More Random Reflections on Photobooks

If we set out to do a thing and then we (merely) do it, everyone is bummed out. (That’s not a work of art; that’s a lecture, a data dump.) 

-- George Saunders

However much I love and admire Lee Friedlander’s photographs, I have to admit that his recent books read like catalogs. They do not take you anywhere. They work as books of photographs rather than as photobooks, as containers rather than as vessels.

Looking at a photobook is a temporal event that takes you somewhere. For it to work it has to surprise you, and not, as writer Georges Saunders points out, lead you down a predictable path. It is not going to be interesting if you already know where you are going. If the photo of the abandoned car on the cover looks like the 40 other photos of abandoned cars inside, you are going to be brain-dead before you get past page seven. Imagine a cookbook with 40 recipes for beef stew, 40 recipes with only minor variations. Who is going to buy it? Why would the author think anyone might?

It begs the question why we have photobooks like this. And the answer I suppose is that most photobooks are self-published or, if published by an imprint, produced through some form of pay to publish. Plus it is hard to be original and easy to follow the crowd.

There are just so many photobooks out there. Every photographer has to have their own, and I am just as guilty as anyone – I self-published my first photobook to general indifference in 1982. I have some copies left, and I am still hoping it will be more widely recognized for its innovations in photobook form. But what higher authorities do we have that separate interesting, innovative books from the rest? Perhaps a handful of book prizes and websites that offer reviews, like PhotoBook Journal or Collector Daily. Or every few decades a work like Badger and Parr’s photobook history series, if your book has been lucky enough to come to the authors’ attention. Otherwise we are left with market-based success as a stand-in for worth, even though sales hardly correspond to a book’s quality or importance.

Publishers can be annoyingly immodest in their claims of importance. Just read their press releases. And consider some of their attention-seeking: printing photos inside folded pages that you can’t open; putting essential information about the book inside a folded dust cover; mixing together photographs from different photographers, but without labeling them, so you do not know who took which photographs; or withholding important information (such as telling you that some of the images have been staged) to make the book appear more mysterious. Maybe you are okay with that. Maybe you know the books I am referring to and like them. But for me resorting to gimmicks is dishonest. Cleverness does not make up for not being profound. If the photos and book design are strong you should not need nifty tricks.

You may have noticed, among publishers seeking to project their status and importance, the race to the top in terms of supposed quality – exotic binding techniques, expensive paper, embossed cloth covers, and high-end printing and production. But like putting lipstick on a pig, you can’t turn a book into something it isn’t. You can’t make something moving and engaging and important just by dressing it up or printing it bigger. There are some publishers who practice book design as a cutting-edge art form, but others are quite conservative, even if they publish trendy younger photographers. Their books are often expensive, and their sales depend on your belief that expensive equals important. Because they need to sell, they can’t afford to deviate too far from traditional practices if they want to stay in business. They have to play it safe rather than take risks, which explains why they do not publish unknown photographers but rather rely on established reputations that translate into higher sales.

By the way, speaking of print quality, let’s be clear that there is no universal standard of print quality. It is about personal taste, period, and personal taste varies considerably. One photographer’s blown-out highlights and blocked shadows that need correcting are another photographer’s intentional artistic choices. Grain, fuzzy focus, washed-out colors, and scratches can be good. Sorry about that, Ansel.