This volume offers a radical challenge to our idea of the photobook, arguing that the genre should be understood not as the artistic vision of one person but as a collective endeavour created through the confluence of individuals and competing interests.
Today's market is geared for photographer-driven books and buoyed by the theoretical framework proposed by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. But The photobook world casts a wider net, paying particular attention to anonymous photographers, institutional publications, digital opportunities, unrealized projects, illegal practices, collectives, poets and the reader. Investigating North American, British and French photobooks from 1900 to the present, the chapters uncover forgotten social objects and show how personal histories are bound to broader historical movements. At the same time, a number engage with canonical authors - notably Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas, Roland Penrose and the Visual Studies Workshop - to reveal the original contexts and "biographies" of the photographs. Featuring contributors from a variety of professional and disciplinary backgrounds, including photographers, curators, historians and other researchers, The photobook world provides a better understanding of how the meaning of photobooks is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.