerning the decimation of the indigenous population as well as environmental devastation, that the images of Andujar and Love are presented. A photograph by Andujar of a pleasant-looking Yanomami child appears on the cover of Realidade magazine, and several more of her portraits are reproduced within. Some accompany a chapter (Anonymous 1971) that presents the aharaibus, a Yanomami subgroup who lived on the upper Negro River, a region that was cut in two by the construction of the Perimetral Norte highway. This text is a rare instance of the magazine seeking a more serious reflection on an eventual indigenous extermination. The article traces a history of violence against indigenous peoples within the history of Brazil and asks what alternatives exist to avoid history being repeated. The solution best accepted by the military government was a slow and gradual integration of indigenous people into white society, either as farm workers or as consumers. ‘The Last Chance of the Last Warriors’, ran the title of the article, arguing that indigenous people were abandoning their cultural identities in order to survive. The text directed harsh criticism toward this government-adopted procedure. Andujar’s images feature people resting in hammocks, children playing and a mother breastfeeding her child. All of them seem to be in a state of unawareness of the danger they are in. Love’s photographs appear in another reportage and relate quite differently to the texts they accompany. There is a striking contrast between the precise information contained in the subtitles and the degree of abstraction of the images.

133

134

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

The text, in general, seeks to present the forest as an extremely diverse and beautiful place, presenting no great danger, and therefore ripe for occupation. Yet, despite this propaganda effort for the colonisation of the Amazon, the publisher Abril, responsible for Realidade magazine, together with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP  – São Paulo Art Museum), mounted the exhibition Hiléia Amazônica (the Amazon rainforest) between December 1972 and February 1973, with the support of the military government. The exhibition included sections dedicated to archaeology, ethnography, as well as the fauna and flora of the Amazon. There were also several didactic panels, one of them being a celebration of the Transamazônica highway, the largest construction undertaken during the military dictatorship and one of the main causes of the deaths of indigenous people. One of the grandest sections, and perhaps the most striking, was the projection of some six hundred slides by Andujar and Love, accompanied by a soundtrack (A Hiléia Amazônica, n.d.). These were the same photographs that had been produced for the magazine. No photographs of the installation of the exhibition are to be found today in the museum archives, but some documents describe the slideshow. It went under the title O homem da Hiléia (The man from the forest) and its main focus was the representation of indigenous people in their villages (O homem da Hiléia, n.d.). An analysis of the archives reveals that the original slides were not used by the photographers in a straightforward way: they had been re-photographed, thus enabling greater freedom of experimentation in the presentation. Numerous fusions and overlaps were made, considerably expanding the possibilities of the photo-sequence and bringing out the narrative potential of the images (Love, undated letter). Love did the ‘setting of the sequences’, the editing of the photographs and he was responsible for the soundtrack (Love 1986). The photographer set up a projection system that included: ‘2 […] projectors, a specially modified image fusion control and small mirrors in front of the lens. Mirrors multiply the images by generating 7 distinct images that were projected on seven screens […]’, and ‘The screens occupy half the circumference of the floor.’ The pace of the projection was slow and the soundtrack was of thirteenth-century Japanese music. ‘Claudia proposes to let the viewer enter the ambiance of a small, hermetic settlement, living within the isolation of the jungle, the Amazon forest’ (O homem da Hiléia, n.d.). The re-photography procedure enabled the creation of fusions or overlays of images that would later characterise Amazônia. This feature had been employed not merely for technical reasons (to preserve the original transparencies), but primarily because of Love’s strong interest in experimenting with new modes of manipulating the photographic image. Such a procedure gave Love and Andujar the possibility of experimenting with photographic processes as well as producing a predetermined sequence in the projection. The use of mirrors should be underlined here, because the images were not projected traditionally, as in a movie theatre, but fragmented and multiplied sevenfold, occupying half of the first floor



Experimental confluence

of the museum. Bringing together technical means and experimental possibilities, Andujar and Love created a specific space that involved the visitor through projection and music. They fashioned an ambiance that sought to reproduce the sensation of being in the forest, using visual and sound technology. The MASP director Pietro Maria Bardi was a great supporter of Love and Andujar’s proposals. The director worked on a project for an album of Love and Andujar’s photographs. In analysing the documents, a similarity becomes apparent between this publication project and the final version of the book Amazônia. Budgets were drawn up and requests for funding made, but the publication was not executed, probably due to the extremely difficult context for the production of art books in the country at the time. Bardi made a major effort to publish the album in time for the BrazilExport ’73 export fair, which took place in Brussels in November 1973. The fair was piloted by the military government and involved some ministries and public companies. Its primary objective was to present Brazil as ‘a major and real alternative to supplying products’ (Vamos Exportar 1973) across Europe, the United States and Japan, with a central focus on the European Common Market, which was based in Brussels. At the opening and other events at the fair there were protests by Brazilians at the Belgian capital against acts of torture, arrests, deaths and disappearances attributable to the military government. Because of this, the Brazilian government began to censor news related to such demonstrations, making it difficult to find out more about the actual conflicts that occurred during the fair (Gaspari 1978: 4). In addition to trade events, it also featured several cultural events such as musical performances, celebrity appearances, lectures, projections of Brazilian films and what may have been one of the largest exhibitions of Brazilian art abroad: Image of Brazil, organised by Bardi and the MASP. Hundreds of works of art and artefacts figured in the exhibition, which presented a panorama of Brazilian artistic production from the early colonial period to the contemporary era. In analysing the exhibition catalogue (Museu de Arte de São Paulo 1973), it is clear that a discourse was constructed to place Brazil as a country heading towards full economic and democratic development, all while camouflaging violations of freedom of expression and acts of corruption of which the military regime was guilty. The mythical themes of cordiality, racial democracy and peaceful racial miscegenation are constantly entertained in this discourse, hiding the record of extermination of the indigenous and Black people in the country. In some works of art the catalogue initially presented the indigenous population as a primitive, wild and violent people who hindered the ‘efforts’ of the Portuguese in 1500. The process of evangelisation is represented as ‘humanising’, and that which made possible the establishment of ‘order’ in the colony and, consequently, economic development. The exhibition discourse defends the full absorption of indigenous populations into white society, erasing their histories and cultures. Virtually no reference is made to indigenous peoples in the

135

136

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

twentieth-century artistic productions. Throughout the catalogue, they are slowly erased from the history of Brazil and absorbed by a supposedly peaceful process of interracial miscegenation. It was precisely in the context of this discourse that a new version of the O homem da Hiléia audiovisual projection was presented at the Brussels exhibition. This project was also conceived by Love (1986) and used a rotating structure similar to that employed in the MASP exhibition. The system had the ‘function of multiplying, reflecting and modifying the projected images, so that the screen presents a single multi-image, moving and constantly changing, but without destroying the visual sense of the images themselves’ (Brasil 1500–1973, n.d.). It was a purposeful presentation that impressed by its size, dynamism and visually striking images, reinforcing the spectacular character of the indigenous portraits and the exhibition as a whole. In Brussels, the audiovisual work O homem da Hiléia was presented differently. In this version, photographs of cities and industries were added, probably made by Love, due to his interest in these themes. Comparing the two versions of the slideshow, we can see how the Brussels version represents a change, given the specifics of the exhibition. In the MASP, the forest was the theme of the exhibition. This allowed photographers to construct a narrative that focused exclusively on the indigenous population and the forest environment. The museum also has its spatial specificities. Being a smaller space, the idea of atmosphere reproduced must have appeared obvious. Thus, the exhibition reinforced the propaganda of the military, using the photographic representation of indigenous people that seemed to suggest that this population was still living tranquilly in the forest, and not under constant attack. In Brussels, the situation was different. The Image of Brazil exhibition was considerably larger than the MASP exhibition and had a broader purpose. The ‘forest’ theme now became a mere detail in a much more extensive narrative that ran through countless other aspects. Seeing here yet another effort to reconcile different issues, and reinforce the argument of peaceful racial miscegenation, the audiovisual projection O homem da Hiléia became practically another work altogether. New meanings accrued to it because of its place in the Brussels show. Possibly coexisting with countless other pieces, the photographs seem to perform, at first glance, a function much more focused on visual impact. But a closer look at Bardi’s proposal shows us that the discourse presented there hid the indigenous extermination promoted by the military and presented a falsely peaceful and democratic nation.

The production of Amazônia and its political and editorial context The efforts to have the album Amazônia produced and released in Brussels were in vain. It is difficult to pinpoint specific causes for such a failure, but Andujar’s decision to quit photojournalism as a profession was probably one of them. In 1974,



Experimental confluence

the activist renewed her research grant, funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, allowing her to stay for longer periods in the Yanomami territory. Witnessing the construction of the Perimetral Norte highway and its harmful consequences, Andujar started to record, in a very deliberate way, the terrible conditions in which the indigenous people lived. The book Amazônia would only be published in 1978, in a very different context. By then, the indigenous issue was being discussed more openly, as a result of indigenous militancy and the pressure from society for the Brazilian government to begin a process of political openness. By this time Andujar had already lived and recorded her most remarkable experiences with the Yanomami, while Love had continued his photographic experiments in his various works. In 1977, Andujar was accused by the military of being a threat to national security and was therefore expelled from the forest along with several foreigners working there. She returned to São Paulo and, together with other activists and researchers, began working to set up the Comissão Pró-Yanomami-CCPY (Commission for the Creation of the Yanomami Park) (Andujar 2018). Therefore, in 1978, the photographer was in a context of indigenous activism, fighting for the Yanomami land to be demarcated (this demarcation occurred only fourteen years later and at the time of writing is being continually threatened by the Brazilian government). Andujar’s photographs began to serve as a means both of spreading Yanomami culture and of advertising the need to demarcate its ancestral territory as a guarantee of survival. Clearly, the progression from military propaganda pieces to indigenous militancy posters represents a drastic difference in the uses of photography. Apart from posters, one of the ways used to publicise the struggle of the Yanomami people was the production of books. In 1972 and 1973, the production of art books in Brazil was extremely difficult, but by 1978 the situation had changed (Hallewell 2017: 705). This was especially due to people like editor Regastein Rocha and his publishing company Praxis who, relying on business support, managed to produce a considerable number of art books in the country, most of them featuring innovative design and highquality production. Amazônia is one of them. Regastein Rocha enlightened us about the trajectory of the publisher and the censorship of the book in interviews granted in April 2021. Before becoming a publishing house, Praxis was an advertising agency managed by Regastein Rocha and Matias Machline, owner of Sharp do Brasil. The agency developed advertising campaigns exclusively for Sharp do Brasil, a national electronics company that obtained the rights to use the Japanese multinational, which was constantly accused of corruption during its years of operation. The company was never properly punished, as Machline had solid contacts with influential military and political figures in the country. Imbued with the nationalist spirit typical of authoritarian governments, Sharp began to promote advertising campaigns, through Praxis, that presented the idea of a genuinely national and high-tech company. Regastein Rocha mobilised a

137

138

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

series of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to produce these campaigns, which received international recognition in awards and magazines (Klintowitz 1979). Contradictorily, many of those people were former prisoners or former political exiles. Over time, this contradiction became untenable. Sharp’s top management began to be annoyed by the presence of political activists in its campaigns and initiated the repressive mechanisms that resulted in the compulsory closure of Praxis in 1978. At that time, Praxis was also beginning to act as a printer and publisher and had already launched its first books. It was the income from the advertising agency that sustained the work of the publishing house, since book sales did not cover the cost of production. However, the publishing house achieved relative international recognition, especially after Maureen Bisilliat’s 1978 photobook Xingu achieved significant sales on the international market. The editing process of Amazônia was done in a collective way. Participants included Regastein Rocha, Claudia Andujar, George Love and, to a lesser extent, Wesley Duke Lee, responsible for designing the cover of the book. But according to Regastein, it was Love who was most involved in the process. At a certain point, Love felt the need to return to the forest to produce more images. Andujar also showed an interest, but her political situation did not allow it. Love’s trips were financed by Praxis, which shows us that the book was also the result of commissioned work by the publisher. These excursions ended up becoming a target of suspicion by the military and one of the elements that triggered censorship. Praxis was known at the time for its high-quality printing. Regastein was in constant contact with international publishers, such as Aperture in North America and Skira in Switzerland, to improve his printing techniques. Coordinated by Hermes Rocha da Silva, the printers made specific colour adjustments for each group of images with similar tones. Thus, the ink loads were increased in order to get as close as possible to the photographic original. This ensured that the deep blues and the luminous yellows were printed as vividly as they are.

The censorship The book Amazônia is part of a larger group of books published by Praxis on indigenous and Amazonian themes. Some of them were published before censorship became an issue, such as Xingu, by Maureen Bisilliat, and Yanomami, by Claudia Andujar. Some other books were in the planning process, but were aborted with the repression. One of them was being organised by the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, an influential politician opposed to the dictatorship. This book had as its theme the indigenous peoples in Brazil and would have comprised archival images from several other anthropologists. According to Regastein, Praxis was in contact with Aperture so that both could become partners in the production and international launch of the book.



Experimental confluence

Little by little, the participation of activists, ex-exiled and ex-political prisoners in Praxis’s productions began to annoy the military, who started working at Sharp do Brasil, at Machline’s invitation. The Amazônia team included two people who denounced internationally the various violations of human rights committed by the Brazilian government, who were therefore seen as enemies of the regime: the photographer Claudia Andujar, who had been expelled from the forest in 1977, and the writer Thiago de Mello, recently returned from political exile. Mello had written the introductory text, though it was ultimately censored. The presence of these and other political persecuted people caused the military of Sharp do Brasil to accuse Regastein of financing the ‘communist movement’. The editor was forced to give statements at the bidding of the political police and saw his family intimidated by the regime. At one point, the military stormed the publishing house and took everything they had there  – from the machinery to future book projects. But before this happened, Regastein had managed to print two thousand copies of Amazônia, whose editing and printing settings had already been defined. However, before printing, the censors had removed the text by Thiago de Mello and some photographs of forest burning taken by George Love. The text by Thiago de Mello (2013), a native of the region, evokes in a poetic way the richness and immensity of the forest and the Amazon River, and denounces the devastation of the forest that had been happening for centuries, highlighting the situation in the 1970s, as well as the resistance of the riverside dwellers and the extermination of the indigenous peoples. The book Amazônia is presented by Mello as a record of what is ‘still left’ of the forest and of its peoples. Upon reading the text, we can imagine the importance that photographs of the forest burning would have had in the book as they would have appeared to confirm Mello’s denunciations. By censoring the denunciations of deforestation and the rampant extermination of the forest, we perceive a military impetus to reposition the Amazon in a supposed state of eternal virginity. The reflections of the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui on nationalism help us to understand this mechanism. According to Chaui, the symbolic representation of a nation as a homogeneous group is fundamental for the apparatus of an authoritarian state to be able to govern a country – especially a country like Brazil, which is marked by ethnic diversity. This homogeneous representation contributes to the population’s belief in the existence of ‘enemies of the nation’, who, in the case of the Brazilian dictatorship, supported by the national and international business community, are simply called ‘communists’. One way to achieve this homogenisation is through the idea of a ‘founding myth’ which has its roots in the Portuguese invasion of 1500. This founding myth acts as an internal vehicle that links the past directly to the notion of origin. That is, the representation of a past ‘that is perennially present and, for this very reason, does not allow the work of temporal difference and the understanding of the present as such’ (Chaui 2000: 6). It is precisely in the attempt to remove the ‘present as such’ from Amazônia that the censorship is configured.

139

140

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

This restriction seeks to connect Amazônia directly to this founding myth, exploring a representation of an Amazon as an almost virgin national symbol. Thus, the desire is to show that the forest, even at a strong pace of exploitation, remains intact. The book is placed in a field of tension between two narratives: one that involves the denunciation of the devastation of the forest and the other a celebration of the forest as a ‘founding myth’, still virgin: a ‘still’ situation that no longer exists. What we have is what is ‘still left’ of the forest, as Thiago de Mello phrased it. On the distribution of Amazônia, Regastein said that the aim was to launch the book internationally. However, with censorship, distribution was far more low-key. The book was only sold in two bookstores: Kosmos, with shops in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and Cultura, in São Paulo. Due to the repression, the books were sold with little accompanying publicity. Kosmos specialised in imported books and foreign distribution, which helped to ensure that a considerable portion of the print run was distributed internationally, but without the initially desired repercussion, since the Praxis publishing house no longer existed. To leaf through Amazônia is, therefore, always to deal with the shadow of devastation and authoritarianism. It is to come into contact, even if almost imperceptibly, with a contest of ideologies that have shaped the book. By considering all these layers, the book offers a unique experience for the reader.

