The history of the photobook is the history of photography itself: this is the basic premise of the impressive, two-volume series The Photobook, edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger and published by Phaidon Press. The Photobook: A History, volume I begins soon after the advent of photography with early books about nature and travel.
The First Photobooks
Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is the first of hundreds of titles covered in the book. Atkins made direct-print cyanotypes of algae—a cyanotype is an early form of photographic print that is blue—and published them in book form. The editors name her as the true pioneer of the photobook and not the well-known Henry Fox Talbot, whose Pencil of Nature was soon to follow.
This is because part of Photographs of British Algae was first published in 1843, several months before Pencil of Nature. The illustrations included here are stunning, with spindly, elegant plants on rich, cerulean backgrounds. Atkins, who went by the moniker AA, also wrote the text to her book. Photographs of British Algae is at once concerned with horticulture, design, and the new medium of photography: Nicéphore Niépce's heliograph, recognized as the world's first photograph, dates circa 1826.
A Photobook Primer
The Photobook could easily be a required text for a course on the photobook or the history of photography. Each of the nine chapters begins with an essay and each entry includes a lengthy description of the book chosen for discussion. Sound academic? It is; in a good way. The writing is full of wonderful details without jargon. Parr and Badger contextualize the work as they describe it.
The quality of the printing is also exceptional, and there are a few illustrations for each book they cover. Although The Photobook could be used in an art history course, it might also sit on a coffee table or serve as a reference for book collectors. In any case, this historical survey is meant to be paged through rather than read from cover to cover, and is an engaging photobook in its own right.
Travelogues, Social Documents, Modern Art
One of the most intriguing aspects of photography and photobooks is their ability to perform multiple functions—and glissade between them. Thus The Photobook takes the reader on a wide-reaching tour. In 1874, James Nasmyth took wet-plate photographs of the moon, and together with James Carpenter wrote the accompanying text to The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.
Dorothea Lange's famous An American Exodus which she made with her husband Paul S. Taylor is also included, with numerous illustrations. Parr and Badger explain that Lange did not include her monumental Migrant Mother in this WPA magnum opus because, "she did not want 'stand-out' images to overwhelm the rest and disturb the book's balance."
And then there's early Modernism. It's hard to say what's more appealing: the beautiful Surrealist book Facile, by Paul Eluard and Man Ray, or something by a lesser-known artist, such as Gustavo Ortiz Hernán's Chimeneas. Actually, part of the strength of The Photobook is viewing titles like these together.
Political Propoganda and After World War II
Fascism and Communism both used the power of the photographic image along with text to convey their political agendas. Russian Constructivism and photomontages are the most striking. Udarniki, or Shockworkers, makes nice use of the grid, diagonal composition, and deep red accents. In one image from S B Ingulov's Pishchyevaya Industriya (The Food Industry), the enormous head of a chicken is superimposed over a large flock being fed by a farmer.
The Postwar sections mix art, reportage, and documentary. There are several collaborations between writers and photographers: Richard Avedon and James Baldwin's Nothing Personal and Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes's The Sweet Flypaper of Life, for example. Robert Frank's influential The Americans (originally published in Paris as Les Américains) includes an introduction by Jack Kerouac.
1960s and 1970s Japan
The last chapter of the book may be the most dynamic. The full force of Japanese avant-garde artistic production is apparent in the work of artists like Eikoh Hosoe and Yukio Mishima, with titles Barakei (Killed by Roses) and Barakei Shinshuban (Ordered by Roses Re-edited). There are also a few books by Nobuyoshi Araki, who is known in the art world for his portraits of bound, nude women, and Hiroshi Sugimoto's Time Exposed and Theaters, two series of serene shots of nothingness.
The Photobook: A History, volume I takes the reader from the dawn of photography to the first inklings of Postmodernism. Indeed, photography and the photobook led art into Modernism and guided it out to a new direction, even as they performed multiple other duties such as social documentary. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's second volume tackles the photobook and advertising as well as postwar artistic and documentary activities.
The Photobook: A History, volume I by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. Phaidon Press, 2004. ISBN: 0714842850
Read more about The Photobook at the Art Books blog.
