The Photobook From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond

by Di Bello, Patrizia; Wilson, Colette; Zamir, Shamoon

• ISBN13: 9781848856158
• ISBN10: 1848856156
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-15
• Publisher: I. B. Tauris

Summary

The photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the publication of Henry Fox Talbot s The Pencil of Nature heralded a new genre in the history of the book, one in which the photograph was the primary vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal if sometimes conflicted partnership with the written word. In this book, practicing photographers and writers across several fields of scholarship share a range of fresh approaches to reading the photobook, developing new ways of understanding how meaning is shaped by an image s interaction with its text and context and engaging with the visual, tactile and interactive experience of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual works, the photobook from fetishised objet d art to cheaply-printed booklet is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.

Author Biography

Patrizia Di Bello teaches History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England. Colette Wilson teaches French Literature and Visual Culture at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London. She is the author of Paris and the Commune 1871-1878: The Politics of Forgetting .Shamoon Zamir has taught at the University of Chicago, York University, and the University of London. He is the author of Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought.

Table of Contents

Aknowledgements * Introduction * 'Scotch Views' for Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845) * 'Art-Science': The North American Indian (1907-30) as Photobook * Autobiography, and Cultural Moments (1927) * Recalcitrant Intervention: Walker Evans' Pages * Sculpture, Photograph, Book: The Sculptures of Picasso (1949) * A Kind of a 'Huh?': The Siting of Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) * Beyond the exhibition - from catalogue to photobook * 'The book the nation is waiting for': One Day for Life (1987) * A Spectre is Leaving Europe (1990): Appropriation in post-communist photobooks * The Photobook as Object of Memory and Nostalgia: Carlos Freire and Robert Solé's Alexandrie l'égyptienne (1998) * The Eye of the Lens and the Feet of the Photographer: Eduardo Gageiro's Lisboa no Cais da Memsria (2003) * Orhan Pamouk's Melancholic Narrative and Fragmented Photographic Framing - Istanbul: Memories of a City (2005) * Select Bibliography * Index