Overview

The materiality of photobooks. Photobooks are an art form on the move. They travel physically, as copies are bought, traded, treasured, forgotten, and rediscovered around the world. They move conceptually, as their meanings evolve through changing use and value. Photobooks combine languages of photography, text and design into a distinct medium that breaks from the confines of galleries and libraries, entering unexpected or intimate environments, such as our homes. Encounters with Photobooks marks a shift in scholarship by showing how meaningful experiences with photobooks are shaped by the situated, material, and political circumstances of these encounters. Weaving together creative writing about photobook encounters with critical traditions in museology, phenomenology, art history and new materialism, this innovative book illuminates the photobook’s multiplicity: its unique potential for its many copies to matter differently to makers and readers in each momentary encounter. This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

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9789462705128

Table of Contents

Reviews

This knowledgeable and considered study makes a persuasive case regarding the world- and sense-making dimensions of the photobook encounter. It deals in serious concepts and scholarship, yet zips by weightlessly thanks to Carlin’s sparkling prose and illustrative case studies. While this study makes a significant contribution to Photobook scholarship specifically, its new materialist arguments are illuminative of readerly encounters more widely. - Victoria Horne, Northumbria University This book reimagines the photobook as a living companion rather than an object. With striking originality, it shows how reading becomes a practice of imagination, intimacy, and connection beyond the human. Using techniques such as autoethnography grounded in feminist new materialist theory, it models an ethics of attention and perception that traces the entanglement of human and more-than-human agencies, illuminating the photobook as phenomenon while exemplifying a generous, rigorous way of doing research. - Moritz Neumüller

Author Information

Briony Carlin is lecturer in Contemporary Art Curation at Newcastle University.

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