On Photobooks


It’s hard to decide where to begin with the topic. On the most basic level we regard photobooks as a portable art gallery or an artist’s portfolio and, in any case, a commodity.

What is not always as apparent is that the photobook is itself an artistic medium, an expressive and interpretive form. Moreover, these books are nearly always the result of collaborations between artist and printer, and perhaps designer, editor, and bookbinder.

What you’ll find tonight is a survey of just some of the exciting conceptual and formal variety encompassed within the category of photobook.

In the attention economy (think social media), photographs are presented in frictionless uniformity one after the other, and some books reflect a similar approach. But as you look through this collection, take a moment to appreciate the genuine variety that emerges when we depart from the habits of consumption cultivated by social media. 

The material, tactile pleasures are self-evident. But in addition to those, investigate the other choices made by the artist and designer: Scale, position, sequence and pacing, repetition, obscuring and revealing page after page. 

You’re also likely to recognize gaps within this collection: methods, identities, voices done violence through exclusion or mystification. Look at this and every other collection critically. The photobook has the capacity to be a revolutionary broadcast, but it frequently becomes a tool to reproduce privilege, subjugation, and gender hierarchy. 

As capital drives everything toward frictionless mining of our attention, the photobook feels like an anachronism—an experience replete with friction, contradiction, inefficiency; strange rather than simply weird.

What excites me most here is not the past and its artifacts but instead the yet-unrealized possibilities for the medium in our present moment. I hope the encounter with this collection ignites a hunger to invent new forms and new interpretations, bending the medium to suit our own individual and collective voices.


J.B. 06-24-25