The book and its photographic experiences These political layers are not, however, the only strata that make up the book. Amazônia also contains a subjective vision, angle or bias that seeks to explore, and even extrapolate from, several typical photographic qualities or methods. We can see, for example, that a considerable number of the images printed on the pages seem to be the result of ‘errors’ in the photographic process. They are very blurred, often under- or over-exposed. It is also noticeable that several images are reused in the sequencing, but have been subjected to reframing, mirroring, colour alteration and re-photography that alter them. The book thus also becomes a commentary on the experimental paths of photography and makes references to the experiences proposed by Love and Andujar in the exhibitions cited in this chapter. Love himself has provided an explanatory account of the book and its imagery: After that work for Realidade, I returned to the Amazon annually in the years following 1975 and then again in 1978. By the end of that year a book was scheduled to come out of these trips. In fact, the book arose from convictions about the nature of photography and about experience in the region in an attempt to reconcile ideas from these two universes. The Amazon was the subject, but the point was to show that a photo is not a faithful representation of the subject. The book was built to translate this thesis that what photography shows is an impression of



Experimental confluence reality, just my impression. What you see is the forest picture, not the forest itself. It’s not the sky, what you see, it’s the photographic film. It’s not an Amazon book, it’s a photographic film book. The book was never understood. Also, the book was simply banished in the golden age of censorship. It never made it to the public. They took the text. We thought it was important for the reader to be introduced poetically to the atmosphere of the forest before immersing himself in the images, where the atmosphere, and not a fidelity to a subject, was the goal. (De Boni 1994)

An interesting point made by Love is that his main objective was not necessarily to record his trips to the forest, but to highlight specific aspects of the photographic language provided by the experience of flying over the Amazon. Love claims to present in the publication his subjective impression of reality and not a more objective reality, mocking the magazine’s title. Thus, Amazônia was conceived more as a book about photographic language than exclusively about the forest. And, flipping through its pages, we can see how much more concerned he is with experimentation than with registering the trip. Saturated colours, abstract compositions, striking contrasts, fields of colour and winding lines are constant elements in the first half of the book with Love’s photographs. All Love’s images are aerial photographs, and sometimes it is hard to know which way is up, which way down, what is big or small, and even what is earth, water or air. The photographer has expressed his experience of photographing the Amazon from above: You go up. My ears start to ache because of the height. Hurt so much, for so long, that I forgot they are hurting. You come in and out of the clouds. The rain hits the wings of the airplane and makes a strange sound. You hear this sound and suddenly you do not know where it is, because everything is white all around. You are on a cloud. Then you come out of the cloud, look down and see only trees. Suddenly it is in another cloud. You get out of it, and you see more trees. Suddenly, rain. The rain, at that speed, hurts when it hits the face. You protect the camera, but you cannot protect yourself. Suddenly you remember that your ears are hurting. There you are inside another cloud and the notion of time no longer exists. Now you are truly in a specific situation. There is no more time or space. You are not sure if you were flying high or low. At that moment, you begin to photograph what is only and particularly yours. The pilot feels the same. Both act as a team. It’s two bodies with one head. A good pilot puts you at the right angle and then you are shooting … clack … clack … You see what you think you see. And what you think you see is real. This is what I photographed in the Amazon. (Quoted in Canjani 2015)

Penetrating the dense atmosphere of the forest bursts the photographer’s senses, sending him on a delirious journey. An idea of immersion is reinforced and produces photographs of organic compositions that are awash in the experience of colour. This feeling of penetration and immersion clearly echoes the couple’s proposal for their audiovisual experiments. The book is arranged as two visual essays: the first with Love’s and the second part is Andujar’s. In Love’s sequence, it is possible to constantly perceive the

141

142

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

presence of three elements, which are often confused with each other: the sky, the river and the land. The images can, however, be separated into three groups. In the first, the elements air and water, sky and river, can each be identified, but with an undefined border between them. The sky is constantly mirrored on the surface of the river, making the two elements become one. In the second group, this border is more clearly established and the river appears with greater definition and constancy. It is portrayed in the most diverse ways, in panoramic views, at angles perpendicular to its surface, in a more abstract manner, with calm and flowing waters. Islands, river bottoms and banks also appear in this section. In the third part, the main protagonist is the land. Here the Amazon landscape is presented with greater clarity. We see the cliffs of a plateau (is it Mount Roraima?), partially covered by clouds. The horizon, absent in the last images, appears in some shots. A dense forest dominates the next images. Love’s essay ends with the return of the river. The last two pages show the same winding river with its calmer waters. The tranquillity of these waters and their flatter relief seem to invite the traveller to descend from the plane and set foot on this seductive landscape. Soon after this flow of images, Andujar’s photographs appear. As if leaving a plane that has just landed in Yanomami territory, the photographer slowly approaches the people, first from a distance, hidden among the bushes, until a child discovers her and looks at her with determination: the invitation is made. The photographic gaze follows a group of women and children, the main protagonists of this first group of Andujar’s images. Inside the long house or maloca, and already fully accepted among the people, Andujar seems to feel more at ease to pursue her experimentations. She established an experimental photographic language that records her experience with the Yanomami, using new effects and films, differing considerably from the images taken during the Realidade magazine period. Examples of these experiments include the use of vaseline on the edges of lenses, the superimposition of negative films, the replacement of flash equipment by several paraffin lamps, a precise control of photometry in low-light situations, and the use of infrared films produced by NASA (Andujar 2005: 170–175). Now a group of men appear and start the reahu, an important Yanomami ritual. The reahu is a ceremony in which the xapiri, tiny spirits of light, defenders of nature, descend from heaven and are invited to dance with humans. This ritual is important because it is where Yanomami wisdom is consolidated and passed down from generation to generation (Kopenawa and Albert 2016). Looking at these images, we are struck by the solution that Andujar presents. With films of high sensitivity, varying exposure times, and with the use of kerosene lamps, the photographer can draw in the space of the maloca countless abstract lines of light that refer directly to the corporeality of xapiri. In a complete trance, the Yanomami are photographed by Andujar as if her own consciousness were miles away, as indeed it was. Here the book reaches its apex of experimentation, not only technically but in the peculiar way in which the ritual is recorded.



Experimental confluence

The end of the narrative comes unexpectedly. Recalling the process of rephotography, pictures of other photographs are placed in the book. The brilliance of the photographs becomes a significant compositional element  – a game of mirrors that deforms and creates an opaque reflection producing a curious doubt. The book ends where it began. Love’s last image, derived from his experiments with photographic films, is the same as the first one of the book but now reversed. Closing a self-unfolding cycle, the publication confirms that sometimes the very big, like the great landscapes of the Amazon rainforest, and the very small, like the small grains of the negative, can be very close to each other, in the way Love has stated.

Final considerations Amazônia was consigned to oblivion for decades. Recently rediscovered, the book seemed to fit perfectly into the definition of the photobook established by Martin Parr and passed on to other anthologies and exhibitions. Its precise editing, enigmatic images, quality printing, sophisticated graphic design and even the total absence of text (which as we saw, was actually censored) added to its political aspect, granting the book the qualification as a Latin American ‘masterpiece’. We have also seen that this valorisation of Amazônia has helped to consolidate Andujar’s status as a recognised artist in the field of international contemporary photography. The same cannot be said for Love, whose trajectory has followed a diametrically opposite direction. Even though he was a well-known and soughtafter photographer in Brazil during the 1970s, his work has been increasingly erased from public notice since his death in 1995. In a way, this research arose from an effort to recover part of Love’s contribution to Latin American photography. Not so much as a posthumous or nostalgic tribute, but rather to establish his effective role in the production of such a significant photobook. It is not about underestimating Andujar’s work in order to value Love’s. To do so would be totally unfounded, as it was in the intimate collaboration between the two that the book took shape. Perhaps it was in the eagerness to recover the importance of Love’s work that this research led to what we believe to be its greatest contribution: the realisation that the book could only have come into existence through a collective effort that even surpassed the efforts of the main people involved. In other words, by taking some of the focus off Andujar to focus on Love, numerous other issues came to light. We have seen that this effort did not come only from the people responsible for the conception and materialisation of the book, notably the editor Regastein Rocha. There was a greater force that constantly dictated the pace of the process: the repression of an authoritarian state. Between 1971 and 1973, Andujar and Love’s images were used as tools for a discourse that sought to convince the population that the exploitation of the Amazon by agribusiness and by national and

143

144

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

foreign industries was good business for the country. By 1978, there was growing pressure in civil society for political openness and this gave strength to another discourse denouncing this exploitation. This made it possible for a book like Amazônia to at least be planned. But the repressive mechanisms were stronger and censorship came into play to reposition the book in a discourse closer to those of the beginning of the decade. However, when analysing the book we realise that this repositioning was not fully effective. It is even possible to identify images from the magazine that are very similar to some used in the book, especially those by George Love. But with this great change of medium and context, the images acquire other meanings. The idea of the exotic and seductive in the magazine and the exhibitions gives way to the experimental and enigmatic in the book. If the images in the magazine seemed to serve as an invitation to explore the forest, the images in the book serve as an invitation to explore the book itself and photography as a means rather than an end. Amazônia shows the photographic language in a more opaque way and this makes it more difficult to adhere to the pernicious discourse of the censors. It was through the methodological approach that we call ‘image biography’ that it has been possible to identify a considerable part of these confrontations. We do not know if this approach can be effective for other photobooks, but in Amazônia’s case it was fruitful, as it led to the identification of the numerous layers of meaning present in the book. Forces, as we have seen, can also act against the production of the book. By using the confluence of rivers as a metaphor to reflect on the process of production and recognition of the book, we may have the erroneous impression that this process has the same fluidity as the rivers. But, unfortunately, the Amazonian rivers no longer retain all their natural fluidity. The exploitation of the forest did not stop with the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship. With the current government which, at the time of writing, defends and exalts the military regime, we have not only witnessed the exponential deforestation and extermination of indigenous people to possibly irreversible levels, but we have also seen a great exploitation of the waters of the rivers in the region. Countless dams have been built over the last few years, causing serious consequences such as the flooding of large regions and radical changes in the health of the rivers and the fauna and flora that surround them. Rivers have had their paths and flows completely altered or hampered. A similar process is seen in the censorship of authoritarian governments. Amazônia is only one of the cases that has seen its flow profoundly altered. We wonder how many other photobooks have had similar trajectories, and how many have not even come into existence because of authoritarianism. We can also imagine what the trajectory of Amazônia might have been if its violent interruption had not taken place. What would the final edition of Amazônia have been without censorship? Would the book have achieved the desired international recognition? Would it still be recognised, decades later, as a ‘masterpiece’?



Experimental confluence

These questions will never be answered, but that is not the most important thing. Living in a hypothetical situation would get us nowhere. The most fruitful path seems to be to consider all the forces that acted upon the book to imagine how we can prevent these repressions from happening again, however difficult it may seem to demolish all these solid dams.

Works cited and archival sources A Hiléia Amazônica (n.d.). Sao Paulo Art Museum Archive, São Paulo. Manuscript. Acker, Antoine (2014). ‘“O maior incêndio do planeta”: como a Volkswagen e o regime militar brasileiro acidentalmente ajudaram a transformar a Amazônia em uma arena política global’. Revista Brasileira de História 34.68. Andujar, Claudia (2005). A vulnerabilidade do ser. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, Pinacoteca do Estado. Catalogue. Andujar, Claudia (2018). A luta Yanomami. São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles. Catalogue. Andujar, Claudia and George Love (1978). Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis. Anon. (1971). ‘A caça aos tesouros do subsolo amazônico: o grande acontecimento do mundo da mineração’. Realidade 64 (São Paulo, October): 120–122. Anon. (1971). ‘A última chance dos últimos guerreiros’. Realidade  64 (São Paulo, October): 202–212. Brasil 1500–1973. São Paulo Art Museum Archive, São Paulo (n.d.): 8. Manuscript. Brazil Export (1974). Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 1st notebook, 8 February: 18. Canjani, Douglas (2015). ‘O fotojornalismo expandido de George Love no Brasil: breve aproximação’. Nhengatu, Revista Iberoamericana para Comunicação e Cultura Contrahegemônicas 2.3: n.p. Chaui, Marilena (2000). Brasil: mito fundador e sociedade autoritária. São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo. Comissão Nacional da Verdade (2014). Report, Vol.  II, Text  5  – Violações de direitos humanos dos povos indígenas: 205. www.docvirt.com/docreader.net/DocReader.aspx ?bib=comissaoverdade&pagfis=1032 (accessed 2 July 2019). De Boni, Zé (1994). Verde lente: fotógrafos brasileiros e a natureza. São Paulo: Empresa das Artes. Fernández, Horacio (ed.) (2011). The Latin American Photobook. New York: Aperture. Gaspari, Élio (1978). ‘Os documentos da censura’. Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 18  June):  4. Special Notebook. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/030015_09/181879 (accessed 12 February 2019). Hallewell, Laurence (2017). O livro no Brasil: Sua História. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. Klintowitz, Jacob (1979). ‘Praxis Propaganda São Paulo: A Brazilian Advertising Agency and Publisher with a Social Dimension’. Graphis: International Journal of Graphic and Applied Art 201 (Zurich: The Graphis Press): 46–58. Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert (2016). A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Krauss, Rosalind (1982). ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’. Art Journal 42.4. ‘The Crisis in the Discipline’: 311–319.

145

146

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine Love, George. [Letter] São Paulo, 5 September [without year] [to] BARDI, Pietro Maria. São Paulo. 2f. [Describes exhibition setup and necessary materials.] Love, George (1986). George Leary Love Curriculum, Leary Love Family Papers, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, page 4, 1 set. Manuscript. Mello, Thiago de (2013). ‘Amazônia, pátria das águas’. Blog do IMS. https://blogdoims. com.br/amazonia-patria-das-aguas/. Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1973). Image du Brésil/Beeld van Brazilië/Image of Brazil. Brussels. Catalogue, no pagination. Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2017). Photobook Phenomenon. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona/Fundació Foto Colectania/RM Editores. O homem da Hiléia. Sao Paulo Art Museum Archive, São Paulo, undated. Manuscript. Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger (2004). The Photobook: A History, Volume I. London and New York: Phaidon. Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger (2014). The Photobook: A History, Volume III. London and New York: Phaidon. Valente, Rubens (2017). Os fuzis e as flechas: história de sangue e resistência indígena na ditadura. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Vamos Exportar (1973). Newsletter for the Brazilian Export Fair 1 (São Paulo): 1.

Dead time: the ‘collectivist’ photobook in the prison work of Mohamed Bourouissa Andy Stafford

Introduction On ne se livrera jamais assez au travail passionnant qui consiste à rapprocher les textes. [We will never spend enough time on the fascinating work of bringing texts together] (Yourcenar 1982: 530)

While working recently on the extraordinary project ‘Shot at Dawn’, by the British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews  – in which she visits and photographs in 2014, at dawn exactly one hundred years later, sites in France where First World War deserters were summarily shot – I read Geoff Dyer’s accompanying essay in the Shot at Dawn catalogue, called ‘Dead time’ (Dewe Mathews 2014). It was not, however, just the power of the eerily pastoral images that struck me in Dewe Mathews’s extraordinary project; nor simply the coincidence of titles of Dyer’s moving essay with Mohamed Bourouissa’s project, Temps mort [Dead Time] (also published  in  2014),1 that intrigued me (Bourouissa 2014). A most shocking and  powerful suggestion is made when Dyer reflects on  the absence of the victims of summary execution in Dewe Mathews’s pastoral photographs of the sites where the executions took place: ‘[T]he photograph effectively removes, almost one hundred years later, the blindfold placed over the [victim’s] eyes’ (Dyer 2014). In other words, Dewe Mathews might well have photographed the very last thing the victims of the firing squad saw through their own eyes just as they were shot, that is, beyond the soldiers shooting them. It is at once a shocking and inspiring moment. It also raised the question of a different type of photo-text from my previous attempt, which involved the triple definition of the retrospective, collaborative and auto-collaborative modes of putting text with photography (Stafford 2010). Here, now, with Dewe Mathews’s visual, albeit spectral, prosopopeia was the ‘collectivist’ photo-text. More powerfully now I feel that there is a ‘collectivist’ form of photo-text – the task here is to show how this might work in a photobook.

11

148

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Mohamed Bourouissa: From Courbevoie to Vuitton Mohamed Bourouissa has had a strange career. Nominated in 2018 for the Prix Marcel Duchamp – the equivalent of the Turner Prize – he has moved from the banlieue of Courbevoie in Paris where he has lived creating ‘staged’ photos with elliptical and contrapuntal captions in his 2005–7 project Périphériques, to an internship at the Le Fresnoy art institution near Paris, on to being involved (illegally) in photographing prisons, and then, in 2019, to working for Louis Vuitton (Bourouissa 2019a, 2019a). The eclectic mix of topics in his photographic oeuvre reflects the highly original aspect to his work. It is not simply the specific photographic aesthetic adopted, nor only the inter-medial innovations between image and text; but, above all this chapter argues, the ‘secret architecture’ of the photobook which accompanies the prison work called Temps mort. ‘Temps mort’, originally a title by the rapper Booba, referred to a film that Bourouissa had created whilst in residence at Le Fresnoy in 2009, using footage shot by a friend in prison (Bourouissa 2009). It also refers to the photographic work that Bourouissa  processed when he received the images from the friend, and which then becomes the photobook complete with text message conversations. Bourouissa worked for around eight months with his friend Al, a prison inmate, during which the artist received hundreds of photographs taken in prison – even though it is illegal to do so – made by his friend using the camera on his portable telephone, accompanied by text messages written in text speak. The deal was that Bourouissa would send Al extra phone credit. However, it is worth pointing out immediately that there is a material contradiction  – ­counterpoint – between showing visually the depredations and indignity of incarceration in twenty-first-century France on the one hand; and, then on the other, Bourouissa’s collecting these into a large-format, indeed sumptuous, photobook, complete with cloth cover, generous blank pages for effect, and an eyewatering price. This is a ‘coffee-table book’ in its material disposition. Bourouissa’s solution to this paradox was to work on the images so that the Temps mort project could introduce a disconnect between viewer and subjects. As Magali Jauffret points out in her essay at the end of the photobook, ‘Une image qui s’évade’ [An Escaping Image], once Al had sent through the telephone photographs, Bourouissa set about re-working them, re-shooting them in analogue format, passing them through his computer in order to make them fuzzy and hazy. Indeed, Jauffret cites an interview with Bourouissa made on 31 July 2008, that is during the project, in which he hinted at a justification for his choice of photographic aesthetic: ‘I didn’t tell you, I’ve begun a new project. I’m taking photos in jail. Actually, I have a friend who’s an inmate. He takes pictures for me. What you see is usually impossible to capture, as if the eye just swept past it without ever stopping’ (Jauffret 2014). Bourouissa explained to Jauffret that the stills’ power lay ‘not in the depth of the picture but in the very surface […] in its texture […] a kind of match between the frailty of a



Dead time

low-definition image and the loss of identity of the incarcerated person, as i[f] both were drowning’. Aware of the potential miserabilism of the project, Bourouissa commented: ‘Doesn’t it seem important for me to have some role in this inmate’s social space, that I should have a function, that I be useful to him in some way? […] Far from being another testimony, I am drawing from reality to reconstruct other realities inside my work. Indeed they hold the qualities of testimony, but that doesn’t exclude a large portion of subjectivity’ (Jauffret 2014). As Jauffret notes, given this insistence on subjectivity, Bourouissa’s project risked dispersal across the eight months and three hundred text and picture messages taken between 2007 and 2008; and slowed by long periods of silence, the communication via images needed to be simple, ‘almost topographic’, and to feature a number of subjects:  the environment, Al himself, the activities, neighbours, the exercise yard, views from behind bars, and all taken from sunrise to sunset. Despite this risk of dispersal, in Jauffret’s view, Temps mort achieves ‘something beautiful in this emancipation that brings Al back to life, made to disappear by justice, projected into the out-of-scope of both photography and life’; for Jauffret, it is the ‘evanescent’ image that is ‘subversive’: ‘that is why one only passes through things poetically’ (Jauffret 2014). It is precisely the notion of the poetic in Temps mort that characterises the project. The difference with Jauffret’s analysis, however, is that this chapter will privilege the text-image intermediality as a crucial site of the ‘poetry’ in the photobook; whereas she concentrates on the photographs, we consider here the manner in which the text messages – and their regular absence in the empty but dated pages that dominate the photobook – interact with the ‘surface’ photographs. As Bourouissa puts it, thinking back to his Périphériques project: ‘I thought I was influenced by painting. But then I realized just how I had been impressed by the aesthetic power of those low definition images, by their plasticity, by a writing that matches the intention’ (Jauffret 2014).

