Why We Need Photobook Criticism

There's a piece on Aperture, inside their "PhotoBook Review" label, which argues for more and better photobook criticism. This is, I have to say, a crashingly unsurprising point of view to appear within the pages of whatever "PhotoBook Review" is, other than $18 an issue. You can go read it here.

On the one hand, obviously I am a big fan of photobook criticism. I do it, I read it, I pay attention to the people who do it. I make fun of many of the people who do it, from time to time, on account of their occasional risibility.

On the other hand, this thing rubbed me rather the wrong way.

It begins with a quote from Sontag which is always a dicey operation. It's 50:50 that Sontag reversed course on whatever the quotation means, possibly on the next page. She's a tricky bugger, and will go on for pages on a theme before dismissing the whole thing as a bad job in a line or two. Also, she is a blatherer, and while she talked around a number of good ideas, her writing is mostly just blathering. But whatever, perhaps from this inauspicious beginning David Solo gets somewhere interesting. Or not.

Next up there's a pretty on-point complaint about most photobook writing, being the same as all other reviews of everything in that it's repackaged press-releases. Honestly, I'm not sure about this. Obviously there are press releases, and from time to time they get repackaged as a review, but mostly I think nobody writes anything at all about photobooks. It may be that that as a percentage, we're getting a lot of Serious Criticism, simply because the enture oeuvre is miniscule and there are, after all, 10 or 20 people who try to write seriously.

Solo proceeds through a lot of words which touch on "more cultural viewpoints" and "historical positioning" but which keep returning to the theme of photobook-as-artist-book. It seems to me that what Solo is really interested in is the book-ness of the photobook, the rare Japanese paper, the typography, the design, the gatefolds, the stupid clumsy bindings, and so on, so beloved of the Serious Photobook Community. He explicitly denigrates reviews that he thinks focus too much on the photographs, which is hilarious. These things are photobooks, dude. It's literally in the name.

His conceit appears to be that if only we doubled-down on talking about all that book-nerd shit we could totally expand the audience and legitimize the photobook as a thing. He stops, just barely, short of proposing that a great deal of grant money should be liberated to support "platforms" where he and his friends could place writing about gatefolds and varnish and the fascinating interplay of text and image. This is, apparently, supposed to be a solution to something or other.

It is, obviously, an absurd conceit. Getting deeper into nerd-land is not how you attract civilians to your cult.

A photobook conceived primarily not as a container for a bunch of photos is definitely a thing. It's just a very niche thing. Only a few people in the world really like it. It's like model railroading. It's a thing, it's very cool, and the people who are into it are really into it. Some of them think maybe they ought to be able to make a living at it. In the end, though, they probably should not.

A photo book (note the space) conceived primarily as a container for a bunch of photos can and should use the same assemblage of parts and tools, the Japanese paper, the spot color, the weird bindings (ok, probably avoid the weird bindings, those are almost always a huge mistake. I mean, seriously, Swiss binding? Give me a break. Someone literally forgot an endpaper once and said "we could probably market this dogshit to artists.") The difference is that rather than treating the photos as a way to showcase your awesome idea for a book, you start from the content and try to work out a good way to present the content in a book-like form.

I have seen and even written criticism which attempts to work out exactly how it is that the weird book-nerd shit supports and enhances the content, which is the idea every photobook practitioner trots out. The answer is usually "it does not, in fact, it distracts and is dumb."

This put me in mind of Lewis Bush's book Metropole which I quite liked. My reaction to the twee swiss binding and thread choices, though, is telling. I wrote this review three years ago and I found the book-nerd shit to be trivial and distracting from what is otherwise a pretty good book. This is the norm. It is as if a sculptor decided that what their statue really needs is a plate of cookies next to it or something. The oft-repeated mantra that you must hire a designer or your book will be shit might be accurate, but I would add to that advice "and keep that fucker on a short leash so they don't sell you a bunch of dumb ideas."

In advertising, your agency will come back with three proposals: the one that will win them an award, a throwaway, and the one you actually want. Book designers, at least the stratum of them that work in photobooks, seem to reliably offer up the one that will win them an award. As with the ad agency, your job is to say "no" to that one, and to the throwaway, and to pick out the proposal that you actually want.

I am pretty generous about what constitutes a book, and I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to having a great book idea, and then casting about for some content to stick in it.

I'm working on that.