Live Mediocre, Love Mediocre, Be Mediocre.

Detail from The True Golden Age of Photobooks  from the South Netherlands School: Reviewers critique photographers of mediocre dummies during he 1475 Brussels Photobook Festival.

Why this is not the Golden Age for Photobooks! That's the title of this article that appeared in Time yesterday. 

In some ways it's not. Dewi Lewis and Maarten Schilt ( both book publishers) mention how, in one way, this supposed  Golden Age can't be a golden age because the Golden part of it is not translating into sales of photobooks through traditional photobook publishers.

Looked at from that perspective, the Golden Age of Photobooks was probably sometime in the 1950s when there were very few photobook publishers around and the highest grossing photobooks would sell in the tens of thousands - much as Kim Kardashian's Selfie does now (so what's changed?).

The other reason that is cited for it not being the Golden Age of Photobooks is the over-elaborate design of photobooks. It simply isn't feasible for publishers to make photobooks with masses of inserts, glued in post-it notes, tipped in photos, or elaborate folding mechanisms. 

In the same way that it isn't feasible for booksellers to stock or sell these books easily; they bend, they break, they don't stack. But that is the bookseller perspective (it's the same perspective that has Rudi Thoemmes of RRB cursing white books - 'Why does anyone publish white books!' he says. 'They're hell to sell because they mark so easily and you can't sell a dirty copy').

Which is not to say that white books are inherently wrong. And nor are intricately designed books. There is no reason that a photobook should come in its traditional form. And having books that are different to what we expect makes it fun, engages us, gives us something nice to touch; I like books that integrate different layers and use texts, folds, and papers in different ways, or come in boxes, or are covered in felt, or have bits of plastic in them, or little pop-ups, or musical accompaniments, or look like playing cards, or come with a poster, or are a poster... or a jigsaw...or a production line. 

And truth be told, none of these designs are new, but they are popping up all over the place left, right and centre simply because people can make them. And they are coming into trade photobook publishers too, despite all the costs and difficulties involved.

The argument is that the design often disguises the mediocrity of the book, and that there are too  many mediocre books. Too true. There are so many mediocre books it is sometimes hard to fathom exactly why they were made. And as well as the mediocre self-published books that come with a fancy design that isn't going to stack on a shelf, there are the mediocre books made by trade publishers that do stack on a shelf. 

And although this is slightly unfair, when it's a toss-up between a mediocre book made with a boring design and a mediocre book made with a chaotic and experimental (and maybe not always terribly well thought-out) layout that goes beyond InDesign, I'll take the latter any day of the week. 

I've heard lots of people argue against mediocrity. "Do you want to contribute to the ongoing mediocrity of photography?" is something Martin Parr said to a friend when he showed him his work. It's a great quote and one that we might bear in mind as we continue with our onward outpourings of pictures, books, exhibitions and writing. 

Excellence is much better than medicocrity. But then mediocrity is much better than downright dullness and stupidity. 

But at the same time, perhaps we should embrace mediocrity a bit more and accept it for what it is. Mediocrity is everywhere. You can see it in the booklists of trade publishers, you can see it in the tsunami of self-published books, you can look at in the pages of the BJP or the FT Magazine or Guardian Weekend or New York Times. If you watch films or read novels, good luck finding something that isn't mediocre, and as for TV, well shoot me and die,.. 

I'm writing a mediocre blog post and later will have a mediocre meal made with mediocre ingredients from a mediocre shop. And so on and so on and so on. 

Their is mediocrity everywhere in photography, even at the most prestigious of places. You will find it for sale at  Paris Photo, on show in Tate Modern or, in the next few weeks, on the book stalls at the Kassel, Bristol or Vienna Photobook festivals (and you'll also find excellence at all those places, make no mistake). 

But. that is to mistake what the enthusiasm is for photobooks in particular. It's not for the excellence of the books. It's for the process of production, promotion and dissemination and all the cack-handed discussion that goes on in the spaces in between. There is an energy about photobooks and the people who are involved in making them - and the fact that so many are self-publishing books or engaged in making dummies or short runs is part of that energy. It's a tactile energy that also translates into quite a positive social energy. It's a mixing of the physical and the visual and it does not really translate into financial reward - not for the photographers, nor the self-publishers, nor the booksellers. 

It's an energy related to photobooks at the moment and it creates a forum where people can experiment, try things out and express opinions. It's an active energy and a positive energy and one that is absent in other more rarified branches of photography where people are maybe more nervous about getting out of their ivory towers and expressing an opinion in public in a democratic manner. 

