Marina Bolotina

Graphic Design L6
6FTC1176 Degree Essay

THE BOOK <part> OF THE PHOTOBOOK

<and its transformations>

Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

01/02/2022
Introduction
During the pandemic of 2020, Sho Shibata made a small edition of his photobook, Reflections
on Tsugaru, available for purchase. I ordered the book, but as it could only be delivered to me
via land mail service (airmail was not available), I waited for it to sail from Wakayama-ken to me
for months. It was delivered safely, I notified the staff at Michioto Publishing, and everybody was
happy, especially me. It was one of those moments when I thought, why? If this book feels so
valuable (not because of its price), then what is the secret of its value beyond photography? Is it
the vastness it traveled or is it design? Or maybe something else entirely, curiousity with which I
stumble upon those photobooks. Why is it there in the first place?

Figure 1. Sho Shibata, Reflections on Tsugaru.

Michioto Publishing. 2019.

This essay will document the process of evolution of the contemporary photobook and trace the
changes in the book part of the photobook: its definition, function, and the way how it evolved
from being a surface for the images to being an artwork on its own.

The first chapter reviews briefly the early examples of the photobook and cites various defini-
tions of it. It also states the topic of a ‘specific theme’ that is assigned to photobooks from the
early days. It continues with an exploration of the notion of narrative and sequence, using texts
by Moholy-Nagy and Carrión as a reference.

The second chapter introduces the works of Ed Ruscha and their uncategorizable nature. It col-
lects various references from the Artforum magazine, for which he worked as a layout designer
under the pseudonym “Eddie Russia” from 1965 to 1969. In the first part of the chapter, various
attempts at categorization of Ruscha’s books are considered. His own words are put against the
words of art critics in an attempt to understand the books better. The layout and captions are
covered in the second part of the chapter. The third part of the chapter touches on the topic of
time and how Ruscha’s works ended up resurfacing constantly.

The third chapter covers two topics: artists using photography and making photobooks out of
found images, and the evolved approach to photobook design. It starts with concerning Batia
Suter’s work and continues on to define some reasons for cannibalizing imagery. Further, in this
chapter, the topic of vernacular photography is reintroduced, and the examples introduce the
opposite: elaborate and intricate works by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The chapter concludes with stating
how the function of the photobook changed.
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Chapter 1. What’s in a name
What is a photobook? As stated by Parr & Badger (2004), ‘photobook is a book — with or without
text — where the work’s primary message is carried by photographs.’ To expand this basic defi-
nition, Badger cited another one by the Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins, who was quoted in
Boom & Suermondt 1989 book Photography Between Covers:
A photobook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The
photographs lose their own photographic character as things ‘in themselves’ and become parts, trans-
lated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book.
Before photobook became ‘a dramatic event’, it was born out of the transition from an album, a
collection of photographs, to a fully resolved and industrially-produced book. ‘In the nineteenth
century original prints were pasted into books by hand, although from the start, the search was
on for a way in which to print photographs in ink.’ (Parr & Badger, 2004)

Figure 2. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature. Longman. Brown, Green & Longmans. London, 1844.
24 calotypes published in 6 fascicles with letterpress commentaries
PARR, M. & BADGER, G. (2004) The photobook: a history Volume I. London: Phaidon.

Since the time when the first photobooks featured mainly landscape and travel photographs, a
photobook has had a specific theme. ‘That subject may be as broad as the universe, like Atlas
photographique de la lune (Photographic Atlas of the Moon, 1896-1910) by Maurice Loewy and
Pierre Puiseux, or as narrow as close-ups of rippled mud, as in Alfred Ehrhardt’s Das Watt (Mud-
flats, 1937).’ (Parr & Badger, 2004) It is noteworthy that the photobook functions as a display for
photographs, albeit not in a way a gallery wall does. The book format suggests a narrative. And
narrative became a natural way to arrange those early topographic and travel photographs. As
Wentworth (1987) put it, ‘we read the world narratively all the time.’