Prison photography: from photo-text to photobook Given this poetic dimension to the photobook, it is worth bearing in mind the parameters and the creative conditions of the photobook, as defined by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr: Our primary criterion for the photobook is that it should be an extended essay in photographs, and that it follows its theme with ‘intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection’ […] The photobook, in short, is the ‘literary novel’ amongst photographic books. And if that is in itself no guarantee of quality […] at the very least it is a statement of intent  – an indication that something more ambitious than the commonplace photographically illustrated book has been attempted, or in certain cases, achieved without any self-conscious attempt being made. (Badger and Parr 2004: 8)

149

150

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

It is surprising however, given the development of so-called ‘prison photography’, that the photobook on prison or imprisonment should be largely absent from Parr and Badger’s three-volume overview. Mathieu Pernot, Klavdij Sluban, Jacqueline Salmon, Michel Séméniako, Grégoire Korganow, Christophe Loiseau, Jean Gaumy  – to name but a few photographers in France  – have produced bodies of photographic work around the modern-day prison. However, the only references to photobooks of incarceration by Badger and Parr, in the second volume, are: Kazimierz Smolen’s 1965 Auschwitz, as a ruin; Andreas Magdanz’s 2003 Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose colour images contrast with Smolen’s choice of black and white, ‘romantic’ images; and Franco Basaglia and Franca Basaglia Ongaro’s 1969 Morire di classe, about an Italian mental institution, which was  closed down following the photobook’s publication (Badger and Parr 2006: 244–246). It is all the more striking then that volume III, which Parr and Badger published in 2014, contains nothing on carceral photography (with the minor exception of Antoine Agata’s sexualised images of imprisonment in Stigma) (Badger and Parr 2014: 75, 98). In the face of the exponential growth of the prison population in the UK and France and elsewhere, there does not seem to have been a photobook by 2014, about (the) prison specifically, which had yet inspired them … Scholarship on visual culture in relation to prisons, by contrast, has begun to emerge, especially in Leonard Cheliotis’s edited volume (Cheliotis 2012; Johnson 2012: 167–188; Fleetwood 2018; prisonphotography.org). There may be a good reason why no actual prison photography is included in the volume  – only drawings and photographic portraits made outside of prison are reproduced. First, there are very strict laws in prisons, especially in France, about photographing. Second, Yvonne Jewkes has noted the common conceptualisation of the prison cell as a place of death or entombment in academic studies of imprisonment (Jewkes 2012: 34). Furthermore, as Michelle Brown sets out, there is a deep suspicion around documentary work on prisons  – she considers mainly film, but some photography from Abu Ghraib  – that raise questions concerning the state’s control of images, around ‘embeddedness’ as ‘vaccination’ against critique, and, for the purposes of this chapter, concerning the dangers of traducing the experience of being incarcerated in today’s penal system (Brown 2012:  109–112; Brown 2014). As two specialists of visual criminology put it: ‘We need a new methodological orientation towards the visual that is capable of encompassing meaning, affect, situation, symbolic power  and  efficiency and spectacle in the same “frame”. This new  approach  must seek to fuse  precise visual attentiveness with politically charged analysis, to be as attuned to representation and style as it is to the way visual culture impacts on individual and collective behavior’ (Hayward and Presdee 2010: 129). This is not to say – especially in our troubled times of war, detention and mass incarceration – that photography or the photobook have avoided these subjects: there exist photobooks on, for example, CIA ‘black sites’ (Clark 2016), and refugees from Africa who have to burn their papers



Dead time

in Morocco in order to be able to stay once arrived in Europe (Chouaki and Chable 2006). Indeed, the so-called ‘visual turn’ in the last twenty years has led writers and artists to investigate the ultimate forms of human oppression via the visual. So Mohamed Bourouissa’s Temps mort is part of wider trend in visual culture around incarceration. Yet, in a purely photographic terms, as Ariella Azoulay has pointed out, not only is ‘taking photographs in prison forbidden’, but also ‘equating the space of imprisonment with the official space of the prison may well entrap one in the illusion of a visual vacuum and an interdiction on photography’ (Azoulay 2008: 421–422). In this sense, we will suggest that Temps mort can play a part in the critical process of what Judah Schept calls, in relation to the ever more powerful sight of the ‘carceral state’, ‘unseeing’ (Schept 2014: 198–223), creating ‘counter-images’ (Brown 2014: 183ff) that disrupt and reorder the state’s control of carceral ideology and practice. Indeed, Temps mort asks key questions around art and autonomy in prison that are beginning to be posed by critics (Johnson 2012). How Al’s ‘writing’ (both the photographs and the text messages, not to mention Mohamed’s messages from outside prison) fits into these debates is not, however, the main aim of this analysis of Bourouissa’s photobook. Rather, it is to consider the collectivised artwork on incarceration, the sharing and connectivity  – however faint  – between ‘inside’ and outside; and although Johnson’s article covers many of the alienations and empowerments of art made ‘on the inside’ that linger in Bourouissa’s work with Al, his (their?) photobook seems to be grappling with the questions around communication and community. There are, of course, precedents for Bourouissa’s Temps mort. The 1994 photo-textual work of Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi in the penal colony  – in which the presence of the inmates is figured in their physical and ghostly absence – is a striking photobook which showcases Chamoiseau’s brilliant photo-essay alongside Hammadi’s glossy images (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994; Stafford 2010:  140–155). And the photographic portrait work of prisoners by Bettina Rheims, in the project ‘Détenues’ (with an ‘e’ at the end signifying female prisoners), also conducted in 2014, has been welcomed for the manner in which it allows female prisoners a certain dignity in, if not autonomy from, prison life (Rheims 2018). However, Bourouissa’s work in Temps mort seems keen to avoid this. In between the full, humanised presence of Rheims’s female prisoners, and the absent-present inmates of Chamoiseau and Hammadi’s bagnards  – which included Papillon and Dreyfus, among the countless others – Bourouissa’s phototextual work moves from a focus on photography and the photo-text, towards the conceptual practices of assembling a photobook. This brings other dangers: in particular, the ‘beau livre’ or ‘coffee-table book’, which might compromise the nature and audience of Bourouissa’s Temps mort.

151

152

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

Dead time … but used well? At the same time, the photobook gives Bourouissa the chance to redefine socalled ‘photographie carcérale’ (prison photography). His photographic work, the text-image interaction, and the photobook’s architecture  – often secret in its plans (never declared) – all combine in Temps mort to work on prison as an experience. In a manner not dissimilar to that used by Thomas Ruff (a student of the Bechers at the famous Dusseldorf school) in JPEGS and Nudes,2 Bourouissa deliberately introduces a hazy format to the images and for a good reason. The ‘flou’ (blurriness) allows for an account of what it means to be a prisoner today – ‘this imprisoned social absent’ – but which does not slip into the compromised area of ‘being just one more visual testimony in the wake of the suburban riots [of Paris in 2005 and 2007]’ (Jauffret 2014); Bourouissa also sees in the prison work the subjectivity of the prisoner. It is an approach that reminds me of Keith Sanborn and the video vortex (Stallabrass 2013:  189–191). But Temps mort is above all a photobook. On the front cover – a luxurious cloth cover, we will remember – we find the following in French (Bourouissa 2014: front cover, my translation): 18.09.2007 – 16.02 : Watcha mate here is 1 top up: 2566866880 Seen the photos of landscape good and got an idea: can you take photos every 2 hours of the same landscape with the same angle Thanks Mohamed

And these landscape scenes are placed at the very start of the photobook: a thumbnail on each page of the same landscape, at different times of day  – presumably taken from the prison  – and spread over four pages. These four thumbnails, faintly pastoral, are but the preface to the photobook, however. The thumbnails are followed by the paratextual information telling us about the book and the bilingual details; only then for one more thumbnail … of dusk; it all feels both ominous and reflective. We return to the use of thumbnails in a moment. This is then followed by Al’s reply (presumably to Mohamed’s request above), on one page and then another late-night (therefore illegal?) reply from Al a month later wondering about the silence from Mohamed: 23.01.2007 – 6.26pm : Ok thanx talk to u tonite Al



Dead time 04.02.2007 – 00:06 : R u good, its al, Haven’t heard from u Al

But then there is nothing but silence. In this disjointed and jolty way, the ­photobook – still yet to show a full-size image – now seems to falter. Only then for it to get worse: representing nearly five months, March to August 2007, and signalled by eight pages of dates but no times of day, each page is empty. Communication has quite literally broken down. But, then, suddenly, a slightly timid enigmatic message from Al appears: 26.08.2007 – 17.43 : its fine, ur family bro Al

And this message is followed, finally, by the first full-size image (Untitled #1, www.mohamedbourouissa.com/temps-mort), and which seems to explain the previous text message. Al’s first photograph is – naturally enough – of his fellow inmates, ‘family’. The disjointedness of the text message conversation continues, as one more day of blankness follows this first photograph. But, finally, Mohamed replies: 27.08.2007 – 11.24pm : Ok call me 2moro nite so we can talk Mohamed

This is followed by the first images of the jail itself (proper size too) (Untitled #2, www.mohamedbourouissa.com/temps-mort). It is now  – despite one or two more blank pages – that the photobook begins to unveil more images, as if trickling slowly through the ether. Suddenly we read this comment, even though we are never sure if we see Al: 07.09.2007 – 6.26pm : That’s crazy! Jail made u lose weight … Mohamed

This exclamation from Mohamed (whom we will take to be Bourouissa) on the outside is followed merely by this image on the next page, very much from the ‘inside’ (Untitled #21, www.mohamedbourouissa.com/temps-mort). This is followed by a blank page and an image of Al or Al’s fellow inmate (we never know) doing press-ups. This is the first aspect to the photobook’s architecture, an understated humour that flickers and eventually fades. The humour runs as follows. The photograph of the inmate doing press-ups is in counterpoint with that which follows it, which is an image of the contents of their fridge (Untitled #5, www. mohamedbourouissa.com/temps-mort). To link exercise with food is already to

153

154

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

raise the question of health. Indeed, this humorous sequence is now completed by the following comment from Al straight after the press-ups/fridge counterpoint: 09.07.2007 – 6.31pm : Dam rite abs speak later bro Al

This is immediately followed by a (rather unflattering) view of an inmates’ ‘abs’ (Untitled #7, www.mohamedbourouissa.com/temps-mort). Thus Bourouissa, in this sequence at least, is linking text-message and images  – fitness followed by fridge contents followed by modest body form – in a way that is both humorous and tender but also ambiguous. This ambiguity becomes more inscrutable in the following sequences. With its gaps in dated pages, the photobook now shows other blurred images: two in sequence of barred and grated windows, the second with an inmate looking through; followed by cooking equipment, then an inmate in bed under the covers, followed by a ceiling light, then an image of an indistinct part of the ceiling. These blurred, almost inaccessible, images are then irregularly interrupted by more messages (not always well translated into English textspeak, so the below is my own translation): 14.09.2007 – 20:22 : yeh yeh, we’re here, one or two little issues in the hood but all going ok I’m still waiting for your new drawings Crikey get on with it otherwise I’ll be out soon Inshallah how’s it going at your end Al

Once again, the pithy communication is followed by an empty page with a date, followed by another image of an inmate from behind who is looking out of a window, followed by an image of a radio behind a Marlboro packet; then more empty pages with dates, and a bare-chested portrait of an inmate but without his head in the frame; then barbed wire, more empty but dated pages, and a stark outside photograph of legs and a shadow, followed by hooded inmates waiting insistently at the fence. This last arresting image is the final photograph of the photobook. It is followed by a penultimate message from Mohamed to Al: 18.09.2007 – 16:06 : from sunrise til nite time. Thanks hope I’m not asking 4 too much. Thx again bro Mohamed

Finally, in his last message to Al dated 18.09.2007 – 19.27 (but out of sequence with Al’s final message printed on the back cover), Mohamed wishes Al  – in



Dead time

Arabic – ‘Sara ftoura’ (bon appétit). The photobook ends, on the back cover, with Al’s message, the time of which is in fact nearly two hours before the ‘bon appétit’ wish from Mohamed (my translation): 18.09.2007 – 17.39 : Désolé je pouvai pa te rpondre cetai cho enpromrnade Al [Sorry I cldnt reply to ya, too risky to reply during the prison walk]

The photobook thus ends on a sour note, with Al fearing the future ‘inside’, with the threat of violence and further depredations. Naturally, the ‘secret architecture’ of the photobook is partly determined by its bookends – the front cover displaying Mohamed’s request to Al, and then the back cover with this curt and sobering reminder above of the daily occurrences in the prison that might hinder communication and cut off the inmate from the outside. But there is also a subtle use of the thumbnail. Between Magali Jauffret’s essay in French at the end of Temps mort and its English translation is a double, folded page of thirty thumbnail images which, seemingly untouched by Bourouissa’s digital-to-analogue technique of hazing the photographs taken on Al’s phone, show, in miniature (all the better to contrast with the hazy but full-size images that pepper the text-message discussions of the photobook proper), clearer ‘documentary-like’ snapshots of daily life for the inmates, shown playing football, sitting and talking together, in a manner which one might expect from a documentary testimony of prison-life (on the thumbnail in the photobook: Stezaker 2009; Badger and Parr 2014: 282, 296–297) – except that these thirty thumbnails are not only tiny but buried at the back of the photobook, in another dimension to the secret architecture of Temps mort.

Conclusion: ‘collectivist’ photobook? We might say then that Bourouissa’s ‘secret architecture’ in his photobook Temps mort is trying to give us an insight, from the inside in both senses, of what it is like to be in prison; crucially though without, on the one hand, giving the inmates a dignity that they may not feel (as in Bettina Rheims’s portraits); nor, on the other, conjuring inmates away in a representation of social and historiographical exclusion that Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi try to figure in their spectral colour images of the penal colony. Bourouissa by contrast tries something else. Rather than subjecting the prison inmates, present or not, Bourouissa works with Al to produce a collective if not collectivist and collectivised form of photobook.3 This collectivist practice is what Jauffret describes as a ‘form of creativity based on dialogue and trust’ which becomes even more marked, in her view, in the film version of Temps mort: ‘the inmate, won over by friendship and the desire

155

156

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine

to create, takes initiatives, appropriates the artist’s approach to the point that, over time, he becomes the co-author’ (Jauffret 2014: n.p.). So that Al and others are not cut off from social exchange whilst in prison, and can anticipate the social presence they will benefit from once released. This is not the presence-absence of Chamoiseau and Hammadi’s inmates, nor the ‘subjectivity’ of the dignified women prisoners in Rheims’s work. Bourouissa also uses the photobook in a particular way. Humour, tension and distorted dialogue seem to give us, in an uncanny way, some kind of access to the feelings in the life of a prisoner. In particular – and this is another striking similarity with Chloe Dewe Mathews’s project and its fastidious respect for noting the time and returning to each First-World-War site at the very time of day when the executions took place one hundred years earlier – Bourouissa insists on supplying the time of each text message. It is as if the (slow) passing of time in the prison is randomly interrupted and temporarily arrested by contact with the outside world. Bourouissa’s project gives the prisoner the chance that he or she might one day return to normal life without having been totally cut off, desocialised or dehumanised. The photobook, in response to Sartre’s famous question ‘que peut la littérature?’ [what can literature actually achieve?], might well be able to argue for a – however utopian – collectivist solution to incarceration; as Jauffret puts it in her conclusion: ‘[Bourouissa] does not fetishise his status as a creator. He lets go. What counts, is not so much who is pressing the button, but whose intention it is’ (Jauffret 2014: n.p.).

Notes 1 The title ‘temps mort’ reminds me of the filming practice called ‘temps faible’ used by Raymond Depardon in his work on the French penal system, in which he sets up a camera for twenty-four hours in a courthouse and records every second of the proceedings without privileging any particular episode – hence the notion that the film records ‘feeble’ or ‘uneventful’ moments, which Depardon considers as the polar opposite of the photo-journalistic ‘scoop’ (Depardon 1994). 2 Jauffret quotes Bourouissa’s having been inspired by Ruff’s JPEGS: ‘[Ruff’s] “JPEGS” are print-screen shots that he had downloaded and whose pixels he had reworked and had produced in untitled, monumental format while remaining anonymous’ (Jauffret 2014: n.p.). 3 Another recent example of ‘Collectivist’ art might be Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s 2018 installation at Tate Modern, in which the viewer was invited to respond to the migration crisis by revealing a heat-induced image on the floor of the Turbine Hall; the title of the installation, ‘10,148,451’, a figure which increased every day, is stamped onto visitors’ hands upon entering the room: ‘the number of people who migrated from one country to another last year added to the number of migrant deaths recorded so far this year’ (Bruguera 2018); accompanying the thermochromic portrait was another installation, a crying room which contained an organic compound that caused the viewer to produce tears, thus creating a ‘forced empathy’ (Bruguera 2018; and see Schwartz 2012).