So if there is a Golden Age of the Photobook, it's not to do with sales, or design or excellence. It's really to do with that energy, positivity,  communication and lack of pretension of the people involved in photobooks enjoy. Essentially, the Photobook World is small, but it punches way above its weight just because there are so many people with so much to say involved in this world.  And when that energy ends or shifts elsewhere, or if it gets too incestuous, pretentious or self-consciously cool, or if it just reduces into an essential pointlessness, as it will one day do, then something else will have a Golden Age; the exhibition, the print, the projection, the decorated plate, whatever. Except of course it won't be a Golden Age at all. It'll just be smoke and mirrors. Because that's all anything is. 

More Reading: Why Publishing Never Had a Golden Age

Why Don't We Believe in Newspapers Anymore?

Mail Online Screenshot

I read Janina Struk's book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpreting the Evidence over Christmas. It was a really interesting perspective on images that we take for granted, on history that we take for granted.

And then I reread this article by Fred Ritchin in Time on the social contract of viewing photographs and the mass of photographs that are currently made. It starts like this.

During the last century, photographs of mass murder in Nazi Germany, Argentina, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia seared the civilized conscience with their revelations of barbarity. Some of the more irrefutable images were the most clinical, eschewing the empathy of the documentary observer while cataloging the horrors as a form of record-keeping, leaving it to the viewer to arrive at the moral calculus of each atrocity.

It's a great point to make, but even with the most horrific images, people don't always respond to pictures in the way they are supposed to. They never have. Compassion fatigue is nothing new and often it is shaped not so much by the images but by the places they are published, by the way they are framed. The moral compass has never pointed straight.

In her book, Struk talks about how holocaust images and films were shown in London at the end of the Second World War. Reactions to the images varied; 'In a Mass-Observation report, made to assess the response to atrocity films, one person who did not intend to see them said: 'I'm beginning to get fed up with all these pictures in the papers. I know it's very terrible and I was as horrified as anyone at the beginning... I do think they've overdone it... I mean you keep on looking at dead bodies heaped on top of each other - you just get used to it. Just as you get used to the idea of death all through the war.''

Ohter people felt disgusted not just with the photographs, but with the people in them for their grey skin and emaciated bodies. 'Such views,' writes Struk, 'may have been exaggerated by the dehumanizing way in which those liberated in the camps were often described in the press: 'pitiful specimens', 'the living dead', 'ape-like living skeletons', 'skeletons held together with rags', ' wrecks of humanity'.

People were often confused by the context in which the newsreels of the atrocities were shown; as a prelude to a Donald Duck film or as a short clip. One Mass-Observation respondent said, 'though the film is terrible, it's very short - too short to be properly convincing and of course you know quite well that the worst shots have been cut out. And then it's followed up by a Walt Disney, and that sort of removes any impression it made; people are laughing again within a minute. And it's all mixed up with a propaganda film about Noble London and how wonderful Londoners were in the Blitz, and that makes you feel the whole show really only is propaganda.'

So not everyone was shaken to their boots by these terrible images. They weren't shaken because the pictures were dehumanising, because the journalism that accompanied them was dehumanising, because they were shown in a context where they were surrounded either by entertainment or propaganda. Or maybe even because the publications in which they appeared shared, in some small way, the sense that these people who had been so callously killed were essentially foreign - they were regarded as Jews or Russians or Gypsies or Communists or Poles or.... pretty much anything except Western European (and this is a point Struk makes in the book).

And perhaps these same reasons are why photographs of atrocities today do not touch us in the way we think they should; because for them to touch us, the people they show need to be made real, they need to live and breathe and laugh and cry, they need to be about people who have lives we can understand. They need to be shown in media in which dehumanisation, stereotyping and war-mongering does not take place. They need to be shown in an appropriate context in publications that are free from propaganda and bias.

screenshot from Der Spiegel

And I don't think there are too many publications that can make that claim.

So maybe the problem isn't so much with the mass of photographs that are made as Ritchin suggests, but with the publications that show them. So instead of saying, Why Don't We Believe in these Pictures anymore, maybe we should ask Why Don't We Believe in these Newspapers Anymore? or Why Don't We Believe in these Broadcasters Anymore?

And Struk already answered that.

Photographing the Holocaust: Interpreting the Evidence is a really interesting book. Buy it at your local bookshop.