This notion of constructing a narrative implies that the sequence must not be random. As Car-
rión (1975) wrote, ‘a book is a space-time sequence’ and making one is to ‘actualize its ideal
space-time sequence by means of the creation of a parallel sequence of signs.’ The photo-
graphs, in this case, essentially become the signs that tell a story, where ‘each picture may be
considered a sentence, or a paragraph, the whole sequence the complete text.’ (Parr & Bad-
ger, 2004) Through this process of creating a sequence, a collective entity that is a photobook
becomes more important than each of the pictures. Moholy-Nagy (1947) described this event
rather tenderly:
The series is no longer a “picture” and the canons of pictorial esthetics can only be applied to it’s mu-
tatis mutandis. Here the single picture loses its separate identity and becomes part of the assembly; it
becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself. In this sequence of separate
but inseparable parts, a photographic series — photographic comics, pamphlets, books — can be either
a potent weapon or tender poetry.

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The examples of ‘weapons’ are among various propaganda-based photobooks of the Soviet
era in the USSR, and ‘tender poetry’ is seen in the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ American pho-
tobooks of the 1970s. One could certainly find propaganda books poetic in their own way. All
things considered, photobooks function as a display for images, and they are three-dimensional
objects providing a space for a photographic narrative. And then they are something else.

Chapter 2. Fifteen small books

Photobooks that are ‘complex and refractory objects that have constantly repeated attempts at
categorization’ (Hatch, 2005) are the ones created by Ed Ruscha and published between 1963
and 1973. Ruscha’s books were labeled West Coast Pop, American photo-documentary, and
antecedents to Conceptual art. (Hatch, 2005) Yet the labels did not stick to them well.

In an early review in Artforum, Leider (1963) seemed rather unimpressed by Ruscha’s work:
The photographs are not professional — most of them are not even good. Ruscha is a young pop artist
whose work, incidentally, does not particularly relate to gasoline stations. “Twenty-six Gasoline Sta-
tions” is a pop-art book.
Ruscha himself said that he never followed any tradition while creating his books. (Schwartz,
2002) He did, however, acknowledge being influenced by the works of Walker Evans and Robert
Frank. (Hatch, 2005)

Figure 3. Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand. Yugensha/Kazuniko Motomura. Tokyo, 1972.
PARR, M. & BADGER, G. (2004) The photobook: a history Volume I. London: Phaidon.

Despite those influences, Ruscha does not study or observe American vernacular architecture
in his Twentysix Gasoline Stations. The core concern of the book is ‘the idea of anonymous, me-
chanical reproduction.’ (Hatch, 2005) Not only do the stations happen to be repeatable stereo-
typed buildings, but photography as a medium implies reproducibility. Benjamin (1935) wrote:
An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they
lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emanci-
4
 pates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of
art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for
example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.
Ruscha questioned ‘the notion of the priviledged original well before this became a common
postmodern theoretical move’. (Hatch, 2005) He noted in 1965 interview, ‘Mine are simply re-
productions of photos. Thus, it is not a book to house a collection of art photographs — they
are technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots.’
(Schwartz, 2002)

It is well known, though, that Ruscha’s photographs are not generic ‘technical data.’ They pre-
serve a personal connection to the artist: a road he took from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City,
swimming pools he frequented, records that are in his collection. ‘Seen in this light, Ruscha’s
books seem to hold in tension two antagonistic poles in the theory of photography, which might
be provisionally labeled the “representational” and the “referential/indexical,” and which would
later find their most forceful advocates in John Tagg and Roland Barthes, respectively.’ (Hatch,
2005)

This coexistence of two antitheses, personal and anonymous, makes it hard to define the es-
sence of the book. It is not just a dry technical index, as ‘the sequence of stations moves more
or less from west to east, it cannot be reduced to a simple mapping from origin to destination.’
(Hatch, 2005) On the order of the photographs in Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Hickey (1997)
wrote in his Artforum article:
The book was arranged, then, so that our progress through its pages, left to right, was roughly analo-
gous to our progress across a map from west to east, while the narrative obviously recounted a journey
from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City and back. Thirteen tanks of gas one way and thirteen the other!
How cool! I thought, How Pop-Joycean! And then, for reasons I can only attribute to Ruscha’s subtle
genius, I counted the unnumbered pages. There were fifty-two of them, front and back, including the
covers — twenty-six individual pages! Somehow, I had known there would be, and, clearly, if we moved
through this book as we move across a map, as we move across America, and the number of physical
pages corresponded to the number of objects depicted… well, hell, it all might mean something! The
complete object might be speaking to us in some odd language of analogue and incarnation.
In Ruscha’s bookwork, the arrangement of paper contributes to the sequence of photographs.
In Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), the last nine pages of the book are left intentionally blank,
and the sense of a narrative is even more fleeting than in Stations. However, the images ‘must
be visualized as playing out over time, given the sequential format of the book. Manipulation of
temporality is made explicit in the pair of non sequiturs with which the book ends: the photo-
graph of the glass of milk, and the nine blank pages that follow.’ It is the moment when the se-
quence of the book becomes not visual, but conceptual. (Hatch, 2005)

