The Problem is Photobook World is not Incestuous Enough

picture by Eamonn Doyle

So the blog will take a short break for Photobook Bristol and Vienna Photobook Festival, both of which I'm looking forward to immensely

In Vienna I'll be talking about narrative and my German Family Album. And at Photobook Bristol I'll be on a panel with

Eamonn Doyle, Kate Nolan and Kazuma Obara

talking about their first photobooks, all of which are massively interesting, engaging and challenging in different ways and have featured on this blog. As well as talking about what went right and what went wrong with their books (and what they would do differently), I think the question of why publish a book in the first place will come up.



picture by Kate Nolan

It's a question that came up on the Photobooks Facebook page where questions were asked on the business model of photobook-land, its incestuousness and all the other usual questions that we repeatedly ask of photobookery.

Well of course Photobook World can be small and it can be an echo-chamber. But it's not really that incestuous. If something is incestuous then the group is closed. If anything, Photobook World is not incestuous enough. I think that is what people are really objecting to.

Sure, you do get the same voices popping up again and again, and you get cliques, but at the same time if you have something that is good and you want to be seen or heard, it's relatively easy. It's a very open world. And the more open you are and the more engaged and engaging you are, the easier it gets. The world of the Photobook is far more open than the equivalent photographic worlds in academia, art or commerce.



picture by Kazuma Obara

Look at the end of year best lists and you'll see names that  were completely unknown a few years earlier. On the 2014 list from Photo-Eye. you had people like Laia Abril, Nicolo Degiorgis, Max Pinckers, Andy Rochelli, Alejandro Cartagena, Momo Okabe, Awoiska van der Molen. 

Go back a year to 2013 and you can see Pierre Liebaert, Lorenzo Vitturi, Oscar Monzon, Carlos Spottorno, Mike Brodie, Carolyn Drake and Paul Gaffney. 

Go to 2015 and 2016 and you'll get people on there who are still students now. Guaranteed.

These are people who have popped up out of nowhere (or almost nowhere) simply because they made something interesting, int he same way that Doyle, Nolan and Obara made something interesting. So you can make it 'big' in photobook world, make an interesting book. It's that simple. 

Of course very few people have heard of these people outside photobook land, but that's because if you're going spend £20 on a book of pictures, you have to be really interested in photography and books. Not many people are. There are other things to spend one's money on. 

But the openness I do not doubt. And if you worry about the world being limited by a handful of tastemakers, the answer is also simple. Write a blog, start a magazine, have an opinion and get busy. 

So sometimes when people talk about photobook world being too closed, I sometimes get the feeling they mean the opposite; that it's too open.

Italy: Crass, Cheap and Nasty!

all pictures by Simone Donati from Hotel Immagine

You sold me to an old man, father
May god destroy your home; I was your daughter


Making love to an old man
Is like fucking a shrivelled cornstalk black with mould

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

These are landays, 2-line poems from Afghanistan that 'have long been used by Afghan women as a secretive form of rebellion' (read more about landays here). The ones above don't hold back and provide a view of life that is harsh, uncensored without the involvement of the self-justifying male filtering mechanism (of the 'actually, women have a lot of informal power, bla bla bla' kind).

The landays hit the spot and they're brutal. After reading those poems, the reality of being fucked by a 'shrivelled cornstalk black with mould' has been made a little bit more real to me. It's a terrible image and the poem is drawing the big picture without flinching or worrying about anyone's sensibilities being hurt. There is no consideration for whoever might get upset by these poems, because however upset they get, their pain is but a pinprick compared to those women sold by their fathers, uncles and brothers into sexual bondage with 'cornstalks black with mould'.

After reading about the landays on Saturday morning, I got Simone Donati's Hotel Imagine in the post. It's a book about the popular iconography of contemporary Italy melting into their equivalents in politics.



So one way of looking at is is as a project about Italian identity in the new millennium. The starting points were two projects, 'Welcome to Berlusconistan' and 'Padre Pio Cult' that Donati did as individual editorial projects. But once these were done, Donati started to think about Italian society as a whole, what it had become and how it could be represented.