Dead time

Works cited Agata, Antoine d’ (2004). Stigma. Marseilles: Images en Manœuvres Éditions. Azoulay, Ariella (2008). The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2004). The Photobook. Volume I. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2006). The Photobook. Volume II. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2014). The Photobook. Volume  III. London: Phaidon. Basaglia, Franco, and Franca Basaglia Ongaro (eds) (1969). Morire di classe: La condizione manicomiale (Death of a Class: The State of the Mental Institution). Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore. Bourouissa, Mohamed (2009). The film version of Temps mort is available at: https:// vimeo.com/29481325. Bourouissa, Mohamed (2014). Temps mort. Paris: Kamel Mennour/Études Books, n.p. In this otherwise bilingual photobook, only the front cover – the ‘consigne’ (instructions) to Al for the project – and the back cover are not translated into English. Many of the photographs in Temps mort are viewable on Bourouissa’s website: www.mohamed​ bourouissa.com/temps-mort/ (accessed 24 September 2019); though the order of the images differs from the photobook version and there are few text messages on the webpages. Bourouissa, Mohamed (2019a). www.mohamedbourouissa.com/peripherique/; and www.numero.com/fr/art/mohamed-bourouissa-campagne-louis-vuitton-virgilabloh-the-painter-studio-atelier-du-peintre-gustave-courbet-prix-marcel-duchamp (accessed 1 July 2019). Bourouissa, Mohamed (2019b). www.numero.com/fr/art/mohamed-bourouissa-cam​ pagne-louis-vuitton-virgil-abloh-the-painter-studio-atelier-du-peintre-gustave-cour​ bet-prix-marcel-duchamp (accessed 1 July 2019). Brown, Michelle (2012). ‘Social Documentary in Prison’. In The Arts of Imprisonment: Control, Resistance and Empowerment, Leonidas K. Cheliotis (ed.). London: Ashgate: 101–117. Brown, Michelle (2014). ‘Visual Criminology and Carceral Studies: Counter-Images in the Carceral Age’. Theoretical Criminology 18:2, special issue on ‘Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment’: 176–197. Bruguera, Tania (n.d.). ‘Hyundai Commission: Tania Bruguera: 10,148,451’. Tate Press Release. www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/hyundai-commissiontania-bruguera (accessed 2 January 2020). Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Rodolphe Hammadi (1994). Guyane. Traces-mémoires du bagne. Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites. Cheliotis, Leonidas K. (ed.) (2012). The Arts of Imprisonment: Control, Resistance and Empowerment. London: Ashgate. Chouaki, Aziz, and Thomas Chable (2006). Brûleurs. Brussels: Yellow Now. Clark, Edmund (2016). Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (2011–2016). Aperture/Magnum Foundation. www.edmundclark.com/books/nega​ tive-publicity-artefacts-extraordinary-rendition/#1 (accessed 24 September 2019; my thanks to Jessie Bond for suggesting this photobook). Depardon, Raymond (1994). Délits flagrants. Double D Copyright Films. [Documentary film.]

157

158

Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine Dewe Mathews, Chloe (2014). Shot at Dawn. Madrid: Ivory Press; see Dewe Mathews’s photographic work at: www.chloedewemathews.com/shot-at-dawn/ (accessed 24 September 2019). Dyer, Geoff (2014). ‘Dead Time’. In Chloe Dewe Mathews. Shot at Dawn. Madrid: Ivory Press, n.p. Fleetwood, Nicole R. (ed.) (2018). Aperture 230, thematic issue ‘Prison Nation’ (spring). https://aperture.org/shop/aperture-230-magazine/ and https://prisonphotogra​ phy.org/2018/02/26/prison-index-essay-published-in-aperture/ (both accessed 24 September 2019). Hayward, Keith and Mike Presdee (2010). Cited in Nicole Rafter ‘Introduction’ to the special issue of Theoretical Criminology on ‘Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment’: 129. Jauffret, Magali (2014). ‘An Escaping Image’. In Mohamed Bourouissa, Temps mort. Paris: Kamel Mennour/Études Books, n.p. Jewkes, Yvonne (2012). ‘Aesthetics and An-aesthetics: The Architecture of Incarceration’. In The Arts of Imprisonment: Control, Resistance and Empowerment, Leonidas K. Cheliotis (ed.). London: Ashgate: 27–45. Johnson, Robert (2012). ‘Art and Autonomy: Prison Writers under Siege’. In The Arts of Imprisonment: Control, Resistance and Empowerment, Leonidas K. Cheliotis (ed.). London: Ashgate: 167–188. Magdanz, Andreas (2003). Auschwitz-Birkenau. Aachen: Andreas Magdanz. Rheims, Bettina (2018). Détenues. Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Blanche’. www.bjp-online. com/2018/03/rheimsdetenues/ (accessed 24 September 2019). Ruff, Thomas (2003). Nudes. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Ruff, Thomas (2009). JPEGS. New York: Aperture. Schept, Judah (2014). ‘(Un)seeing Like a Prison: Counter-visual Ethnography of the Carceral State’. Theoretical Criminology 18:2: 198–223. Schwartz, Stephanie (2012). ‘Tania Bruguera: Between Histories’. Oxford Art Journal 35.2:  215–232. www.taniabruguera.com/cms/files/oxford_art_j-2012-schwartz-215–32. pdf (accessed 2 January 2020). Smolen, Kazimierz (ed.) (1965). Oswiecim/Auschwitz. Oswiecim: Panstwowe Museum. Stafford, Andy (2010). Photo-texts. Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Stallabrass, Julian (ed.) (2013). Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images. Brighton: Photoworks. Stezaker, John (2009). The 3rd  Person Archive. Cologne: Walther König; and London: Koenig Books. Yourcenar, Marguerite (1982). ‘Carnets de notes de “Memoires d’Hadrien”’. In Œuvres romanesques. Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliotheque de la Pleiade’: 530.

Part V Memorialising the ephemeral

The Road is Wider Than Long: a Surrealist photobook Antony Penrose

The Road is Wider Than Long is a love story written by my father Roland Penrose in 1938 as a poem to the woman he had fallen in love with: my mother, Lee Miller. Published the following year, at its core it has the duality of his romantic love and his love of peace, freedom and justice. The love story, narrated through the oblique phrases of Surrealist poetry, is passionate, sincere and tinged with doubt. Marriage had recently failed both Roland and Lee, and his aversion to the risk of further hurt can be found in the poem which outwardly seems an idyllic romance set in an exotic background. The poem narrates a journey Roland and Lee made in the summer of 1938 through Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Roland had travelled to Athens to meet Lee, who had arrived there from her home in Egypt with her car, a large and powerful Packard. It is in Romania that the subtext – the peace, freedom and justice element – becomes most evident. Here they are travelling in remote areas where traditions handed down unchanged for centuries are the norm. Modern life and politics are yet to make an appearance. Witchcraft and religion are inextricably mixed and are evidenced in the Paparuda dance to bring rain and the Caolian and Pastras rituals to bring abundance, witnessed and photographed by Lee and Roland who incorporated them into his narrative. The extreme vulnerability of this way of life was in no way understood by those who lived it. The same cycles of social and natural life had remained unchanged for countless generations that had withstood pestilence and famine. Political interference in rural life was remote. Wars had washed over these people many times before but the resilience and isolation of peasant life soon restored their equilibrium, and life returned to its normality. This harsh, orderly, often primitive but mainly peaceful existence was never to exist again after 1939. The Road is Wider Than Long is also a strident political protest and a lament for this peaceful and innocent way of life that was about to be brutally ended less than a year after Roland and Lee’s visit. The turmoil began in June 1940 when Romania was forced to cede the provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, Northern Transylvania to Hungary, and Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Romania entered the war on the side of the Germans in June 1941, and the massacres of

12

162

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

Jews and Romani began. After the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 Romania envisaged reconciliation with the Soviet Union and in 1944 fought against Germany, but this led to the country becoming a puppet state dominated by Stalin after the war. The territories were reunited but the agrarian reforms forced by the Soviets became a decisive force in the destruction of the traditional rural ways. Roland and Lee knew the future was likely to be catastrophic, but not even in their moments of greatest pessimism could they have imagined a more complete destruction of a culture. Their premonitions were such that an important part of their journey was to see and record as much as possible of traditional life before it was swept away. The unstated further purpose was, through the agency of art, to try and raise awareness in England of the uniqueness and vulnerability of the innocent peasant people whom fate had placed in the path of the oncoming war. Roland was a Quaker and a pacifist. Lee had been educated in a Quaker school and held similar views. They were both deeply committed to human rights, and to freedom above all. Roland had served as an ambulance driver in the First World War and in 1936 he went to Catalonia to report on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Both he and Lee held strong left-wing ideals and Roland always voted Labour; although he had connections to the British Communist Party, he never became a member. Lee as an American could not vote outside the United States, but her left-wing views were so extreme that later in London during the war she was placed under surveillance by MI5 as a suspected Communist. Born 1900 in London and very British despite being a Surrealist artist, Roland was well known in France where he had lived for thirteen years. He had become close friends with Max Ernst, Man Ray, Paul Eluard and Georges Braque and in 1936 had met Pablo Picasso and begun his lifelong friendship with him. It was in Paris in June 1937, at a Surrealist Ball with Ernst, Eluard and Man Ray, that he met an American woman of immense beauty. He later described the sensation of seeing her for the first time as like being struck by lightning. It is evident he was never the same again. The woman’s name was Lee Miller, born 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a Surrealist photographer in her own right but was better known at that time for having been a model for Man Ray and for Edward Steichen, whose fashion photographs of her in the pages of American and French Vogue and Vanity Fair from 1927 to 1932 made her a supermodel before the term was invented. It was love at first sight. Roland soon discovered Lee was far more than his Surrealist muse incarnate. Highly intelligent, articulate, and with great practicality and physical courage, she utterly refused to be bound by the constraints of society, yet her great warmth and intelligence gave her the capability to make friends with most people. Theirs was the deep, passionate love of two desert travellers who found their oasis in each other. Their love was to last until Lee’s death forty years later. From that moment in June 1937 they were inseparable for rest of their enchanted summer. Unknowingly, as part of the Surrealist circle, their lives had interlocked from 1929 when Lee arrived in Paris. She became Man Ray’s lover and he her mentor



The Road is Wider Than Long

until they parted in 1932 when she returned to New York. In Paris she had known Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, and other Surrealist associates such as James Joyce. Eluard and later his wife Nusch were deeply important to both Lee and Roland, yet despite their extensive group of mutual friends it was not until 1937 that they met. It is certain that Eluard’s work influenced Roland’s life and his own poetry profoundly. Similarities are to be found between Eluard’s work and Roland’s The Road is Wider Than Long. Eluard’s poetry is usually intensely visual, his lines are sometimes like reading a stream of pictures. Roland, who was dyslexic, found images were his vital key to communication. Eluard collaborated with Man Ray to produce the key French Surrealist photobook titled Facile (1936). Eluard’s poems celebrating his wife Nusch are framed by, or flow around, Man Ray’s intensely beautiful photographs of her nude body. Roland had his own copy which remained placed among his most treasured books until the end of his days. The fusion of poetry and photography in Facile must have been foremost in Roland’s mind during his travels with Lee. After an excursion to Cornwall with Paul and Nusch Eluard, Man Ray and his girlfriend Ady Fidelin, they all headed to the Côte d’Azure for a sort of Surrealist summer camp. A blissful time passed on the beaches and in the small medieval hilltop town of Mougins where they all stayed in the Hôtel Vaste Horizon. Picasso was there with his new lover Dora Maar. He painted Lee’s portrait six times à l’Arlésienne. Maar drew her in pencil on a paper tablecloth and Man Ray photographed her. Roland, stimulated by the wealth of talent around him, began making collages using patterns of postcards depicting local scenes. The images repeat in patterns that extend far beyond their original intention. His work titled The Real Woman,1 thought to be his first in this style, is clearly inspired by Lee. The cut-out frottage of her torso is alluringly modelled, visceral and with the heat of her sexuality evident from the vivid slash of the orange-red sunset that forms her pudenda. She is present, the ‘real woman’ of his life. The image of a bird and other elements are a collage of picture postcards and other media. The postcards he bought were plain, often banal, but put into repetitive rhythmical patterns they become transformed into strong new shapes, in a manner similar to a cubist reconstruction. More work exploring this technique followed during this holiday and Roland continued making postcard collages until the last weeks of his life. For him photography, his own and that of others, was simply another artistic medium. Rather than objects in their own right, he saw photographs as source images to be used in the service of the final object. He was not concerned about the aesthetics of the photographic image but about how it could be subverted, cut up and used as a collage component. Roland’s collages give us an insight into the creative process that was to inform his poetry. The lines in The Road is Wider Than Long often speak in visual terms, reflecting how he constantly gathered images from his surroundings (see plate 15). The book is another form of collage with the visual expressed in .

163

164

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

his close fusion of words, calligraphy and his photographs. He unintentionally created a photobook. It was simply his application of the principle of the objet trouvé, the act of finding the marvellous in the everyday. The photograph is elevated to being part of the work as a whole in the same way that in the collages the smallest adaptation to the assembly of banal postcards transforms them into the extraordinary. The visual layering of Roland’s observations can be seen in this example (see plate 16) where he describes the ragged clothes of a Roma woman. At the end of August the French left the Côte d’Azur and returned to Paris. With an agonised parting, Lee went back to her husband Aziz Eloui Bey in their luxurious but stifling home and social life in Cairo, defined by her as being dominated by ‘the black satin and pearls’ set.2 Their stream of letters shows a complete intellectual affinity and a physical passion undiminished by distance. In June 1938 Lee wrote: ‘Roland darling, I will be in Athens in July. I am bringing my Packard two seater with dickey outside […] rather a lot of luggage […] I want to see some of Romania, Transylvania and the Carpathians.’3 In the afterword to the 1980 edition of The Road is Wider Than Long, Roland wrote: ‘I at once booked my passage from Marseilles on a Greek trader […] Having idly soaked in the Mediterranean sun on its deck and passed through the Corinth Canal […] I reached Athens and had the exhilaration of finding Lee impatient to start our journey.’ From Athens they went to the islands of Mikonos and Delos. Then back on the mainland they headed to Corinth and down to Nauplia before doubling back to Epidaurus. They went on to Delphi, the home of Pythea, the oracle who inhaled gas emanating from the rock and foretold the future. Lovers have an innate desire to know the future but in the absence of Pythea these lines show Roland was content to read tomorrow’s news in the sky (Penrose 2003: 30–31): Vapours escape from the rocks writing tomorrow’s news in the sky we have forgotten yesterday and tomorrow’s news is bad news.

Tomorrow’s news would be bad. Goebbels’s propaganda had penetrated to remote areas and among Lee’s photographs are images of young boys giving the Nazi salute. The ancient battlefield of Thermopylae was next, the bleak empty plain a reminder that armed conflict was about to recur. Then they went on to the monasteries of Meteora and north to Kavala, continuing to Sofia in Bulgaria and on to Bucharest in Romania, one of their main objectives. It was here they sought out Hari Brauner, with an introduction to him from his brother Victor Brauner, the Surrealist artist and friend of Roland’s in London. Hari was professor of music at Bucharest University. His passion was collecting notations and making recordings on wax cylinders of the many varied forms of folk music current at that time. When Lee and Roland arrived with the wonderful resources of a camera, a car and money to buy fuel and food, he immediately seized the opportunity to ask them to travel with him and his partner, the artist and folklorist Lena Constante, to remote areas and photograph the rural traditions.



The Road is Wider Than Long

Lee, who aside from being a Surrealist photographer had been a ­professional running her own studios in Paris and New  York, loved this opportunity.  Lee’s Romanian shots have a technical perfection. They are accurately exposed, beautifully composed and sometimes we have a strong sense she set up some scenes to get the ideal shot, the mark of her life in the fashion and portraiture genre. Behind the acute observation of the documentary maker we detect a Surrealist quirk. She has an ­unerring eye for the unusual, for witty juxtapositions and what we might call the ‘image trouvée’. From Roland’s work we can gauge he was much less intrusive as a photographer. He tended to wait until the people’s awareness was elsewhere, usually directed at Lee, who with her blond hair and Nordic looks in a population with black hair and dark faces was automatically the centre of attention. Using her as a distraction, Roland would get his shot, catching naturalness in the people. This is evident even when they are looking straight at him, often with innocent curiosity. Remarkably for such a discreet person, he did not flinch from photographing the emotionally charged funeral of a little girl, and here again we see his non-invasive manner. He is an unobtrusive observer. The two groups of images complement each other and stand as photography in their own right, but it was his own work that Roland chose to take to the next step of his first and only photobook. Roland had pressing business in London so after about five weeks on the road he reluctantly tore himself away from Lee in Bucharest and boarded a train bound for London via Paris. In Munich he found a portent of things to come. The station was decked out with thousands of Nazi flags in honour of Chamberlain’s appeasement visit to Hitler. Perhaps that increased his determination to make a record of his experience. He later wrote: On my return to London I was seized by a desire to celebrate this brief and stimulating Balkan adventure in some enduring form and since I never keep a diary of daily events I put together my memories of the scenery and the people that Lee and I had enjoyed and the events we had lived through together, making of it a scrap book or a visual diary dedicated to her. (Penrose 1980)

The book’s importance to Roland was far more than an act of self-indulgence. It was his courtship ritual. He wanted Lee to leave Aziz, move to London and marry him, and in his poem he pleads his case by invoking their intimacy. He set to work rendering the adventure into a poem and using images cut from his contact sheet as place holders. On the map the journey takes a linear sequential form, but in the poem the narrative becomes a stream of consciousness and the sequence of events is random. Here the olive groves of Kavala immediately precede the Paparuda rain dance of southern Romania, although they were actually separated by several weeks with many other events between them. This corresponds to the way our memories tend to change the sequence of linear events, so Roland is justified in beginning the poem in Meteora, reached about two weeks into the adventure. The final manuscript is both an artist’s photobook and a Surrealist object in its own right. Using heavy art paper he has calligraphed the words and tipped

165

166

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

Figure 12.1  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. First draft of the original ms, 1938.

in enlargements of his photos. Roland had the photographs printed by Wallace Heaton, a camera shop known for their good quality work and he carefully chose the size for each print. Roland references the swollen bellies of the Roma children whose parents are forbidden to move their tents and the indifference of the smartly dressed official (see plates 17, 18 and 19). It was supposed the Roma carried tuberculosis and this



The Road is Wider Than Long

justified banning them from entering the markets. In reality it may have been a convenient excuse for gratuitous persecution. Curtailing movement is a near lethal restriction for a nomadic people. The lines about the lips precede his photograph of the amphitheatre of Epidaurus (see plates  20 and 21). A coin dropped on the stone disc set in the acoustic centre of the stage can be heard in the back row. A year before he met Lee, Roland had seen Man Ray’s famous portrait of Lee Miller’s lips titled Observatory Time4 when the painting was loaned to the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition he curated in London. It is a huge painting, 2.3 metres wide. The smile from those lips would certainly have echoed when it dropped on the stone disc. Roland had the pages professionally bound, done with great care and skill, and for the cover he chose the sort of leather used for the soles of high quality shoes. It became a beautiful object, charged with love and intimate memories. For the printed first edition, Roland found a large quantity of surplus board covers faced with wood veneer, rather appropriately intended for a book of common prayer. The artist Hans Bellmer designed the typography of the cover. We don’t know the name of Roland’s printer at the Bradley Press but clearly he had great technical ability and a touching generosity in allowing Roland an unlimited choice of his big selection of different typefaces. The use of letterpress printing allowed the font and its size to vary from one line to the next and the layout uses widely varied lines that flow around the photographs. Roland had a close understanding of Surrealism’s precursor, the Dada movement. He felt an affinity with the Dadaists’ anarchic views and the way their typographical style deliberately broke the rules of composition, format and e­ verything else. Roland’s poetry was definitely not Dadaist but Surrealist in a style with its obliqueness and mysterious associations of words and phrases. Roland’s writing differs from his friend Paul Eluard in that it has a narrative quality. Roland engaged with the world, examined it through the lens of his Surrealism and shared his findings with us. Take this sequence about the funeral of a young Romanian peasant child: How imprudent of you to have died Oh how we miss you when your father comes home you will not be there to hold his bicycle why have you not kissed me for three days why don’t you smile oh darling how we miss you.

