The photobook, just picture it

I collect books on photobooks so this title was an obvious addition but who had heard of it. It was only through reading 'Published: Photobooks in Sweden' (ISBN 978 3960984757) that I became aware of it. There is no ISBN number so it never shows up in book searches. It is a 424 page soft cover catalog (25 x 20cm) to a 2004 exhibition at the  Hasselbad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Andrew Roth (who wrote 'The book of 101 books', the first proper study of photobooks) edited this title which considers 172 books published between 1878 and 2003. Many of the great European and American photobooks published over the decades are included. It follows the usual format with the book's cover and two or three inside spreads. I thought it was unfortunate that the captions give very little away: title, publisher and references to the cover (a photo or illustration) binding and end-papers, print run but no details about a book's photographic intentions. The first thirty pages have interesting essays about the photobooks.

I thought some of the titles ask the question: just what is a photobook and how obscure could it be so they are not included. In 1970 Nobuyoshi Araki published twenty-five photobooks with the caption saying three were never realized and the entire edition was only seventy copies, likewise Jack Smith in 1962 published 'The beautiful book' consisting of nineteen gelatin silver contact prints mounted on yellow paper and staple bound, no print run is mentioned or Georges Hugnet's 107 signed and numbered copies of eighty-two holiday photos published in 1969. These are three examples of incredibly limited titles that I would have thought, because of such small public exposure, would not be worth using in this book. Obviously nearly all the others books included are proper printed editions that were generally on sale.

At the back of the book there is a sixteen page photo essay about how Steidl published Robert Frank's 'Storyline'. Steidl, in fact, designed and printed (with a 175 screen) 'The open book' and I found it a really good study of the genre but you'll have to search the net for a copy because this isn't a normally published book and I expect it had a rather limited print run making copies rather expensive.