So there are images from fascist marches, pictures of fans at the Napoli training ground. and contestants queuing up to audition for 'Grande Fratello' (Big Brother), as well as images showing Italian crooners ('melodic singers'), race fans, and election night celebrations.

Individually the pictures are a survey of the collective Italian crowd mentality and they are straightforward a documentary/step-backs from a photojournalist approach, the opening up of the mise-en-scene that is repeated throughout the book.

So we see priests preparing for a prayer meeting at a football stadium attended by Mariya Pavlovic, a visionary who sees the Virgin Mary. Mixed in with that a stripper performs at a Grand Prix meeting, and we see Karima El Mahroug (Berlusconi was convicted for having sex with here when she was underaged), sitting sad-faced in the private are of the 'Paradiso Club'.



So it's fascism, politics, music, soaps, reality TV, and religion. There's sex and corruption and once you start adding it all together it ends up being an extreme cynical idealisation of Italian life. This is stupid Italy and maybe it's my imagination, or maybe it's me projecting the disgust you repeatedly hear Italians express for aspects of Italian life, but after a couple of viewings, it's almost as though Donati is spitting the pictures out.

There seems to be a disgust in there; at the triteness of it all, the easy fall into adulation, the upsurge of fascism, the seduction by a twinkly smile or a pair of breasts, the dumb populism, It's a book that answers the question, How Crass is Italy? And the answer is This Crass! And This Stupid!

Donati nails, in a very direct way what is wrong with Italy. Hotel Immagine is a book that could be paired nicely with Frederico Clavarino's more allegorical Italia O Italia, a book I describe as '...a deeply pessimistic book, one that uses the symbols of the past to relate the slow tragedy of a dying present. And in the end that isn’t just the story of Italy, it is the story of everywhere.'


Of course you could do the same thing for other countries. How Shit is the USA, France, China, Nigeria, Brazil, Australia, the UK?

Ah, the UK! It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. We do crap with a small c-, and without the compensations the Italians have (food, art, weather, architecture - we lose) But the cultural depictions of this country's crassness are constrained by a certain affection for its popular pastimes and traditions. Go to Only in England, the Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr show and there's a rooting of the images (which are Fantastic fantastic!) in the history of Pagan history, Wakes Week, Mass Observation and American street. It's kind and not savage at all in comparison.

It would be nice if it were savage. There is a lot to be savage about. We currently have a government that is dismantling the welfare state, employment laws, and human rights in a manner that rides roughshod over 150 years of campaigning and progress. The British people have bought into the dehumanising of the poor, the sick and the disenfranchised and embraced the values of a commodified, property-centred culture that is built on a bubble of imported corruption, greed and venality.

You can speak to pretty much anyone who works in photography and there is a recognition that this state of affairs is not represented. Nobody is doing those broad brush strokes on what it is to be British or English, on the snobbery, self-interest and cruelty that is devastating this country.

You can see this at all levels. Every year Source puts out its annual survey of student work. There are some great projects in there (from the University of South Wales where I teachs, Mira Andres, Sebastian Bruno and Isaac Blease have done some great work), but you can go through the different universities and colleges and there is virtually nothing on what is happening in the UK on a larger scale.

I appreciate that not everybody is interested in doing this kind of work, but when the absence is on such a scale, one wonders if there isn't some kind of systemic blindness to the world around us. There is little that is passionate, angry or concerned. And on such a scale it's a Roger Irrelevance in photographic form.

It's the kind of irrelevance that Tom Wolfe wrote about in his introduction to Bonfire of the Vanities, He talked about how back in the seventies he waited and waited for somebody to write the great American novel dealing with great American problems; the decline of the cities, social conflict, racial strife, the political class.

But nobody wrote it. American novelists were too busy dealing with the death of the novel, the death of the realism and their response was to come up with different kinds of novels - 'Absurdist novels, Magical Realist novels, and novels of Radical Disjunction'.

