1
PBR 002 spring 2012
The act of sequencing is just as creative, and often just
as intuitive, as the act of making the individual pictures.
GERRY BADGER
It’s Narrative, But Not as We Know It . . . Sequencing the Photobook
Once you think you know what kind of story you are trying to
tell, the first step in making a photobook is to make a rough
selection of the pictures you want to include, and make a pre-
liminary sequence, which you will edit and refine until you are
satisfied that it’s as good as it can be. It’s not only the first step,
it’s the most crucial, because it fundamentally affects the final
narrative of the book. Sequencing by itself does not necessarily
constitute the whole narrative, or meaning of the work, but it
lies at the heart of it.
The process is simple enough. Most photographers take
small work prints and spread them out on the floor or on a ta-
ble, and begin shuffling them together in groups. These days,
you can put low-res files into a program like Powerpoint or
iPhoto and play with them on the computer screen. This has
the advantage of being able to save the selection process at
various intervals, in case of a later change of mind.
Others prefer to use the old-fashioned method of rough
work prints or Xeroxes, and handmade, “cut-and-paste”
dummies or maquettes. For his highly regarded Redheaded
Peckerwood (MACK, 2011), Christian Patterson made a se-
ries of handmade dummies and posted photographs of them
on Facebook in order to elicit feedback. (See pp. 10–11 for
a discussion between Patterson and Ken Schles about the
making of this photobook dummy.) William Klein tells the
story of how, many years ago, he made the maquette for his
masterpiece, New York (Editions du Seuil, 1956). He was
able to use one of the first Photostat machines in the New
York offices of Vogue—which took up a whole room, he
recalls—and make copies of his pictures at different sizes,
which goes some way to explaining the dynamism of the de-
sign and layout of the book.
Sequencing is generally an intuitive business, a mat-
ter of trial and error and much contemplation, testing out
ideas as you progress. Some photographs just look right to-
gether, others don’t. John Gossage says you shouldn’t try to
sequence more than six, eight, or ten photographs at a time,
making up a section that you then put alongside another sec-
tion. Sometimes it helps to have someone else there to bounce
ideas off of and get a view in tandem. Photographers on their
own can sometimes be too close to the pictures. Robert Adams
works with his wife, Kirsten, as the pictures are laid out on the
floor. They deal with one double-page spread at a time, but it
is essential, says Adams, that you keep the totality in your mind
at the same time, a point with which Gossage agrees.
British photographer Jem Southam says he is thinking
about sequencing as he makes each picture. He uses a large-
format camera so he has time to plan and think about every
image and where it might be placed in a book. He compares
the whole business of sequencing to building a brick struc-
ture from the inside. You don’t really see what you’ve got, or
whether it will stand up, until you complete it.
Yet, while the whole book must be kept in mind, and
some photographers may have the whole thing worked out be-
forehand, the act of sequencing is just as creative, and often
just as intuitive, as the act of making the individual pictures.
Frequently, sequencing can change the story, if not overall, at
least in its nuances and detail.
I keep using the term story to define the narrative, but
in a photobook, we are generally not talking about a story in a
strict sense, more about constructing a framework for the im-
ages. Photography does not narrate like words, or even like a
film. A photograph is not a word (or even a thousand of them),
and a sequence of photographs is not a sentence or a para-
graph. The photographic sequence of course is related closely
to a scene, or scenes in a film, and yet when constructing a se-
quence it is also useful to compare its narrative flow to a piece
of music. Like a film editor, a photo-editor or a photographer
putting together a sequence needs to make use of filmic and
musical qualities like point and counterpoint, harmony and
contrast, exposition and repeat. There should be an ebb and
flow to a photobook’s narrative, and it should build naturally,
if not to a climax, at least to a resolution. The musical analogy,
I feel, is a useful one, because most photographic sequences
are more abstract in actuality than they might appear, even
when the photography is “documentary” in nature. When I
use the word story in relation to photobook sequencing, I am
referring to the work’s meaning, not a specific storyline in the
conventionally understood sense.