Wrenchingly the poem goes on, lamenting the loss: Oh my darling how we miss you – how unkind of you to die.

That line ‘how unkind of you to die’ poignantly transmits how the sense of being a victim is part of bereavement. Yet the child’s spirit is sternly warned not to try

167

168

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

and return. For me, the death of the child can also be seen as a metaphor for the death of these innocent people’s way of life at the hands of the Nazis. Some years ago the present owner of Roland’s studio found the actual plate for this image (see plate 22), damaged but still legible and perhaps serving as a reminder of the enduring need to protest against the destruction of innocence. At this time, Roland owned The London Gallery in Cork Street. Commencing a year earlier he and his manager Edouard Mesens had published The London Bulletin, which ran right up to June 1940. It was under The London Gallery imprint that Roland published The Road is Wider Than Long in June 1939 (see plate 23). Note the reference in the advertisement to coloured type and illustrations. Roland clearly had an eye on the unique selling points. ‘On Sale at the Zwemmer Gallery’ was also a prestigious coup, showing his close connection to the British Surrealists. Later in 1939 Zwemmer mounted his famous Surrealist show featuring mainly British artists and including work by both Roland and Lee. The book was reviewed. Mr  Laker of the West Lothian Courier liked it but found the poetry unintelligible; he felt more at home with Kipling. Stephen Spender in the New Statesman found the poems and photographs pretentious and dull. This may have wounded Roland but it did not stop him from continuing to be friends with Spender to the end of his life. From the surviving papers it seems there was the possibility of a French publication but the war ended that hope. The first edition printed at the Bradley Press was limited to 510 copies. Ten copies were on hand-made paper and Roland used them as personal gifts with special hand-drawn illuminations and dedications in the form of little details in watercolour. Simple designs, sometimes cabalistic, sit well with the printed colour and the font changes. The oracle at Delphi was a woman, Pythea, so in his drawing (see plate 24), Roland gives us woman and mountain as interchangeable elements. Copy Number 1 was for the person who inspired the work. ‘Lee, who caught me in her cup of gold’, the dedication reads. A beautiful, poetic and discrete line sensitive to the fact Lee was still married to Aziz, so Roland’s words had to be oblique enough to avoid a confrontation. Aziz knew about Roland. Lee had been honest with him, and Roland was anxious to avoid humiliating him in front of his friends and society. The drawing of the sailing boat comes from an object he made in 1936 titled Le Paradis des Alouettes (see plates 25 and 26).5 The pince nez spectacles belonged to his maiden aunt. In the drawing they are doubled, perhaps a metaphor for the forward movement of life being driven along by the way we see things. A few weeks after publication Roland headed for Egypt, ostensibly as the photographer attached to a field trip by the dance expert and ethnologist Beryl  De Zoete. The role was his cover, and it was important as he wanted to avoid embarrassing Aziz. Roland found Lee on a friend’s cotton farm in the upper Nile at Asyut. He bore with him as gifts the first copy of The Road is Wider Than Long, and a pair of gold handcuffs made by Cartier. Lee said she found both presents thoroughly captivating.



The Road is Wider Than Long

Having met Roland, Aziz who knew Lee was unhappy in their marriage was satisfied that in Roland Lee had found the right person to love her and care for her. He gave her his blessing, money, a steamship ticket to London and continued to love her until he died. After travelling in Europe with Roland, Lee arrived in London on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. Lee became a war correspondent for the US Army, accredited to Vogue magazine. After D Day her reporting on the US Army’s advance across Europe established her domination of Vogue features for the next year and a half. She became a combat photographer, a role completely forbidden to women. In the post-war years her final career was as a Surrealist gourmet cook, written up in the pages of Vogue and House and Garden magazines. Roland and Lee married in 1947, a few months before my birth, and despite their marriage being fraught with extreme difficulties it endured for thirty years until Lee’s death in 1977. The passage of time has conferred an unexpected historical value on The Road is Wider Than Long, as the war obliterated so many of the old ways Roland, Lee and Hari had documented. Early in 1946 Lee got through to Bucharest in her capacity as a war correspondent. From Hungary she had sent back a despatch documenting the extreme political tensions and hardships in the post-war months. Now in Romania she looked for the Romani and found few, as so many had been murdered in the Nazi death camps. She photographed King Mihail and his mother Queen Helen in their palace at Sinaia. She photographed the democratically elected political leaders, and she found Brauner and Constante alive but living in much reduced circumstances. The words she wrote are strangely oblique and lacking in detail. Much of the text is anodyne, using the distraction of interviews with the royal family  – material that was no doubt of interest to the readers of Vogue but a mask for what Lee really felt she needed to say. She was well aware that many of her friends, the politicians with integrity whom she admired and King Mihail himself were under threat and she wanted to be sure that her journalism would never incriminate them. They were mostly facing severe persecution for resisting the inexorable march of the post-war regime. She was right. In the totalitarian Soviet-run state that followed, the key figures were imprisoned and many were murdered. Brauner and Constante had been friends of Lucretiu Patrascanu, Minister of Justice and also professor at Bucharest University. He was tortured and executed and because of their association with him Brauner and Constante were imprisoned without trial for twelve years. Constante wrote a moving book on the eight years she spent in solitary confinement (Constante 1995). They were reunited in the last years of their lives. After the war Roland’s own work as an artist took second place to his biography of Picasso and curating his 1960 Picasso show at the Tate for the Arts Council. In 1964 he curated the Joan Miró retrospective at the Tate and wrote his biography of the artist. He followed this with his biography of Man Ray in 1976. After Lee Miller’s death in 1977, he continued to write, producing

169

170

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

Figure 12.2  London Bulletin (June 1939).

his biography of Antoni Tàpies in 1978. In 1980, to mark his eightieth birthday, the Arts Council gave Roland a major retrospective that toured several venues in England and ended at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. They published a facsimile of The Road is Wider Than Long, which was also presented



The Road is Wider Than Long

Figure 12.3  Maritza (Maria Tănase) the famous folk singer, recording with Hari Brauner, Bucharest University 1946. Photo by Lee Miller.

as a performance piece on BBC Radio. The photographic reproduction on the Arts Council edition version was not up to the standard Roland had achieved with the London Gallery, as he noted on the proof. This and other of Roland’s marginalia show us that at the age of 80 he had lost nothing of his critical faculty. The following year, in 1981, Roland published his autobiography titled Scrap Book (Penrose 1981), which featured a double page on The Road is Wider Than Long. In this way, he acknowledged the importance in his life of the book and the adventure it narrated. Roland died in 1984, having continued to make  collages and write poetry right up to the end of his life. In 2003 Roland’s  work featured  in a major Lee Miller exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and for this the Getty created an accurate facsimile of the first  1939  edition. The  Lee Miller Archives scanned the printed version and  then scanned the  photos from the original manuscript,

171

172

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

and the Getty’s printer placed them on the pages. It worked beautifully and the images regained their clarity. One liberty had to be taken, which was to recreate the collage on the page which had become a drawing in the London Gallery edition. We remade it with the image from the original manuscript (see plates 27, 28 and 29). The importance of this little photobook goes beyond the beguiling personal story it tells. Photobooks are rare in pre-war Surrealist literature. There is Man Ray’s aforementioned Facile which he followed by La photographie n’est pas l’art (Man Ray 1937). Man Ray had previously made Champs Délicieux in 1922, but like Electricité in 1931 it is a folio of Rayographs. It is not a photobook, but a collection of images with no narrative or poem. The J. Paul Getty Museum version of The Road is Wider Than Long sold out years ago and so in 2021 The Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose collection selfpublished both a new facsimile of the 1939 London Gallery edition, and a replica of the original (leather bound) manuscript. We also plan to make electronic facsimiles that can be viewed on flat screens in our gallery and go out on loan. Interest in Roland’s work is rising and we want to help this little book secure its place in the history of Surrealist literature and of photobooks.

Notes 1 Roland Penrose. The Real Woman, mixed media on paper. 1937. Coll. National Trust Willow Road. 2 Lee Miller. Letter from Cairo to Roland Penrose in London, dated 11  June 1938. Coll. Lee Miller Archives. 3 Ibid. 4 Man Ray. Observatory Time or The Lovers, oil on canvas, 1934. Private Coll. 5 Roland Penrose. Le Paradis des Alouettes, mixed media, 1936. Private Coll.

Works cited Constante, Lena (1995). The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eluard, Paul, and Man Ray (1936). Facile. Paris: GLM. Man Ray (1937). La photographie n’est pas l’art. Foreword by André Breton. Paris: GLM. Coll. The Penrose Collection. Penrose, Roland (1939). The Road is Wider Than Long, London: London Gallery Editions. Penrose, Roland (1980). The Road is Wider Than Long, London: Arts Council of Great Britain. Penrose, Roland (1980). Scrap Book. London: Thames & Hudson. Penrose, Roland (2003). The Road Is Wider Than Long. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.

An unmade book: Walker Evans’s 1970s alphabet Polaroids Caroline Blinder

The photograph: Not a Picture of, But an Object About Something. Robert Heinecken, 1965 (Respini 2014: 155)

When Walker Evans died in 1975, he had been in the process of putting together a photobook, or rather, an alternative literary typology based on a series of Polaroids of isolated letters. Taken from roadside signs, traffic markings, advertisements and other urban ephemera, the letters are both singular and discernibly a part of longer words and writing. The aim, according to Jeff L. Rosenheim, the curator of the Evans Archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was to create ‘an alphabet book based on individual letters’ (Evans 2001:  2). Despite the fact that the book never materialised, the experimental nature of this ‘alphabet book’, together with the thousands of Polaroids ranging from portraits, to houses, to debris, and signage, seemingly disparate and taken ad hoc, allows us to take a backward glance at the complex nature of Evans’s practice. The Polaroids function as commentaries on Evans’s earlier photographs but they also, in ways that are usually overseen, counter the idea of Evans’s work as predominantly a ‘critique of the unravelling of American culture’ (Evans 2001: 1). Instead, the projected book of letters works towards the opposite by articulating a potentially sequential system of meaning in which the Polaroids render a vision of America that is both legible and recognisable. In these Polaroids, Evans’s desire to get ever closer to the material substance of his photography can be seen in graphic terms: a desire that is not in contradiction to his earlier practice but an extension of a lifelong attempt to provide a cohesive perspective on the constituent parts of American culture. In other words, the Polaroids become both an exploration into the possibility of photography as a language in and of itself, and a way to reconstitute American culture rather than focus on the signs of its social disintegration. Despite its anomalous nature, then, Evans’s unmade book signals something fundamental but often overlooked about his overall oeuvre. In the Polaroids, there is an attempt to make culture legible alphabetically, as many of the same obsolete, inconsequential and discarded parts

13

174

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

of American culture that Evans had previously photographed are re-inscribed into a coherent, rather than fragmented, vision of twentieth-century life. Looking at the Polaroids in terms of a ‘renewed concentration on the minutiae of life and its graphic qualities’, the few Evans scholars who have done so tend to see them as a continuation of a post-war move towards ‘a strong visual language of abstraction and the doubling or slippage of meaning’, rather than in terms of coherency and legibility (Brett 2016: 7). Other critics read them simply as the last efforts of a lazier and older photographer intent on returning to the material of his heyday. However, while the Polaroids exemplify Evans’s continued obsession with the graphic qualities of photography, the issue of a ‘doubling or slippage of meaning’ requires some thought. The focus on the constituent parts of language in the letter Polaroids show an awareness of the slippery nature of meaning, but they also continue Evans’s lifelong attraction to the indexical potential of vernacular culture. Thus, while the letters themselves do not necessarily indicate what words they stand for, they nonetheless point towards an iconography that is indexical as well as textual even if it veers towards abstraction. On both levels, the Polaroids indicate a more intimate approach to the materials of American culture, including the material nature of the Polaroid as a photographic object in its own right (see plate 30). Despite only using the Polaroid SX-70 roughly between 1973 and 1975, Evans managed to amass thousands of Polaroids prior to his death in October 1975. According to Rosenheim, there were over 2,600 instant photos in colour and some in black and white. While a portion were dedicated to portraits of friends, students and models, the vast amount of Polaroids are variations on Evans’s earlier subjects, abandoned wood structures in the South, objects found discarded on the streets and so forth. Close-ups of discarded signage, road signs, singular letters, advertisements partially torn and illegible reference Evans’s earlier material from the Depression Era, such as the images on the walls of the sharecroppers’ houses in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1942) – his famous collaboration with the writer James Agee – the salvaged belongings of flood refugees in 1937, as well as his magazine work on tools and utensils from the 1940s and 1950s (Campany 2014). Because of this, it is tempting to see the letter Polaroids as simply close-up versions of the material fragments of modernity that Evans had already photographed throughout his career. However, some key differences, among them the introduction of colour, provide us with a sense of Evans re-seeing the material of past work rather than simply getting closer to it. In fact, while in many of the Polaroids Evans has clearly returned to his previous subjects, now, dilapidated structures and facades, abandoned shacks and handmade signs are bathed in the yellow golds of a setting sun, and roadside shacks and untended weed gardens are made up of saturated greens and blues rather than the muted black and white of the Depression era (see plate 31). The colours of these Polaroids thus not only reflect the unique tonal qualities of the instant film stock, they also add a sense of transparency to Evans’s earlier black and white images. While the intersections between photographic and



An unmade book

ethnographic practice are still in evidence in ways that are not dissimilar to earlier work, the luminosity of the Polaroid colour adds a sense of weightlessness to the scenes, a sense heightened by the lack of people within the frame as well. Rather than focus on the locations shot as staging areas for particular lives – as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – the structures, much as the letters, seem to be extracted and displayed for another purpose. This sense of luminosity, chiefly aided by the use of the Polaroid’s colours in the landscapes and architectural studies, is there in some of the letter Polaroids as well. Together with Evans’s continued focus on vernacular forms of signage, the presence of mass media and advertising is counterbalanced by a focus on a more homespun version of American iconography. This is material that takes its cue from Evans’s fascination with the persistent presence of the vernacular even within an urban environment rather than pop culture’s fascination with the signs of commodification. In fact, it is between the crevices of a slightly awkwardly worded public message and what may or may not be its more official public counterpart, that Evans most visibly references as well as departs from his earlier work. Thus, while the Polaroids continue Evan’s interrogation into how photography operates as a cipher for the quotidian, they also form a critique of p ­ hotography’s tendency to universalise and classify the everyday, an interrogation made all the more poignant by the status of the instant camera as an apparatus marketed for the everyman. Evans’s interest in the discrete relationships between artefacts and signage is similar to his pre-war photographs, but also tempered by a more oblique sense of timelessness. This sense of timelessness is also accentuated by the anonymous nature of the letters in the Polaroids. They are recognisably vernacular but also synonymous with the city as a canvas for another form of language, one that is both timeless and pervasive. These are Polaroids that resemble graffiti at times, and at others  extracts of large-scale exercises in fonts for public services and roads. Above all, they give a sense of Evans as first and foremost an astute observer of the city as a jumble of signs, a liminal place where writing does not need to have a meaning in order to be both lyrical and indicative of something wider within American culture. However, in the letter Polaroids, previous images of the commodification of the American landscape – the advertisements and movie posters that prevail in Evans’s earlier work – become more experimental and more minimalist as they shrink in size and format. Despite this, the ongoing iconographical nature of the material in the Polaroids tends to detract from the fact that Evans is engaged in a more conceptual and artistic effort. This is partly due to the ongoing fascination with Evans’s more realistic images from the pre-war era – images in which the sociological and ethnographic contexts are more obvious and as such easier to insert into a historicised reading. It is also a way to compartmentalise his early work and to retain its status both commercially and artistically. By avoiding a more synthetic vision of his work across decades, the pre-war photographs continue to form a much desired ur-text, not only for Evans’s career, but for documentary photography in general.

