The rise of what was once termed "the Illustrated Press" in the late Victorian era resulted from huge literacy advances and, perhaps more significantly, the invention of the halftone process in 1880. This process transformed printing from using laborious engravings to illustrate text to a more dynamic use of images that, in turn, led to whole industries evolving in such areas as fashion and photojournalism. These technical advances also opened up a wider audience to the illustrated photographic book, or the photobook.
In the 20th century, photography became a legitimate art form, no longer tied subserviently to illustrating texts or as a visual corollary to event. Artists such as Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz demonstrated that the photographic process could reveal an aesthetic vision as rich as that of any painter or sculptor. The art of photography, first given wide currency by its inclusion in magazines and books, has reclaimed the book as an appropriate context for displaying its complexity and power. Today, a photobook need not simply be an anthology of a photographer's or an artist's greatest hits. As the Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins puts it, "A photobook is an autonomous art form, comparable toa piece of sculpture, a play or a film."
A good photobook has a rhythm and flow not dissimilar to a film, and a narrative that the reader can follow, although it may not necessarily be a linear one. Gerry Badger, in The Photobook: A History (Phaidon, 2004), writes, "In the true photobook each picture may be considered a sentence, or a paragraph, the whole sequence the complete text."
There have been several touchstone photobooks over the years. One classic is Robert Frank's TheAmericans (1959), which has a filmic rhythm punctuated by what one critic called "dry, lean and transparent" images of the Stars and Stripes, which slightly change the pace and lead the viewer on. Even earlier, Walker Evans's 1938 American Photographswas equally influential. Now, photographic artists realize that the book is in some way a better medium for showing their work than the gallery.
Both conceptually and aesthetically, the book has more to offer. Philip-Lorca diCorcia's A Story Book Life(Twin Palms, 2003) and and Paul Graham's American Night(Steidl, 2003) were both conceived as books.
DiCorcia's book works as a kind of family album. He started to work on the project in 1978, and for the past 25 years has been directing his friends and family in imagined scenarios of everyday life. Through careful sequencing and editing, diCorcia weaves a complex and epic view of daily routine. Starting and finishing with pictures of his father, stories unravel hinting at adventure, romance and wit with that unshakable feeling of impending doom so apparent in much of his work. Some pictures are almost claustrophobic with their heightened intense atmospheres, but there is also breathing space in quieter images as you turn the pages.
Graham's American Night steps back from the intimate in order to comment on social and racial fracture in America. About 80% are bright, burning white images, which are almost blinding . These repeat for many pages as you make your way though the book until suddenly you are attacked by a Technicolor representation of a house that looks supersaturated after the starvation of the white pictures. You need the repetition the book offers so that the color images act like an illusion, a mirage within the endless bright white. It has to be repetitive.; only a book can offer this. Says Graham, "Exhibitions are nice, but they can be less successful as so much depends on the curator and the space. With a book you have much more control."
The photobook, for me, is often the most successful way of experiencing photographs. I can work through images at my own pace, picking up threads and themes that may otherwise have been lost in exhibition and, most importantly, the images are mine to keep and return to whenever the time is right.
There are a wealth of photobooks coming onto the U.S. market this season. Every book may not be a work of art, but photography is a category in which true visual artists are at work in the medium of the book. It's worth a look.
Click here for a list of illustrated gift books, just in time for the holiday season.
