THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY VOLUME III | pagina's 210/211
Rating: 4.5/5 
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s ambitious series The Photobook: A History is a blessing and a curse. These are essential reference books for anyone interested in photography, and especially for the photobook collector. The volumes include titles that the seasoned collector may well own—I am lucky to have books from each volume in my own photobook library. But watch your checkbook.
Parr and Badger’s subjective histories potentially send the acquisitive personality on a hunt for elusive, pricy books they may have heard of but can’t afford, or that amazing Dutch or Japanese photobook they never knew existed. Get out your credit cards, or if you’re lucky, your library card.
The doorstopper tomes each feature a few hundred photobooks. Parr is himself the author of some, one of which, The Non-Conformists, I reviewed here last year. Parr and critic Gerry Badger select the books for inclusion in each volume, and Badger contributes text that puts the book into historical context. The text can be dry, but what you come for is the photography, artful covers and selected page-spreads laid out in tantalizing miniature, with detailed publication information to aid your acquisitive fever.
The first volume of Parr and Badger’s survey was published in 2004. In the 10 years since, the market has changed. The latest volume continues the historical survey with important post-war books left out of previous volumes, but the emphasis is on the contemporary photobook. If you follow these trends at all, you will recognize titles that reflect the state of the collector’s market.
And what a market! Photobooks are frequently published in runs of a few hundred copies, if that. When that first printing is gone, prices can skyrocket. I still think about the handful of times I had a chance to buy Cristina DeMiddel’s The Afronauts, first at its original cost of $40, then as the asking price went to three figures and finally a limited edition that was out of my budget at $250. Last I checked, that limited edition goes for $5,000 and up, for a book whose thousand copies went on sale in spring 2012 and fetched high prices in a matter of months.
The contemporary photobook is an art object and an investment, edutainment and fetish. DeMiddel’s book is one of the recent titles featured in Volume III’s final section, called “Cannibalizing Photography: Representing and Re-Presenting the Medium.” The chapter covers one of the most exciting developments in the medium, the rise of collections of found and repurposed photography. Such collections can shift the emphasis in a photobook away from the photographer to the editor. Volume III represents one of the most inventive editors, Erik Kessels, with a title from his series In Almost Every Picture, which takes the vernacular photo trend to a new level. These books take the kind of photos you find at flea markets, not as discrete snapshots but as an entire body of work, as in the volume of souvenir photos made at a Montreal restaurant in which patrons had their picture taken feeding a piglet out of a milk bottle.
The Photobook: A History Volume III is such a dense tome that I could write a full review about every chapter. The authors divide it into sections on Propaganda (also covered in Volume 1), Protest, Desire and other themes, with the caveat that a book may well fit into more than one category. The fluid categories lend an element of surprise to a narrative that doesn’t follow a straight line. The chapter on Propaganda encompasses the kind of political works you expect, but also includes a meat catalog from Czechoslovakia as well as a book promoting tourism in Marienbad, in which clever design combines with ordinary images to make a book that sings.
This is a theme that comes up again and again: a good photobook is more than a collection of good photographs. A fully-realized book marries design, image and text into a coherent narrative that is a work of art in its own right.
This volume, and perhaps the series, ends with a look to the future of photography: Google Street View. Doug Rickard poured through terabytes worth of street view images to put together his 2010 book A New American Picture. Rickard used this anonymous technology to capture the life of the underprivileged in America, and selected images that referenced the work of classic street photographers.
Throughout The Photobook: A History Volume III, Parr and Badger note the rise of Flickr and Facebook, and the seemingly bottomless pit of photography online. The challenge of the photobook consumer and creator is more than just sorting out one’s own aesthetic, but making sense of the image saturation that we face on a daily basis.
Physical books that expand the form, like The Afronauts, continue to appear, but that elusive book points to another direction for the future, one that the authors allude to but do not select for inclusion. DeMiddel’s highly collectable book has since been released in an affordable iPad version. But if a digital experience is what you want, what are you doing with this hardcopy contender that weighs in at over five pounds? The audience for this book, bibliophile and photographer alike, already knows they want it. I’m just going to confirm that they need it.
Actueel | 24 maart 2014 | Door: PhotoQ
Groot aantal Nederlandse fotoboeken in Volume III van Parr/Badger
In het zojuist verschenen derde deel van The Photobook: A History staan net als in de eerste twee delen van dit internationale standaardwerk over fotoboeken 22 titels van Nederlandse fotografen en ontwerpers.
Samenstellers Gerry Badger en Martin Parr richten zich in Volume III van hun gezaghebbende overzicht op de periode vanaf de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Op een bepaalde manier is dit boek een uitwerking van het hoofdstuk ‘Modern Life’ uit Volume II, aldus Badger en Parr. Volume I verscheen in 2004, Volume II in 2006.
In de drie delen worden meer dan 700 titels getoond en beschreven. De publicatie van deze overzichten sloot aan bij de wereldwijd groeiende populariteit van het fotoboek. De eerste twee delen zijn invloedrijke naslagwerken geworden. Zo leidde opname van titels inThe Photobook vaak tot grotere verkopen en stijgende prijzen. Dat zal voor Volume III vast niet anders zijn.
Een opsomming van de in Volume III opgenomen boeken van Nederlandse fotografen en ontwerpers:
• Blauwe Maandag, 1975, verschillende fotografen, over de Nieuwmarktrellen, ontwerp Albert Blitz en Loe van Nimwegen
• Bisnisjongens/On the Game, 2006, Rob Philip, ontwerp Ineke Teeninga
Florian Van Roekel // How Terry Likes His Coffee from haveanicebook on Vimeo.
• De Politiekapel van Suriname, 2010, Sara Blokland, ontwerp Willem van Zoetendaal
• Infidel, 2010, Tim Hetherington, ontwerp Heijdens Karwei
• Sochi Singers, 2012, Rob Hornstra en Arnold van Bruggen, ontwerp Kummer + Herrman
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