It can be daunting when faced with a group of photo-
graphs, not knowing quite where to begin. So many photog-
raphers fall back upon models with which they are familiar
www.aperture.org/pbr THE PHOTOBOOK REVIEW
Sequencing Part
This is part one of a two-part contribution on sequencing as a critical, syntactical element of
the photobook. The second part, in which additional approaches are addressed, will appear in
PBR 003. On the next page, a second perspective on sequencing is offered by Tate Shaw.
when structuring a book, even although the pictures them-
selves might be quite radical. Indeed, the overall structural
framework can often be quite simple, and once that is in place,
sophistication and complexity can follow, by orchestrating the
internal voicings within and between the images.
One thing about laying out a photobook is clear. A strong
image, or a few strong images at the beginning, makes for a
strong start. And the same can be said for the end.
A great example is the first picture in Walker Evans’s
American Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1938). It is of
a neighborhood photographer’s shop, and outlines the themes
of the book in a single picture—stating immediately that the
book is about the dignity of the vernacular and the handmade,
extolling the virtues of the small business and common man
over the faceless corporation. The combination of text and
photographic imagery in the picture signifies that American
Photographs depicts not only photographs of America, or pho-
tographs by an American, but also demonstrates the place of
photographs and textual signage in the landscape.
Evans reiterates this ambitious program in the next ten
pictures or so, one of the best opening groups of images in any
photobook. He repeats ideas, counterpointing them, playing
with them, as in the famous Penny Picture Display, which also
emphatically reiterates the primary theme of the book—Evans
himself laying down a gauntlet for the future of photography,
both as an important force within society, and as a significant
means of expression.
One of the most obvious ways of at least beginning a se-
quence is to lay the photographs out chronologically. You have to
start somewhere; telling the story in “real time” is as good a way
as any—that is, adopting a linear narrative. Initially, if you think
about it, making a photobook is the opposite of making a film,
although frequently the photographer and the filmmaker end
up in the same place. Photographs are made “in sequence,” as
it were, but not necessarily assembled that way. Few photogra-
phers are like Jem Southam, sequencing as they shoot. Movies,
on the other hand, are frequently shot entirely out of sequence,
but assembled in order. In both arts, you end up with a narrative
that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but (remembering
Jean-Luc Godard), not necessarily in that order.
Because it mirrors the way in which photographs are tak-
en, one of the most popular narrative forms for the photobook
is the journey. So many photographers take trips to photograph
and some of the best-known photobooks have adopted the jour-
ney model, especially in America, where the road trip seems an
almost obligatory rite of passage for young American photog-
raphers. Let’s take a look, for instance, at two classic American
photographic road trips—Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline
Stations (Self-published, 1962), and Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the
Mississippi (Steidl, 2004). The basic form of the trip, or trips,
each photographer took is in there somewhere, an underlying
framework to the book’s other themes, in the case of Soth. In
Ruscha it is the primary theme, at least nominally.
Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi is also about charac-
ters and experience, but in addition has a keen sense of place, and
how the land (and the river) has shaped the America he depicts.
He begins in Minnesota, where he lives, and ends in Louisiana,
so the north to south course of the river, and the shape of his trip
(or trips), is maintained. He meanders, but only a little, during
the course of the book. What is more important, however, is
that he utilizes an extremely useful narrative device, common in
literature, and in certain poetry, but especially crucial in music.
That is the leitmotif (leading motif), a tune or musical phrase
that a composer inserts into a composition at intervals to ground
the listener and pull them home when the music wanders and
takes off. In jazz, it would be a repeated riff on saxophone or
whatever, again interpolated to remind one of home base when
the improvisation begins to get a little too far out.
In Mississippi, Soth’s leitmotif appears in the third picture,
which is of an item belonging to a famous midwesterner, Charles
Lindbergh—his childhood bed from Little Falls, Minnesota,
where the aviator grew up. Pictures of beds and mattresses
punctuate Soth’s narrative, functioning both as a symbol of home
and journeying. The beds, as Soth says, are like Lindbergh’s
plane and Huck Finn’s raft—“vehicles for dreaming.” But take
note—the leitmotif, while it has a degree of narrative force, and
is therefore significant, is primarily a structural device. Although
it can be, it is not necessarily the narrative core.
Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations is another
interesting case of a photobook sequence built around the
journey. The book is derived from Ruscha’s journeys from Los
Angeles, where he lived and worked, back to see his folks in
Tulsa, Oklahoma. He shot around sixty photographs, and ed-
ited them down to the twenty-six by taking out any he felt were
too “interesting.”
If ever there was a case for presenting the images in a
pure linear narrative, here it is, in the first “conceptual” photo-
book. And we begin the sequence in Los Angeles and finish near
Tulsa (actually in Groom, Texas, suggesting the return trip). But
five of the pictures are placed out of strict sequence. The west-
east nature of the journey is maintained, but even here, with
such a strong structural framework established, the bookmaker’s
imperative remains how the images interact in the pages.
Beyond Borders (White Press, 2010), by the German-
Lebanese photographer, Frederic Lezmi, is a search for both
the photographer’s roots and the troubled history of the rela-
tionship between Occident and Orient. As an “Oriental” living
in Germany, some people tended to put him in a box, as he put
it. His German grandfather had remarked in the 1920s that
“behind Vienna the Orient begins,” so he determined to look
at the box in which he had been placed by making an overland
trip from Austria to Beirut, and looking at signs in the land-
scape to determine where Occidental and Oriental cultures
begin to collide. In Lezmi’s case, it was logical to sequence the
book in accordance with the logic of the route, as we gradually
leave the West and enter the East. Lezmi then reinforces the
sense of discovery and things unfolding in the book’s physical
structure. The book consists of one long leporello (accordion)
fold that opens out like an Asian scroll and displays the whole
trip from beginning to end if the viewer so desires.
Speaking of leporello folds, Ruscha of course used this de-
vice in his other great photobook masterpiece, Every Building
on the Sunset Strip (Self-published, 1966). It’s a journey too, of
sorts—an endless journey, as we wander down the city blocks
that comprise L.A.’s Sunset Strip, then wander back again up
the other side of the street.
The journey, then, is an extremely useful strategy for con-
structing a coherent photographic sequence. It’s a kind of safety
net, if you like. But there are photographers who like to oper-
ate without the benefit of obvious safety nets when sequencing
their imagery. One of these is New York–based photographer,
Roe Ethridge.
Ethridge is known for being a multi-style photographer.
His work derives from various kinds of photography, from clas-
sic modernism to advertising and commercial tropes. Ethridge’s
photographic voice is defined by eclecticism, and by the bound-
aries of his own sensibility within this diversity. So how do you
sequence a Roe Ethridge book with what one might term this
mix ’n’ match approach? The short answer, perhaps, is with dif-
ficulty, in that the multiplicity of styles makes for an inherently
fractured narrative, with incoherence never far away, even when
there is the unifying factor of at least a nominally shared sub-
ject matter, as in his recent book Le Luxe (MACK, 2011). It is
a tightrope walking act—sans safety net—requiring a very sure
sense of what you are trying to do. Ethridge books should pos-
sibly come with a warning: Don’t try this at home!
Ethridge himself uses a musical analogy, saying that he
combines his images in fugal fashion. The fugue is a classical
music form, with strict rules. But all good artists break rules,
and Ethridge is not afraid to do that. It’s only an analogy for his
method, anyway, essentially a question of theme and variations.
In a podcast interview with Roxana Marcoci, of the Museum of
Modern Art, Ethridge explained further. He mentioned a se-
quence of photographs based around the loose theme of fall,
beginning with a photograph of a pumpkin that was itself allu-
sive, because it wasn’t a real pumpkin, but a sticker depicting a
pumpkin. A photograph of a photograph of an object associated
with fall.
The pumpkin reference was relatively straightforward, but
some of the variations had the loosest connection with fall. That,
however, was the point. By playing with multiple styles and sub-
ject by association, Ethridge has to work extremely hard to get
his effect, but so does the viewer to “get” Ethridge at more than
a superficially aesthetic level.
GERRY BADGER , a photography critic for nearly
thirty years, is himself a photographer, as well as an
architect and curator. He has written for dozens of
periodicals and his previous books include The
Photobook: A History, Volumes I and III, coauthored with
Martin Parr, and The Pleasures of Good Photographs
(Aperture, 2010).
3