The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha and beyond

We cite from the INTRODUCTION:
"Ever since the publication of Henry Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature (1844-46) as a series of six fascicles, the home of the photograph has been the book as much as the gallery wall. It could even be argued that the book is the first and proper home of the photographic image from which it moved out to take up residence in the fine art gallery and the modern museum in the early twentieth century - just as the proper home of vernacular or private photography is the album or scrapbook. Despite this fact, histories of photography have not generally accorded the photobook a place of central importance, if they have paid it any attention at all; accounts have been organized more often around trajectories of technological developments, national histories, genres, iconic images, or the landmark bodies of work by individual photographers as auteurs.1 Recent years, however, have witnessed a growing interest in the photobook, and this interest among both scholars and collectors is widespread enough to justify speaking of an emergent intellectual and cultural moment which is moving us to new levels of integrated understanding beyond the more scattered studies which have come before."
"The ensemble of essays gathered here presents close readings of individual photobooks, from the early days of photography to the present, as well as some analysis of examples at the 'prismatic fringes' of the genre - magazines, catalogues, biographies.2 Despite its wide temporal and formal scope, however, and despite its chronological organization, the collection does not attempt a history or a theorizing of genre. Motivated by the emergent scholarly interest in the photobook and in image and text interactions, the contributors are primarily preoccupied with developing ways of reading the photograph in the book. Understanding how meanings are shaped by an image's interactions with another, or its place in a group or sequence, or through its dialectical coexistence with text is the foundation upon which histories as well as aesthetic and cultural conceptualizations of genre must be built up if they are to prove durable, even in their inevitable partiality."
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