Another crucial detail is the caption. According to Benjamin (1935), modern photography relies
on them heavily:
They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They
stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to
put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become
obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The
directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become
even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to
be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
For Benjamin, the sequence of a film contributes to the narrative, and caption rules over the im-
age, and in Ruscha’s case, captions do quite the opposite. (Hatch, 2005) They name what is in
the image ­— and in the book, creating a tautology. Or, in Some Los Angeles Apartments, a mess,
when names of the buildings in the photographs are (mis)matched with names of the buildings
in captions. ‘At other moments, photographed signage appears to repeat and hyperbolize the

5
caption. “200 N. Rampart” is echoed by the words “Rampart Manor” on the blank facade of the
building, adding emphasis to the initial, expressionless, denotative address.’ (Hatch, 2005)

It may seem that there is no logic in Ruscha’s books. But, as LeWitt (1967) puts it, ‘Conceptual
art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at
times only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist to lull the
viewer into the belief that he understands the work.’ He concluded his Paragraphs on Conceptu-
al Art with the subject of physicality, and according to LeWitt, three-dimensional art can only be
used in a ‘paradoxical way.’ It is exactly the way Ruscha uses his photobooks, and ‘the question
of who or what is in charge (author or practice, subject or object) is consistently left undecided.’
(Hatch, 2005)

Ruscha’s books today are not the same that he made in the 1960s. Walker (2012) wrote:
Not only does it show us a landscape that has long disappeared, but how we think about the book has
also changed, and this is because of the contextualizations and recontextualizations that have formed
around it.
Ruscha’s bookwork have also changed the way we see photographs in a book. The photobook
is no longer an all-accepting surface — the container became as valuable as the images it con-
tained. ‘The meaning of Twentysix Gasoline Stations still lies as much in its layout and typog-
raphy, its presence as an object, as it does in the twenty-six photographs it contains.’ (Walker,
2012)

Figure 4. Ed Ruscha, ‘Hands Flipping Pages’, 1963.

DI BELLO P., WILSON C., ZAMIR S. (2012) The Photobook: From Talbot to
Ruscha and Beyond. London: I.B.Tauris.

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Chapter 3. Those pictures are <not> taken by me
‘There is a genre of photobook that might be made by someone who is not even a photographer,
comprised entirely of ‘found’ imagery, where the photograph might be considered simply as a
building block in a potentially new structure.’ (Parr & Badger, 2004) In 2007 Roma Publishers
of Amsterdam published a book by Batia Suter called Parallel Encyclopedia. The book is a thick
tome full of images collected over the years by the author. The sequence of the images is cine-
matic, exploring the notion of the collective past. It is an example of how ‘a well-made book can
bring a group of photographs to life’ (Parr & Badger, 2004) and of an artist who is not a photog-
rapher but uses photography.

In the age of not mechanically but digitally reproduced images, the existence of a photobook
of this encyclopaedial kind is reasonable. Fisher (2012) wrote: ‘What haunts the digital cul-de-
sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth
century taught us to anticipate.’ It is tempting to construct narratives out of archives since they
became a commodity akin to gas stations, material that is just there, waiting to be transformed.
The space and time of producing an image are lost — a photograph is acquired in seconds via
the Internet in no time.

The archives are found in the material world as well. Sheringham (2016) wrote: ‘I think the city as
archive is something that opens up when we use the city in particular ways. Or perhaps cruise
rather than use, as what’s involved is a non-utilitarian take on the urban.’ The role of the photog-
rapher is that of a mobile device, capturing the mundane and turning it into poetry.

