A New Materiality

The contemporary photobook as a corporeal object, fixed in its nature, unmoving and expensive, should not be the phenomenon that it is. That is at least if we are to believe proclamations of the redundancy of the book, or the supposed death of photography with its image-flood metaphors (Estrin, 2012) and laments for trust in the camera (Foam, 2011). Yet against this backdrop the medium has thrived, reaching into every corner of photographic discourse, quickly becoming a process and form of concretised output that every photographer wants to be part of (Schaden, 2014). Such is the growth of the medium that we have seen a five-fold increase since 1999 in the number of publishers dedicated to photography (Chéroux, 2021:4). Accompanying this proliferation of outputs is a concurrent flurry of activity that seeks to document, situate, and analyse the interactions between photography and the page, from which varying approaches have emerged. For many, an enticing view to take is in connecting the present form to art-historical roots via key works and movements.¹ For others, consideration of the photobook as a product of localised forces is pressing, and with it, numerous geographically-oriented canonical works have sprung up.² Then there are also investigations into the process of publishing and the business of making books,³ but a holistic account cannot be achieved without engaging with materiality. The very thing that has become a central feature of the medium and has defined ‘the specificity of the photobook as a (plat)form amongst other photographic spaces’ (Rose and Tuminas 2020, 195)...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 3