175

176

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

What is needed, then, is a more synthetic vision of Evans’s overall oeuvre, one capable of incorporating the Polaroids as an extension of his earlier work and proof that the impulse towards abstraction was always there. Nonetheless, Evans’s ability to look directly at poverty and distress with clarity, forgoing the sentimentality and/or pathos that his contemporaries might have been drawn to in the pre-war era (Dorothea Lange, for instance), has assured him the stature of an iconoclast, and to some extent an unemotional photographer. It is Evans’s ability to maintain the sanctity of the landscape before him in the famous photographs of sharecroppers during the Depression that first and foremost has generated his reputation as a shrewd political commentator as well as professional documentarian. However, in order to really understand the potential of the Polaroids, it is necessary in some measure to set aside the politics of Evans’s pre-war photography and instead think of the Polaroids as an extension of a more ontological and hence philosophically minded investigation into the medium itself. With this in mind, the letter Polaroids – rather than a last attempt to get as close as possible to the constituent parts of the selfsame subjects and objects that he charted forty years before  – constitute an investigation into photographs, not only as social signifiers above all, but as a form of language unto itself. In the case of the letter Polaroids, the issue is not simply one of artistic experimentation, it is about the photograph itself as another version of the fragmented letters. In other words, the idea of the fragment is fundamental to the Polaroid itself as a distinct form of photographic endeavour, just as the idea of the letter is fundamental to the act of writing.1 In analogous terms, the Polaroid shares constituent aspects with that of photography as an object in its own right and a cipher for the things represented within it. Sequence, alphabetically speaking, is paramount but also in itself a nondescript thing in so far as the letters have a stand-alone meaning only in the context of what they potentially reference in the form of future words and sentences. This is obvious, but in terms of the Polaroid it also foregrounds the fact that a Polaroid, as an object, is constituently different from other forms of photography. Because there is no original negative, as such, it cannot be duplicated ad infinitum and it thus reserves a temporal quality that is different from other forms of re-printable images. If Evans’s first monograph American Photographs (1938) relied heavily on sequencing in order to introduce a particular narrative, a projected alphabet book would presumably likewise provide a sequence capable of uniting the disparate nature of the individual images. The letters may visibly be from different places and taken out of different contexts, but once inscribed into an alphabetical sequence they nonetheless become part of one overall design (see plate 32). In this regard, Evans’s use of the Polaroids is another form of reconstitutive process, but one that also relies on a linguistic system that moves beyond the fissures and cracks within American culture. In fact, one might argue that it is the idea of legibility that enables an understanding of the Polaroids – not as isolated units  – but as a potential alphabet.2 Rather than seeing the photographs as a random collection of letters Evans offers us a specifically ‘Evans-ish’ version of an



An unmade book

American alphabet. The fact that the letters are taken from the same type of signs and streets that he frequented thirty years before is crucial in this respect. The urge to provide an intrinsically authorial perspective on the American landscape across decades does not preclude a simultaneous desire to provide an index of sorts, a lexicon of the day to day, but so it is, one could argue, to most American documentary photographers of the early twentieth century. More unique to Evans is the way in which he indiscriminately mixes the signs of urban dilapidation and rural decay. In a projected letter book, mass produced street signs and vernacular signage could conceivably follow one another alphabetically as long as the letters themselves remained sequentially correct. This sense of hybridity – as other critics have noted – is a mainstay of Evans’s much noted European and modernist sensibility as well. After his extended stay in Paris in the 1920s, Evans agreed to translate parts of the poet/writer Blaise Cendrars’s novel Moravigne (1926), a novel that among other things seeks to narrativise an essentially modernist and urban version of the twentieth century. Evans’s translation of Cendrars’s ‘principle of utility’, from Cendrars’s chapter ‘Our Rambles in America’, contains crucial glimmers of Evans’s alphabet book: the language – of words and things, of disks and runes, […] numbers and trademarks, industrial patents, postage stamps, passenger tickets, bills of lading, signal codes, wireless radio  – the language is refashioned and takes on body, […] the multicolored posters and the giant letters that prop up the hybrid architectures of the cities and straddle the streets, the new electrical constellations that climb each night into the sky, the alphabet-book of smoking chimneys in the morning wind. (Hill and Liesbrook 2015: 84)

Written during the 1930s, Cendrars’s promissory note of modernity as a storehouse of images and letters has a certain Dos Passos quality, the exuberance of Henry Miller’s nocturnal wanderings and a desire to refashion the jumble of urbanity into a new language written from scratch but also as ephemeral as a ‘smoking chimney in the morning wind’. It is electricity, partly, that enables the embodiment of this new language and it is a renewed focus on images of change and travel that seem less about the social context of their production and more about their potential as signifiers in their own right. In Evans’s Polaroids, rather than elevate the fragmented or extracted letters to something visibly aestheticised as still life objects, a charge that one might have levied at Evans’s sharecropper interiors, the letters are reminiscent – as mentioned earlier – of an urban form of abstract art and graffiti. In conceptual terms, their status as fragments thus becomes a commentary on photography beyond that of the social and historical circumstances of the photographs. In line with Cendrars’s promise that ‘language be refashioned in order to take on body’, Evans’s letters – rather than words simply torn asunder – take on their ‘own body’ by being refashioned as singular objects. Like language, photography, as Evans and Cendrars were well aware, cannot escape from being a sequential art form the minute it becomes institutionalised – in

177

178

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

museums, in books, in various photo-textual endeavours. Thus, the focus on singular letters will always inevitably be ‘read’ syntactically, even when shown in fragments as a sort of alternate alphabet. The traditional sequence may be disturbed in this ‘alphabet’, but it will always in some shape or form be recognisable. While there is no risk of reading these singular letters as coming from the same source, they cannot help but function simultaneously in isolation and in tandem once exhibited together and certainly if published together in book form. The ephemeral nature of Cendrars’s ‘smoking chimneys in the morning wind’ are in this context a fantastical antidote to the literally concrete nature of Evans’s Polaroids for whom the material object world – no matter how seemingly ­fragmented – is its chief subject. Nonetheless, the sense of endless permutations in the Polaroids, or what John Tagg calls Evans’s predispositions towards ‘reordering, insertions, recategorization, and regrouping’ (Tagg 2003: 155), also denotes an antipathy towards rigid narratives and a sense of unnecessary foreclosure, one that may appear counterindicative to the alphabetical nature of the project itself. For Tagg, the sequencing of American Photographs (1938) already showed the signs of this desire to retain a mutable structure. According to Tagg, despite the ‘rigid binding of the book’, American Photographs retains ‘a sequence that might be undone by a provisionality that allows the reader to imagine the book unmade and remade again’ (Tagg 2003: 155). American Photographs, then, could be seen as a precursor to the Polaroids – emotionally and conceptually – even if the actual look of the photographs are very different. The images in American Photographs also resist any single meaning by not providing an accompanying narrative or sociological explanation despite the careful sequencing. As Tagg argues, the camera instead becomes ‘both crypt and encrypting machine […] a portal to a world that has no message, that is addressed to no one, and that is seen not as “present”’ (Tagg 2003: 171). In 1938 David Wolff in a New Masses review on American Photographs noted how Evans’s work reveals ‘a certain hideous miscellaneousness of American life’ (Wolff 1938: 31) as though the variegated nature of Evans’s subject matter indicated the scattered uneven aspects of American culture more widely. At the same time, paradoxically, Wolff seems to indicate a vision of something potentially much larger and more cohesive, namely American life more generally. In the case of the Polaroids, moving closer and closer to the constituent parts of signage Evans removes their purpose in terms of their original intent, advertising, road instructions and so forth and yet, as individualised ciphers and graphic artefacts they still reference the iconographic nature of their original form. The thing that remains discernible within this particular vision of modernity is, as Cendrars put it, that a language of ‘words and things’ has been put into play. Reading the Polaroids as a landscape particularly suited for the staging of language and writing as a form of artefact does not mean, however, that they are divested entirely from their social, economic and political context. To return to the Polaroid as object, its charge relies largely on its identity as a medium that



An unmade book

itself functions as a series of miscellaneous objects rather than a set of duplicates. As mentioned previously, the Polaroid cannot duplicate ad infinitum, it cannot completely be erased, nor is it meant to be altered once the image has been taken. That is why Evans univocally stated that only photographers with experience and vision should ever take photographs with an instant camera. In this sense, the apparatus proves the instinctive nature of the Polaroid and its role as a container and purveyor of meaning proves, as Tagg put it, that the camera is ‘both crypt and encrypting machine’.3 At the same time, the Polaroids very noticeably counter the type of CartierBresson aesthetic in which a decisive moment of activity is captured through the photographer’s ability to be in the right spot at the exact right time. For the Polaroid, its capabilities and aesthetic can only be based on being in the decisive place rather than the decisive moment, for lack of a better phrase. Evans recognises this paradox within the Polaroid, the way in which the format lends itself to a certain proximity to the subject matter, a certain kind of intimacy. This is an intimacy that comes from more than simply the act of getting physically closer to the objects that you photograph, it is born out of the object itself – you can put the Polaroid in your pocket – it can be easily transferred, and so on. The format and chemical properties of the Polaroid mechanism eliminates one kind of labour (the laboratory and development) in favour of a necessarily more careful and singular consideration of what is seen in the viewfinder. The sense of singularity also means that, for all of its disposable qualities, the Polaroid shares a nineteenth-century reliance on a photographic process in which the chemical properties determine the outcome of the image to a large extent. These considerations, of the material object that the Polaroid first and foremost is, is often downplayed in writing on Evans  – if dealt with at all. As mentioned previously, this is partly because of the attractiveness of his photographic persona as form of documentary truth teller: a photographer whose intentions are consolidated through his expert use of the camera rather than determined by the limitations or advantages of the apparatus itself. In Depth of Field, for instance, Heinz Liesbrook reads Evans in these terms as a consolidator of existing materials rather than a creator of something new. Liesbrook describes Evans’s ethos as ‘a process of clarification within existing circumstances, not the discovery of something fundamentally new, as would be the case in the act of composing. The auteur’s artistic will to form is restricted by the very weight of the visible world’ (Hill and Liesbrook 2015: 23). While the Polaroids do carry the ‘weight of the visible world’, they are nonetheless less reliant on regional markers for their sense of identity – the vernacular signs and road signs captured by Evans could, after all, be from anywhere and nearly any time. Writing on precisely this, the mass proliferation of images and the encroachment of the material world onto the photographic one, the photographer and cinematographer Hollis Frampton also wrote on the uneasy interaction between abstraction, realism and photography in the 1970s. Frampton, whose abstract film Zorns Lemma was based not coincidentally on the alphabet, wrote on how the application of

179

180

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

alphabetical signs together with various images might question the idea of photographic veracity.4 For Frampton, the important thing was that photography in itself could never be a ‘true’ version of life. Logically speaking, the meaning of isolated images would always be determined by whatever pre-existing contexts we impose on them. As Frampton put it: We assume, then, that there are certainties in our knowledge of, and through, photographs. An extended generation of photographers dominated the propagation of the photographic code […] by enforcing their belief that the legibility of photographs is directly dependent upon a credibility guaranteed by ontological association with a pretext. But a photograph is, above all, a sign of the radical absence of its pretext. To validate the prior existence of another object from a photograph is to commit a novel sin. (Frampton 2009: 102)

If, as Frampton puts it, ‘a photograph is really dependent on the credibility guaranteed by ontological association with a pretext’, then Evans’s images of fragmented signs are a perfect instance of this. For Frampton, as with Evans, photographic veracity is not a defunct idea. However, it must be deployed as a way to interrogate our obsession with the correspondence between image and sign and therefore between image and the meaning we impose on it. In similar terms, Evans’s Polaroids also act as interrogations into the correspondence or lack of one between image and sign; they are immediately recognisable as something familiar and yet, at the same time, signal the radical absence of whatever ‘pretext’ they were a part of originally. Two paradoxes are at play here: first, by getting closer and closer to his subject matter in the Polaroids, Evans manages to make them both singular and yet clearly a part of a wider whole and second, by showing letters that are evidently part of longer words the sign of a ‘radical absence’, according to Frampton, becomes visible. The wider metaphor of photography as a linguistic system allows us to return to one of Evans’s earliest statements on photography, namely that photography is in reality ‘the most literary of the graphic arts’ (Campany 2014: Aperture Magazine, #217). Writing on Evans tends to fix on the literary aspect of this ­statement  – often referencing his interest in the literary realism of the French writer Gustave Flaubert – but the word ‘graphic’ is in this context as important. Not only does the graphic nature of the letters themselves take centre stage, they often determine the framing and outline of the Polaroid itself. The Polaroids may be breaking language down by taking various parts out of context, but they are doing so through a continuous process of assembly as well. For Evans, then, it is the Polaroid’s integral nature (the word utilised by the inventor of the Polaroid, Herbert Land, to describe the one step process), that is the real attraction. The white borders of the print signal the integral nature of a self-contained printing process in which the job of development, cropping and cutting has been done for the photographer. The word ‘integral’, however, also denotes that the process is equally about the addition of a necessary component, about rendering something complete and legible.



An unmade book

For Evans there was a clear affinity between his obsession with the Polaroid format and his not inconsiderable collection of picture postcards – another art form that can be easily transported and that straddles a thin line between the commercial and the private. While the analogy may seem somewhat forced, it is the obsessive nature of Evans’s categorisation of his postcards that signals a similar movement towards indexicality and order. Evans categorised them according to what iconographic subjects and materials they represented, for instance ‘town squares’, ‘seaside’ and so on, rather than in regional or geographical terms. Despite the fact that most of his picture postcards are from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are more readily seen as precursors for his 1930s images of main streets and shops, the washed-out colours of the picture postcards, with their muted reds and blues and green tints are in many ways reminiscent of his 1970s Polaroids. In similar terms, the intention of the picture postcard – just as with the original Polaroids – is to be easily communicable and easily transferable. In this sense, the picture postcard has an aspect of it that is fundamental to its charge as an artefact that is similar to that of the Polaroid; it can be passed around easily, its portable and transferable nature makes it a picture postcard and not simply a picture. In Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard, published by The Walker Evans archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curator Jeff Rosenheim notes the relationship between Evans’s photographs from the 1930s and 1940s and the quotidian subjects of the picture postcards. While this makes sense in terms of subject matter and aesthetics, the actual graphic design of the formatting of the postcard and the Polaroids should still be noted. Between 1935 and 1936, Evans worked on a postcard project for the Museum of Modern Art in which he sought to reprint his own large format 8 × 10 inch negatives on postcard-format photographic paper. The project, like the book of letters, never materialised, but it provides some evidence of his attempt to straddle several mediums through a process of both alignment and transferral. By taking the art prints off the walls of the museum, Evans’s images also become more accessible, they become more tactile and presumably less costly – much like a Polaroid.5 In this way, the Polaroids  – like the aborted postcard project  – attest to a desire for a more direct form of engagement with the material nature of the print. Interestingly, the gravitas and confidence of the 1930s museum images still rely to a large extent on the perceived distance between Evans as the professional photographer and the subjects photographed, a distance that is often cited as having enabled him to photograph the destitute and the abject with a sense of dignity and respect. Not so with the Polaroids. Here, Evans positions himself on top of the very material, at a hand’s length from the objects on the street, almost as though he wants to step into the material that he decades before would have observed from a more decorous distance. This desire to get ever closer to the material substance of his photography is an underestimated part of Evans’s legacy but it is not contradictory to his earlier practice, simply an extension of his desire to provide a cohesive perspective on

181

182

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral

the constituent parts of American culture. Evans’s interest in the object nature of his work is related to the Polaroids alone but is a concern throughout his career. The subject matter of Evans’s letter Polaroids clearly relates to the earlier black and white photographs of objects and places in the 1930s, but the letter Polaroids are also emblematic of something beyond the more obvious social and ethnographic ramifications of his practice. Returning to the projected alphabet book allows us to see Evans’s lifelong interest in the vernacular as something beyond documentary practice, a term which he himself famously had misgivings about. For Evans, the issue was not necessarily one of coherency or about systematising the material culture he took as his subject. Instead, it was about the process through which an artist amasses the materials of his or her art. Legible and yet open-ended, the letter Polaroids are the perfect medium for such an exploration providing something different from the so-called ‘hidden miscelleaneousness of American life’. Instead, they must be read as a series of unique variations on what Evans had done from the beginning; namely provide a coherent if idiosyncratic vision of the everyday.

Notes 1 For more on this in relation to Schlegel’s theories of the Fragment, see Blinder (2016: 51–62). 2 In many ways this is the same impulse that made a younger Evans insist that a particular sequence of his photographs be maintained in his 1938 exhibition and to change the sequence of the photographs in the 1960 reprint of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 3 On the virtues of the SX-70, Evans remarked: ‘A practiced photographer has an entirely new extension in that camera. You photograph things that you wouldn’t think of photographing before. I don’t even yet know why, but I find that I’m quite rejuvenated by it. […] True, with that little camera your work is done the instant you push that button’ (as quoted in Tagg 2003: 14). 4 Zorns Lemma is a 1970 American structural experimental film by Hollis Frampton. Originally starting as a series of photographs, the non-narrative film is structured around a 24-letter Latin alphabet. 5 ‘You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m no longer comfortable in a museum. I don’t want to go to them, don’t want to be “taught” anything, don’t want to see “accomplished” art. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular. For example, finished, I mean educated, architecture doesn’t interest me, but I love to find American vernacular’ (as cited in Katz 1971: 88).

Works cited Blinder, Caroline (2016). ‘Fragments of the Future: Walker Evans’ Polaroids’. In Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practice, Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland (eds). Manchester: Manchester University Press: 51–67.



An unmade book

Brett, Donna West (2016). ‘Damaged: Ruin and Decay in Walker Evans’ Photographs’. In Walker Evans Symposium. Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography, University of Sydney, 7 October: 1–7. Campany, David (2014). Walker Evans: The Magazine Work. Göttingen: Steidl. Campany, David (2014). ‘Walker Evans & the Written Word’. Aperture Magazine  217 (Winter); and https://aperture.org/blog/walker-evans-written-word/. Evans, Walker (1938). American Photographs. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Evans, Walker, and James Agee (1941). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Evans, Walker (2001). Polaroids. Introduced by Jeff L. Rosenheim. New York: Scalo Press. Frampton, Hollis (1970). Zorns Lemma. American structural experimental film. Frampton, Hollis (2009). ‘Pictures, Krims’s Pictures, PLEASE!’ (1982) In On Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Bruce Jenkins (ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 100–103. Hill, John, and Heinz Liesbrook (eds) (1980). Walker Evans: Depth of Field. New York: Prestel, 2015. Jenkins, William (1980). ‘Introduction’. In Heinecken, James Enyeart (ed.). Carmel: Friends of Photography: 4–10. Katz, Leslie (1971). ‘Interview with Walker Evans’. Art in America 59 (March–April): 88. Tagg, John (2003). ‘Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans’s Resistance to Meaning’. Narrative 11.1 (January): 3–77. Wolff, David (1938). ‘Walker Evans, American Photographs’. New Masses (4 October): 31.