An example of this approach would be seen in the work of Hiromix (Toshikawa Hiromi), the
ex-student of Nobuyoshi Araki. Her photobook, Girls Blue, ‘is deter­minedly upbeat, focusing
on the pop-consumerism of the young urbanite of relative affluence — a lifestyle dominated by
clothes, shopping malls, fast-food outlets, and young men, to which Hiromix, like her subjects,
clearly subscribes.’ (Parr & Badger, 2004) The book is a colorful collage of images, uses almost
no white space, and looks like a feed of photographs on a phone screen. The author makes
nude self-portraits, mocking the way in which women are portrayed by male photographers.

Hiromix’s teacher Nobuyoshi Araki himself has experimented with various styles and ways of
making books. ‘But the figure who has attained an international reputation to rival Araki’s is Hi-
roshi Sugimoto, whose approach is the antithesis. With work as austere, precise and elegant as
a Zen garden, Sugi­moto has a natural propensity for deluxe, limited-edition books, as precisely
engineered as a machine.’ (Parr & Badger, 2004)

Sugimoto works only in series with a carefully measured approach, close to personal dogmas.
His main subjects are nature, religion, time, science, and their interactions. The analog process
is primary, minimalism and perception are key. Parr & Badger (2004) describe his work:
‘Everything he does is fastidious and exquisite.Three of his most renowned series have been published
in deluxe photobooks that uphold the finest Japanese traditions, and match Eikoh Hosoe’s books of the
1960s in terms of complex packaging. The series are quite different from each other in terms of subject
matter, but similar in conception and execution. Each is based on the repetition of a single static view,
in the manner of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and each also makes intel­ligent use of the effects of long
exposure times.’
In the case of Sugimoto’s photobooks, an artist book is an almost purely visual and sensual
experience with their brushed aluminum covers and silk-covered slipcases. Accordion folding
of the Sea of Buddha is done to achieve a combination of modernity and tradition, which goes in
line with the exploration of time done in the series.

Both Sugimoto and Hiromix use their own photographs to construct their series. Batia Suter’s

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Encyclopedia is a combination of found imagery. In both cases, the book design plays a crucial
role, making a book something other than a surface. The photobook is a fact that happens, an
artwork in its own right. Carrion (1975) wrote that a book ‘exist as an autonomous and self-suffi-
cient form, including perhaps a text that emphasizes that form, a text that is an organic part of
that form: here begins the new art of making books.’ In 2010 film by Wetzel & Adolph, Steidl said:
‘I don’t describe my books as industry products. They are “multiples”. A “multiple” is an idea that
is developed by an artist but that is carried out by a technical person.’

In the case of represented photography, the book becomes a vehicle of appropriation. In a way
similar to Ruscha’s, Doug Rickard titled his book A New American Picture, a declarative title that
basically describes the contents of the book. The book consists of photographs of the comput-
er monitor with opened Google Street View. The agent is not Rickard, but Google, yet the book
allows Rickard to introduce the voice of the author to the images.

If the book is ‘executed with consistency and visual intelligence’ (Parr & Badger, 2004), it gains
‘the ability to move and provoke in a way unintended by its makers — that is to say, it has the cap-
asity to display a distinctive photographic or book voice.’

Conclusion
This essay followed the process of evolution of the contemporary photobook and outlined a path
that led the photobook to become something other than a surface.

The definitions cited in the first chapter gave an understanding of what was generally perceived
as a functional photobook from the earliest publications. It is established that photobooks were
usually inspired by and translated into a certain topic. The chapter concludes with a definition of
a functional photobook that is a space for a photographic narrative.

The second chapter introduces the works of Ed Ruscha and explains their significant impact on
the design of future photobooks. The chapter also explains how and why various attempts to la-
bel Ruscha’s books Pop or Conceptual are not fruitful, as ‘a Ruscha photobook constitutes more
than a Conceptualist gesture but less than a formalist statement, more than a documentary but
less than a critical negation of art photography. Rather, it quite happily exacerbates the various
gaps in between.’ (Hatch, 2005)

Looking back at the final chapter, it is mostly examples of the evolved approach to photobook
design. The notion of photography became mixed-up with the notions of archive, nostalgia, dig-
ital ephemera, vernacular, etc. The function of the photobook changed from a surface to an art
form.

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