Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond

Publisher's Description
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 from different fields of scholarship share a range of new approaches to reading the photobook, developing fresh 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, from the Victorian aestheticism and indulgent production of Talbot’s literary-inspired images to the fragile, disposable yet paradoxically enduring creations of Ruscha, the photobook in all its manifestations – from fetishised objet d’art to cheaply-printed booklet – is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.

International in scope and encompassing the history of the photobook until the present day, The Photobook demonstrates a variety of critical approaches accessible to academic scholars, the art world and the general reader alike.

Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Size: 234 x 156 mm
288 pages