183

Select bibliography

Books about photobooks Armstrong, Carol (1998). Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, MA: October/MIT. Auer, M. and M. (2007). Photo Books: 802 Books from the M+M Auer Collection. Hermance (Switzerland): Editions M+M. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2004). The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2006). The Photobook: A History, Vol. 2. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, and Martin Parr (2014). The Photobook: A History, Vol. 3. London: Phaidon. Badger, Gerry, David Bate, H.  Hedberg, Bettina Lockemann and Michael Mack (eds) (2013). Imprint. Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond. Stockholm (Sweden): Art and Theory Publishing; Gothenburg (Sweden): Academin Valand/Göteborgs universitet/ Hasselblad Foundation. [Text in English and Swedish. Includes bibliography.] Berghmans, Tamara (ed.) (2019). Photobook belge 1854–Now. Veurne (Belgium): Hannibal Publishing; Antwerp (Belgium): FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp. Bertolotti, Alessandro (2007). Books of Nudes. New York: Abrams. Blinder, Caroline (2019). The American Photo-Text, 1930–1960. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boom, Mattie, and Rik Suermondt (1989). Photography between Covers: the Dutch Documentary Photobook after 1945. Amsterdam: Fragment Uitgeverij. Bouqueret, Christian (2012). Paris. Les livres de photographies des années 1920 aux années 1950. Paris: Gründ. Brouws, Jeff, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner (eds) (2013). Various Small Books Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bryant, Marsha (ed.) (1996). Photo-Textualities. Reading Photography and Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. Capshaw, Katharine (2014). Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Caraion, Marta and Jean-Pierre Montier (eds) (2016). Photolittérature. Montricher (Switzerland): Fondation Jan Michalski. Carson, Matthew, Michael Lang, Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich (eds) (2014). 10 × 10 Japanese Photobooks. New  York: 10 × 10 Photobooks/International Center for Photography. [Limited to 400 copies.]



Select bibliography

Carson, Matthew, Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich (eds) (2013). 10 × 10 American Photobooks. New York: 10 × 10 Photobooks / International Center for Photography. [Text in English and Japanese. Limited to 500 copies.] Caslin, John, and D. Clarke Evans (eds) (2001). Building a Photographic Library. A Library of Photography, Personally Selected by Photographers, Artists, Curators and Educators. San Antonio (Texas): Texas Photographic Society. Colberg, Jörg (2017). Understanding Photobooks: The Form and Content of the Photographic Book. New York: Routledge. Daiter, Stephen (2006). From Fair to Fine: 20th Century Photography Books that Matter. Chicago: Stephen Daiter Gallery. Debat, Michelle (ed.) (2003). La photographie et le livre. Analyse de leurs rapports multiformes. Nature de la photographie, statut du livre. Paris: Trans Photographic Press. Desachy, Éric, and Guy Mandery (2012). La Guilde du livre: les albums photographiques, Lausanne 1941–1977. Melun: Les Yeux Ouverts. Di Bello, Patrizia, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir (eds) (2012). The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond. New York: I.B. Tauris. Dickel, Hans (2008). Künstlerbücher mit Photographie seit 1960. Hamburg: MaximilianGesellschaft. Dogramaci, Burcu, Désiré Düdder, Stefanie Dufhues, Maria Schindelegger and Anna Volz (eds) (2016). Gedruckt und erblättert: Das Fotobuch als Medium ästhetischer Artikulation seit den 1940er Jahren [Printed and leafed through: The Photobook as a Medium of Aesthetic Articulation since the 1940s]. Cologne: Bibliothek Herzog Franz von Bayern am Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte/Schriftenreihe des Studienzentrums zur Moderne 3. Dugan, Thomas (1979). Photography between Covers: Interviews with Photo-Bookmakers. New  York: Light Impressions. [Interviews with Syl Labrot, Nathan Lyons, Ralph Gibson, Larry Clark, Keith Smith, Joan Lyons, Eikoh Hosoe, Bea Nettles, Duane Michals, George Tice, Robert Adams, Scott Hyde, A.D. Coleman, David Godine, Sid Rapoport.] Durden, Mark (1994). ‘Photography and the Book. From Fox Talbot to Christian Boltanski’. PhD thesis, The University of Kent, Canterbury. Edwards, Paul (2008). Soleil noir: Photographie et littérature des origines au surréalisme. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Edwards, Paul (2016). Perle noire. Le photobook littéraire. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Eskola, Taneli (2003). Kuvan kirjoja: Suomen painettua valokuvataidetta 1966–2003  – Finnish Photo Books 1966–2003. Helsinki: Musta Taide. Ewing, William A., and Nathalie Herschdorfer (2009). Impressions en continu: L’art du livre. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl; Lausanne (Switzerland): Elysée Lausanne. Fernández, Horacio (1999). Fotografia Pública: Photography in Print 1919–1939. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. [Text in English and Spanish.] Fernández, Horacio (2011). The Latin American Photobook. New  York: Aperture; and Mexico City (Mexico): Fundacion Televisa. [Also published as El fotolibro latinoamericano. Mexico City (Mexico): Editorial RM, 2011.] Fernández, Horacio (2014). Photobooks Spain 1905–1977. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía/RM/Acción Cultural Española. Fernández, Horacio (2017). New York in Photobooks. Barcelona: Editorial RM/Centro José Guerrero.

185

186

Select bibliography Fitzpatrick, Orla (2016). ‘Modernity and Irish Photographic Publications, 1922 to 1949’. PhD thesis, Ulster University. Foster, Sheila J., Manfred Heiting and Rachel Stuhlman (eds) (2007). Imagining Paradise. The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at George Eastman House. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl; Rochester, NY: George Eastman House. Gernsheim, Helmut (1984). Incunabula of British Photographic Literature. London: Scolar Press. Goldschmidt, Lucien, and Weston J. Naef (1980). The Truthful Lens: A Survey of the Photographically Illustrated Book, 1844–1914. New York: The Grolier Club. Groth, Helen (2003). Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heiting, Manfred, and Roland Jaeger (eds) (2012). Autopsie: Deutschsprachige Fotobücher, 1918 bis 1945, Band 1. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl. Heiting, Manfred, and Roland Jaeger (eds) (2014). Autopsie: Deutschsprachige Fotobücher, 1918 bis 1945, Band 2. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl. Heiting, Manfred, and Kaneko Ryuichi (2016). The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1980. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl. Heiting, Manfred, Vojtech Lahoda, Amanda Maddox, Peter Roubal, James Steerman and Thomas Wiegand (eds) (2018). Czech and Slovak Photo Publications 1918–1989. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl. Himes, Darius, and Larissa Leclair (2012). A Survey of Documentary Styles in Early 21st Century Photobooks. Exhibition Catalogue. Selections from the Indie Photobook Library. Washington, DC: Blurb/Indie Photobook Library. www.blurb.fr/books/4589116-asurvey-of-documentary-styles-in-early-21st-centu. Hunter, Jefferson (1987). Image and Word. The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Tiffany K. (2016). ‘Current Dynamics of the Photobooks [sic] Market, Future Publishing Viability, and Potential for Audience Expansion’. MA dissertation, Oxford Brookes University. Joseph, Steven F. (2015). Belgian Photographic Literature of the 19th Century: A Bibliography and Census – L’édition photographique belge au 19e siècle: bibliographie et recensement. Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press. Kaneko, Ryuichi, and Ivan Vartanian (2009). Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s, New York: Aperture. Karasik, Mikhail, A. Morosov and A. Snopkov (2007). Парадная книга Страны Советов – Great Stalinist Photographic Books, Moscow: Kontakt-kultura. [Text in Russian with brief summaries in English.] Karasik, Mikhail, and Manfred Heiting (2015). The Soviet Photobook 1920–1941. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl. Kern, Magrit (2008). España a través de la cámera. Leipzig (Germany): Plöttner. [The source for this entry is: photobibliomania at the ICP.] Kessels, Erik, and Paul Kooiker (2012). Terribly Awesome Photo Books. Ghent (Belgium): Art Paper Editions. Kessels, Erik, and Paul Kooiker (2014). Incredibly Small Photo Books. Ghent (Belgium): Art Paper Editions. Kessels, Erik, and Paul Kooiker (2019). Highly Uncomfortable Photo Books. Ghent (Belgium): Art Paper Editions.



Select bibliography

Koetzle, Hans-Michael (ed.) (2011). Eyes on Paris: Paris im Fotobuch, 1890 bis heute. Munich and Hamburg (Germany): Hirmer Verlag/Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg. [Text in German.] Koetzle, Hans-Michael (2011). Photographers A-Z. Cologne (Germany): Taschen. [An alphabetical list of famous photographers, each represented by one or two of their monographs. 400 entries in total.] Lambrechts, Eric, and Luc Salu (1992). Photography and Literature. An International Bibliography of Monographs, Vol. 1. London: Mansell/Cassell. Lambrechts, Eric, and Luc Salu (2000). Photography and Literature. An International Bibliography of Monographs, Vol. 2. London: Continuum. Laurent, David (2012). BOPB: Best of Photobooks  – Le meilleur des livres photos. Paris: David Laurent. [List with summary descriptions.] Lederman, Russet, Olga Yatskevich and Michael Lang (eds) (2018). How We See: Photobooks by Women. New York: 10 × 10 Photobooks. Martins, Susana S., and Anne Reverseau (eds) (2016). Paper Cities. Urban Portraits in Photographic Books. Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press. Meizel, Laureline (2017). ‘Inventer le livre illustré par la photographie en France 1876–1897’. PhD thesis, Université Paris I. Montag Stiftung Kunst und Gesellschaft Collective (2019). The Photobook in Art and Society: Participative Potentials of a Medium. The Photobook Museum/Jovis. Morioka, Yoshiyuki (2012). Nihon no taigai senden gurafu-shi  – Books on Japan 1931–1972. Tokyo: Bi Enu Enu Shinsha. Neumüller, Moritz, and Ángel Luis González. (2011) Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade. Dublin: PhotoIreland. [The list of 30 books is reproduced here: http://2011. photoireland.org/news/martin-parrs-best-books-of-the-decade/.] Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2017a). Photobook Phenomenon. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona/Fundació Foto Colectania/RM Editores, n.p. [8 fascicules: Moritz Neumüller and Lesley A. Martin, ‘Photobook Phenomenon’; Markus Schaden and Frederic Lezmi, ‘Reading New York. A Photobookstudy on William Klein’s Life Is Good & Good for You in New York’; ‘The Collector’s Vision. Martin Parr’s Best Photobooks’; Horacio Fernández, ‘The Library Is the Museum’; Ryuichi Kaneko, ‘Five Aspects of Japanese Photobooks’; Gerry Badger, ‘Propaganda vs. Protest Books’; Erik Kessels, ‘Fascinations and Failures’; Irene de Mendoza and Moritz Neumüller, ‘Contemporary Practices’.] Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2017b). Market? What Market? Edited by Moritz Neumüller. Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus; Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market, available at: https://unseenamsterdam.com/looking-back-market-what-market, and bit.ly/2DAGZOR. Neumüller, Moritz (ed.) (2019). What? Market? Market! Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus; Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market. https://unseenamsterdam.com/ looking-back-market-what-market, and bit.ly/33zBE57. Neves, José Luis Alfonso (2017). ‘The Many Faces of the Photobook: Establishing the Origins of Photobookwork Practice’. PhD thesis, Ulster University, October. [Available on ethos.] Newhall, Beaumont (1983). Photography and the Book. Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston. Nott, Michael (2018). Photopoetry 1845–2015: A Critical History. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

187

188

Select bibliography Núñez, José Arturo Rodríguez (2008). Hojeando … Cuatro décadas de libros y revistas de artista en España – Leafing … Four Decades of Artists’ Books and Magazines in Spain. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior (SEACEX). [In English and Spanish.] Parr, Martin, and Wassinklundgren [Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren] (2016). The Chinese Photobook: from the 1900s to the Present. New York, Aperture. Pfrunder, Peter, Martin Gasser and Sabine Münzenmaier (2012). Schweizer Fotobücher 1927 bis heute: Ein andere Geschichte der Fotografie – Livres de photographie suisses de 1927 à nos jours. Une autre histoire de la photographie – Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present: A Different History of Photography. Baden (Switzerland): Lars Müller Publishers; and Winterthur (Switzerland): Fotostiftung Schweiz. [In German, with French and English translations in small print at the back of the book.] [Provoke] Roth, Andrew (1999). Provoke Catalogue. New York: Roth Horowitz. Ritchin, Fred, and Carole Naggar (2016). Magnum Photobook. London: Phaidon. Roth, Andrew (ed.) (2001). The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC. Roth, Andrew (ed.) (2004). The Open Book: A history of the photographic book from 1878 to the present. Gothenburg (Sweden): Hasselblad Center. Schaden, Markus, Christoph Schaden, Ulla Fischer-Westhauser and Uwe Schögl (eds) (2021). ‘I am Shocked’: The Reception of Photobooks. Special issue of PhotoResearcher 35 (October). [In English. Magazine of the European Society for the History of Photography, Vienna.] Schäfke, Werner, and Roman Heuberger (2010). Köln und seine Fotobücher: Fotografie in Köln, aus Köln, für Köln  – im Fotobuch von 1853 bis 2010. Cologne (Germany): Hermann-Joseph Emons Verlag. Scholz-Hänsel, Michael (2007). Spanien im Fotobuch  – von Kurt Hielscher bis Mireia Sentis – eine imaginäre Reise von Barcelona in die Extremadura. Leipzig (Germany): Plöttner Verlag. Sichel, Kim (2020). Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sira, Victor (2010). Venezuelan Photobooks and Catalogues. New  York: Library of the International Center of Photography/Book Dummy Press. [16 pages. Exhibition catalogue. Edition limited to 1,000 copies.] Stafford, Andy (2010). Photo-texts. Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Stettler, Pepper (2015). Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Stott, William (1973). Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suermondt, Rik, and Mattie Boom (1989). Photography between Covers. The Dutch Documentary Photobook after 1945. Amsterdam: Fragment Uitgeverij. Suermondt, Rik, and Frits Gierstberg (2012). The Dutch Photobook: A Thematic Selection from 1945 onwards. New York: Aperture. Thurmann-Jajes, A. (2002). Ars Photographica. Fotografie une Künstlerbücher. Bremen (Germany): Neues Museum Weserbuerg Bremen. Toman, Jindrich (2009). The Modern Czech Book 2 Photo/Montage in Print  – Moderni ceska kniha 2 Foto/montáž tiskem. Prague: Kant. [In English.]



Select bibliography

Villaro, Leandro (2011). The Photobook in Argentina. New York: Library of the International Center of Photography and Leandro Villaro. [16 pages. Exhibition catalogue.] Villaro, Leandro (ed.) (2014). Publicaciones sobre libros fotográficos y fotografía impresa. La Plata (Argentina): Biblioteca Pública de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. [Texts by Deirdre Donohue and Joaquim Marçal Ferreira de Andrade.] Villaro, Leandro, and Luis Weinstein (2014). The Photobook in Chile. New York: Library of the International Center of Photography. [Exhibition catalogue.] Walker, Ian (2002). City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press. White, Mus (1999). From the Mundane to the Magical: Photographically Illustrated Children’s Books, 1854–1945 and Beyond. Los Angeles: Dawson’s Bookshop. Wiegand, Thomas, and Manfred Heiting (2011). Deutschland im Fotobuch: 287 Fotobücher zum Thema Deutschland aus der Zeit von 1915 bis 2009. Göttingen (Germany): Steidl. Wilkie, Theresa, Jonathan Carson, and Rosie Miller (2012). Photography and the Artist’s Book. Edinburgh: Museums Etc Ltd. Wilson, J.L. (1995). ‘Publishers and Purchasers of the Photographically Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century’. PhD thesis, University of Reading. [Available from ethos.] Wood  III, Charles B. (1976). The Photograph and the Book  III: A Selection of Rare and Out-of-Print Photographically Illustrated Books, Albums, Prints and Photogravures. Catalogue 84, South Woodstock, CT: Charles B. Wood Inc.

Selected articles about photobooks Anon (2017). ‘Tate Acquires Martin Parr’s 12,000-strong Photobook Collection’. British Journal of Photography (11 September). www.bjp-online.com/2017/09/tate-acquiresmartin-parrs-12000-strong-photobook-collection/. Cablat, Olivier (2019). ‘On the Role of Digital’. In Moritz Neumüller, What? Market? Market! Aarhus (Denmark): Photobook Week Aarhus; Amsterdam: Unseen Book Market. https://unseenamsterdam.com/looking-back-market-what-market, and bit. ly/33zBE57. Campany, David (2014). ‘The “Photobook”: What’s in a name?’ The PhotoBook Review 7 (Winter). https://davidcampany.com/the-photobook-whats-in-a-name/. Cole, Teju (2020). ‘Smell the ink and drift away: why I find solace in photobooks’. The Guardian (24  February). www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/24/teju-colephotobooks-fernweh. Guillemain, Charles (1952). ‘Une curieuse et éphémère étape de l’illustration du livre par la photographie collée ou montée dans le texte’. Bulletin de la Société Archéologique, Historique et Artistique ‘Vieux Papiers’. Auxerre: Impr. Moderne. Haaften, Julia van (1977). ‘“Original Sun Pictures”. A Check List of the New York Public Library Holdings of Early Works Illustrated with Photographs, 1844–1900’. Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80.3 (spring): 355–415. Ibels, André (2006). ‘Enquête sur le roman illustré par la photographie’. Mercure de France  97 (January 1898):  97–115. [Reprinted with notes and biographies in Paul Edwards (ed.). Je hais les photographes! Textes clés d’une polémique de l’image 1850–1916. Paris: Anabet: 93–117.]

189

190

Select bibliography McCausland, Elizabeth (1942). ‘Photographic Books’, Complete Photographer 8.43 (National Educational Alliance, New York, 20 November): 2783–2794. Nesbit, Molly (2005). ‘Photographers’ Books’. Art History 8.1 (March 1985): 132–138. Parr, Martin, and Mark Haworth-Booth. ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Photography Books’. Aperture 179 (summer): 66–73. Prins, Ralph (1969). ‘Met foto’s vertellen. Ralph Prins  – Cas Oothuys’. Wereldkroneik (27 December). Shannon, Elizabeth (2010). ‘The Rise of the Photobook in the Twenty-First Century’. St. Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 14: 55–62. Sweetman, Alex (1985). ‘Photobookworks. The Critical Realist Tradition’. Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. New  York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester: 187–205. Sweetman, Alex, and Todd Walker (1986). ‘Photographic Book to Photobookwork: 140 Years of Photography in Publication’. California Museum of Photography Bulletin 5.2: 1–32. [Criticism and exhibition catalogue.] Walker, Ian (2012). ‘A Kind of “Huh”: The Siting of Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962)’. In Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir (eds) (2012). The Photobook: from Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond. New York: I.B. Tauris: 110–128.

Web resources British Library Catalogue of Photographically Illustrated Books: www.bl.uk/catalogues/ photographyinbooks/welcome.htm. International Center for Photography (ICP), New  York: https://monstersandmadonnas. blog/2014/10/27/photobibliomania-at-the-icp-library/. Répertoire de la photolittérature: www.phlit.org [In French]. University of St Andrews Catalogue of Photographically Illustrated Books: https://col​ lections.st-andrews.ac.uk/collection/photobooks-and-photographically-illustratedbooks-collection/592623.

Index

Works can be found under authors’ names. ABP see Association of Black Photographers Agassiz, Louis 102–103 alphabet book 22, 173, 176–178, 182 Althusser, Louis 74 Anderson, Ben 37 Andujar, Claudia 130–145 as distinct from George Love 21, 131–133, 137, 142 Yanomami 138 Yanomami Struggle, The 132 Andujar, Claudia and George Love, Amazônia 12, 20, 130–145 O homem da Hiléia 134, 136 anonymity 2, 4, 56, 69, 156n.2, 175 Armstrong, Carol 14, 73, 77 art market 2–3, 11, 13, 15, 18, 27–28, 132 buyer’s market 16, 32 collector’s market 1, 5, 27 ecosystem 10, 16, 30, 73–74, 76, 82 emerging market 11 market-orientated discourse 14 market value 20 ‘micro art worlds’ 16 niche market 2, 8, 10, 30, 38 photobook market 21, 28–32 secondary market 5, 11, 28, 30, 32 stagnating 28 art object, photobook as 1–5, 10, 17, 51 see also artists’ books artists’ books 7, 17, 27, 47–48, 66, 128, 165

Association of Black Photographers (Autograph ABP) 18, 81–82 Atkins, Anna 73 audience 1, 7, 14, 21, 29–30, 35–36, 38–39, 43, 48, 64–66, 86–87, 89–93, 127, 151 see also materiality augmented reality (AR) app 18, 85, 90 auteur (author), photographer as 1, 4, 6–7, 12, 14–16, 19, 78, 81, 121, 131, 156, 179 photographer-driven photobook 6, 21 photographer’s book 4, 6–7, 73, 77–78, 81–82 Autograph ABP see Association of Black Photographers Azoulay, Ariella 91–92, 151 Badger, Gerry 29, 41, 75, 78, 81, 87–89 Badger, Gerry and Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History 4–5, 7, 16, 27, 73, 75–76, 86, 92, 131–132, 143, 149–150, 155 Badiou, Alain 86, 91 Bardi, Pietro Maria 135–136 Barthes, Roland 7, 86 Bate, David 77, 89 Baudouin, Nicolas, Camden, NJ 18–19, 95–97 Becker, Howard S. 77 Art Worlds 4–5, 7, 10, 16, 35–36, 73–74

192

Index Bellocq, Ernest Joseph, Storyville Portraits 60 Berger, John 86, 89, 92–93 Berkeley, George 40 Berry, Ian, The English 77 Bhaskar, Michael 90 ‘biography’ of a photograph 5 ‘image biography’ 131, 144 object biography 41 see also Realidade Bisilliat, Maureen, Xingu 138 Black Photographers Annual, The 78 Blinder, Caroline 22 Bond, Jessie 18 bookshop 16, 29–31, 36, 38 Boom, Mattie 4 Bourdieu, Pierre 38, 74 Bourouissa, Mohamed Temps mort 21, 147–158 film version of Temps mort 148, 155–156, 156n.1 Brauner, Hari 164, 169, 171 Brauner, Victor 164 Brazil-Export ’73 135 British Black Art Movement 78 Britishness 77 Bunnell, Peter 66 Cameron, Julia Margaret 6 canons 11, 15, 27, 60, 62, 66–67, 76, 92 canon-building descriptions 13 canonical histories 3 canonicity 15 ‘masterpiece’ 130, 132, 143–144 Carlin, Briony 16, 19 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, The 50, 60–61 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 3, 60, 179 Central Louisiana Hospital in Pineville 102 Central Louisiana State Hospital 12, 101–102, 106–109, 114n2–n4 Central State Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane 101 Chamoiseau, Patrick and Rodolphe Hammadi, Guyane 151, 155–156 Chaui, Marilena 139

Coast to Coast 68 Cole, Teju 1–2, 9–10 collecting 11, 27, 50 Ziegarnik effect 11 see also art market collective production 1–4, 7, 9–10, 12, 14, 17, 42, 92, 138, 143, 147, 155–156 collaborative networks 3, 9–10, 35–36 ‘collective behavior’ 150 collective experience 37 collective photography projects 3 collective production of meaning 7, 14, 16–18, 20–21 collectors 10–11, 27, 29–31, 62, 66, 73, 79, 82 see also art market Constante, Lena 164, 169 COVID 32 Cram, Ralph Adam 125–127 Crimp, Douglas 41 Crossley, Nick 10 Dahmani, Taous 18 Darnton, Robert 76–77 da Silva, Hermes Rocha 138 dealers 3, 7, 10, 30–31, 66 DeCarava, Roy and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life 78 de Mello, Thiago 139–140 Depardon, Raymond 156n.1 Dewe Mathews, Chloe 147, 156 Diallo, Djibril 80 Diamond, Hugh W. 102–103, 109–110 Didi-Huberman, Georges 81–82 digital photobook 4, 8, 18, 29–30, 95–97 digital photography 1, 7–8, 32, 91, 155 photograph posted on Instagram 90 photograph taken on portable telephone 148 Disfarmer, Michael 69n.2 Dorfman, Elsa 17, 62–63, 65 Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal 59, 62–63 Duffy, Mark 40 Dugan, Thomas 47–49, 52 Duncan, Carol 37, 40 du Plessis, Rory 102, 110

Dworkin, Andrea 63 Dyer, Geoff 147 Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum 101 East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson 101–104 Edwards-Grossi, Élodie 19–20 Eluard, Paul 162–3, 167 Facile 163 Emmons, Chansonetta Stanley 69n.2 Eskildsen, Ute 76 Evans, Walker 21, 173–183 American Photographs 176, 178 Cendrars, Blaise 177–178 Frampton, Hollis 179–180, 182n.4 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 174–175, 182n.2 Liesbrook, Heinz 177, 179 postcards 181 Tagg, John 178–179 vernacular 174–175, 177, 179, 182, 182n.5 Wolff, David 178 see also Polaroids Fernández, Horacio 27, 131–132 Fichter, Robert 65 flipbook 52 Foucault, Michel 81, 101 Francis, Armet 12, 17–18, 79–81 Black Triangle: The People of the African Diaspora, The 12, 17–18, 79 Children of the Black Triangle 17–18, 80 Frank, Robert, The Americans 62, 77 Freed, Leonard, Police Work 5 galleries 3, 8–9, 17, 36, 38, 40–41, 48, 50, 60, 63, 65, 79, 82, 92, 168, 171–172 Garvey, Marcus 80 Genette, Gérard 39 Germain, Julian, For Every Minute You Are Angry, You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness 38 Gierstberg, Frits 4 Gilman, Sander L. 102–103, 110, 113 GLC see Greater London Council Godeau, Abigail Soloman 65 Goodhue, Bertram Grosvenor 121

Index Google Street View (Street View) 18–19, 95–97 Greater London Council (GLC) 80–81 Griffiths, Philip Jones, Vietnam Inc. 77 Grundberg, Andy 92 Guerrilla Girls 60, 68 Gupta, Sunil, Christopher Street 1976 82 Gutekunst, Frederick 109 Hackney Flashers 2 Hall, Stuart 75 Heath, Dave 53 Hedges, Chris and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt 18, 95, 97 Hiléia Amazônica 134, 136 Hooker, Marian O. 127 Horn, Roni 76 Hunt, Myron 127 Ikon Gallery 81–82 Image of Brazil 135–136 invisibilisation 15, 74, 78 invisible ‘other’ 75 Iser, Wolfgang 39 Jauffret, Magali 148–149, 152, 155–156 Johnson, Robert 50–51 Johnson, William S. 61–62 Johnston, Frances Benjamin 69n.2 Jones, Tiffany 2, 7, 9, 28–31 Kerlin, Isaac Newton, The Mind Unveiled 110 Kessels, Erik 6 Killip, Chris, In Flagrante 41–42 Kirker, Harold 116, 128 Kokkinen, Eilla 63 Krauss, Rosalind 130–131 learn-to-read books 3, 68 Le Corbusier 118 Lee, Wesley Duke 138 Lezmi, Frederic 9, 30 libraries 5, 9, 16, 36–39, 41, 66, 69n.2, 82, 90 Light Impressions 66 ‘literary photobook’ 6, 22

193

194

Index Louisiana Hospital for Insane of the State of Louisiana in Pineville (Central Louisiana State Hospital) 101, 103–105, 111–112, 114n.5 Love, George, as distinct from Andujar 21, 130, 132, 134, 136–141, 143–144 see also Andujar Lowell, Guy 121–123, 125, 128 Lyons, Joan 17, 47–58 Abby Rogers to Her Grand-daughter 56 Artifacts 51–52 Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook 47–48 Bride Book Red to Green 52–54 Gynecologist, The 48 In Hand 50–52 My Mother’s Book 48 Prom 54–56, 57n.6 Self Impressions 50–51 Twenty-Five Years Ago 50 Wonder Woman 52–55 Lyons, Nathan 49–50 McDonald, Jessica S. 15, 17 McGrath, Juliet 52, 57n.7 Mack, Gerstle and Thomas Gibson, Architectural Details of Southern Spain 119–120 McLuhan, Marshall 43 Madhubuti, Haki R. 80 Magnum 4, 18, 28, 60, 65, 77 Magnum Photobook 5 Malais, Nicolas 6–7 Marcelino, Vitor 20–21 market see art market MASP see Museu de Arte de São Paulo materiality 16–17, 39, 43, 78, 90 active form of spectatorship 87 haptic 8–9, 16, 36, 40, 43 material and immaterial affects 37 synesthetic encounter 40 tactile 36, 38–39, 181 viewer physically involved 68 Meiselas, Susan 17, 59–60, 85 Carnival Strippers 59, 63–65 Nicaragua 18, 85–90, 92–93 Nicaragua: Mediations 92

Pictures from a Revolution 18, 85, 90 Reframing History 18, 85 Meizel, Laureline 4 Menger, Pierre-Michel 11 Middel, Cristina de 28 Miller, Lee 161–165, 167–169, 171, 172n.2 Lee’s Romanian shots 165 Mol, Annemarie 41 Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP – São Paulo Art Museum) 134–6 museums 8–10, 15–17, 20, 27, 36–40, 48, 60–62, 66, 134–136, 171–173, 177–178, 181, 182n.5 Nesbit, Molly 78, 81 Nettles, Bea 17, 59, 65–66, 68 Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook 66–67 Events in the Sky 59, 66 Events in the Water 59, 66 networks see collective production Neumüller, Moritz 6, 9–10, 16, 73, 132 Neves, José Luís Afonso 4, 7, 27 Newhall, Beaumont 61 Nkrumah, Kwame 80 Norfleet, Barbara 17, 19, 59–62 Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life, The 59–62 Panzer, Mary 17, 19 Parr, Martin 4–5, 41, 82, 131 see also Badger, Gerry and Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History Penland School 65–66, 68 Penrose, Antony 22 Penrose, Roland 161–172 Bellmer, Hans 167 Bradley Press 167–168 facsimile 170–172 less intrusive as a photographer 165 Munich 165 Paradis des Alouettes, Le 168 printed by Wallace Heaton 166 Real Woman, The 163 Road is Wider Than Long, The 12, 21, 161–172 stream of consciousness 165

photobook see art object; auteur; digital photobook; literary photobook Photobook Week Aarhus 29 photographer-driven photobook see auteur Photographers’ Gallery, The 8, 38, 79 photoliterature 22 Polaroids 21, 173–181 colour of 174–175, 181 Polaroid SX-70 174, 182n.3 Praxis, publishing house 130, 137–140 Prins, Ralph 4, 86 ‘prison photography’ 150, 152 see also Chamoiseau; Rheims Ramdin, Ron 79–80 Rancière, Jacques 91 Realidade 132–134, 140, 142 Reed, Eli, Black in America 78 Rheims, Bettina 151, 155–156 Riggs, Lutah Maria 117–119, 124–125, 128 Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives 60, 64 Ritchin, Fred 5, 18, 78 Rocha, Regastein 137–140, 143 Rodney, Walter 80 Rogers, Dick 63 Rosler, Martha 91–92 Roth, Andrew 11, 73, 76, 82 Rounds, Jay 37 Ruff, Thomas 152, 156n.2 Ruscha, Edward 19, 41, 52, 128 Salgado, Sebastião 3 Genesis 40 Schaden, Markus 28, 30–31, 73 screenshots 95–97 Sealy, Mark 81 Shannon, Elizabeth 1, 4, 27 Sidlauskas, Susan 102 Sinsabaugh, Art 59, 66 Sligh, Clarissa 17, 59, 65, 67–68

Index Reading Dick and Jane with Me 12, 59, 68–69 What’s the Matter With Momma? 59, 68–69 Smith, George Washington 118, 124 Sontag, Susan 86, 91, 103, 105 Soule, Winsor 124–128 Spence, Jo 2 Stafford, Andy 21 Steele-Perkins, Chris and Richard Smith, The Teds 77 Suermondt, Rik 4 Suntop, Lionel 66 Tagg, John 105, 178–179, 182n3 Talbot, William Henry Fox, The Pencil of Nature 6, 73 Time-Life 5 Tuminas, Daria 16, 29–32 Ueslmann, Jerry 65 Unseen Amsterdam Book Market 29–31 van der Elsken, Ed, Love on the Left Bank 42 Schrofer, Juriaan 42 Van Gennep, Arnold 75 Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) 17, 47–48, 50–51, 56, 68 Walker, Ian 7, 41–42 Warhol, Andy 52 Weissman, Terri 89 Welter, Volker M. 20 Wetherell, Margaret 36, 39 Whitehead, Chris 37, 40 Whittlesey, Austin 120–121 Wollen, Peter 88–89 Women’s Caucus for Art 68 Wood, John 49–50 Zealy, Joseph 102 Ziegarnik effect 11

195

Plate 1  National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The monumental architecture and yellowish light cast a hushed, antique tone upon book encounters here. (Photo by Briony Carlin)

Plate 2  Joan Lyons. Artifacts. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1973. Portfolio of ten colour offset lithographs. 26 × 19 in. Edition of 10.

Plate 3  Joan Lyons. Bride Book Red to Green. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1975, 42 pp. Two-colour offset, Japanese stab binding. 9 × 7.75 in. Edition of 20; second printing, edition of 29, 1975.

Plate 4  Joan Lyons. Bride Book Red to Green. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1975, 42 pages. Two-colour offset, Japanese stab binding. 9 × 7.75 in. Edition of 20; second printing, edition of 29, 1975.

Plate 5  Joan Lyons. Prom: A Six-Sheet Offset Lithograph. Toronto, ON: Coach House Press, 1975. Portfolio of six, four-colour offset lithographs. 23 × 17 in. Edition of 24.

Plate 6  Joan Lyons. Abby Rogers to Her Grand-daughter. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1976, 32 pages. Three-colour offset, saddle stitched. 10 × 7.5 in. Edition of 500; second printing, edition of 500, 1979.

Plate 7  Barbara Norfleet. The Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life. Boston: David R. Godine, 1979: front cover. Halftone.

Plate 8  Elsa Dorfman. Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974: front cover. Halftone and letterpress.

Plate 9  Clarissa Sligh. What’s Happening with Momma. Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1988. Silk-screened with acrylic ink on 100% rag paper.

Plate 10  Clarissa Sligh. Reading Dick & Jane with Me. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1989. Printed Offset.

Plate 11  George Love. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love, Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p.

Plate 12  George Love. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love, Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p.

Plate 13  Claudia Andujar. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love, Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p.

Plate 14  Claudia Andujar. Double page spread from Claudia Andujar and George Love, Amazônia. São Paulo: Praxis, 1978, n.p.

Plate 15  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 33–34.

Plate 16  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 11–12.

Plate 17  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 5–6.

Plate 18  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 7–8.

Plate 19  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 9–10.

Plate 20  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 39–40.

Plate 21  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1938: 41–42.

Plate 22  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. JP Getty edition, 2003.

Plate 23  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Corrections to the Arts Council edition of 1980.

Plate 24  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. 1938. JP Getty edition, 2003.

Plate 25  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. 1938. JP Getty edition, 2003.

Plate 26  Roland Penrose. Le Paradis des Alouettes, mixed media, 1936.

Plate 27  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Original ms, 1939.

Plate 28  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. Arts Council edition, 1980.

Plate 29  Roland Penrose. The Road is Wider Than Long. JP Getty edition, 2003.

Plate 30  Walker Evans. ‘New Haven’, Polaroid, 11 November 1974.

Plate 31  Walker Evans. Untitled Polaroid, 1973–74.

Plate 32  Walker Evans. Untitled Polaroid, 1974.