Wolfe waited and waited for somebody to write the great realist novel but it never came. So he wrote it and that's how Bonfire of the Vanities was born. It's a story in which story-telling and realism come together perfectly. It's entertaining, savagely funny, but comes with a bitter heart of cynicism and a cold gimlet eye.

Hotel Immagine has a similar bitter heart and so do the poems featured at the top of this post. So that's Italy and Afghanistan covered. But what about Britain? There's plenty of bitterness here, we're drowning in it. But what about the photography? Where are our landays, our Bonfire of the Vanities, our Hotel Immagines? You get the feeling it to is wallowing in its visual equivalents of  'Absurdist novels, Magical Realist novels, and novels of Radical Disjunction'. Which is all well and good but of little interest to anybody beyond the photographers themselves and the photo-world of which they are part.

I think if we want to get an audience and have a voice as mentioned in last week's posts on the Golden Age of Photobooks, then we need to think about the grand narratives and what is actually happening in our world. Donati and others are doing that for Italy. It would be nice for people to do it in the UK (and thank you Zed Nelson for your piece on property in London). And maybe think about it a bit. And get angry about it a bit. And have an opinion about it a bit. And not be afraid to do so.



Buy Hotel Immagine here.

Vienna Photobook and the Entertainment of Photography

"My mother was quite disappointed. She hardly knew him. But my father thought my mother was wonderful and he was very happy. Emotionally, he was a fairly reticent person; he would happily give me a great bear hug but for the finer things he wasn’t quite with it. So really my mother wasn’t that happily married but did her duty."


So my talk at Vienna is going to be about my German Family Album (you can see some of the pictures here and more of them here) and the stories that Photobooks can tell.

The problem for me is how do you tell family stories, and they are quite tragic and sad story when those stories are overshadowed by the horrors of Nazi Germany.

How can I uncover the layers of different histories through the conflicting recollections and non-recollections of family members? How can I organise the mixed strata of a series of family albums; albums in which there are both the conventional representations of family life as well as pictures where little cracks appear, ambiguities become apparent and an ultimate sadness of life in 1930s Germany is brought to the fore.

It's White Ribbon meets Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (aka Generation War), and it is devilishly difficult to do.

The problem is combining a visual narrative with a textual one, while negotiating the interference caused by the mass of film, literary and historical material on the matter, one in which my family is set squarely on the wrong side. It doesn't give much leeway. How can I tell the story with pictures and words and is it a story worth telling? The reason for making this the subject of my talk is to give me some ideas, but to be honest it has only confused me more.

But it has given me an excuse to revisit some great photobooks and see how they handle telling a story, and that has revealed to me how very rigorously people are engaging with story telling through photobooks.

One of the major problems with photobooks (which I mentioned in these posts from earlier this week on the supposed Golden Age of Photobooks) is they are subject to interference.

So often the tone is set through academia and this infects the timbre of the photobook. You find yourself seeing these great pictures, or really intelligent visual insights, but it's spoilt by the words that accompany it. This is why the day when photobooks become the subject of serious academic study is probably (not definitely because academic study can be a blessing) the day that all the energy and madness and chaos of the current photobook market is dissipated.

We all love Azoulay, Barthes and Baudrillard, but you are killing your audience if the book starts with the dense essay that ticks off the names of the usual suspects. It might tell people how educated you are in conventional photographic theory, but that really means diddly-squiddly to most people. If you want to tell people about your intelligence, rather than spending your £15,000 on making a photobook,  you might as well print a bunch of flyers saying how smart you are, and stand on the corner of the local High Street handing them out to whoever is daft enough to take them. You'll get a bigger audience and at a cost of say £100 (for 1,000 flyers if you design them yourself) you'll save yourself a bunch of money and get a far bigger readership.

But then I suspect that sometimes people don't want an open audience, they want an audience that is closed, an echo chamber of other people who are doing the same kind of thing, and the bigger the budget the amplifying effect it has on the statement you make. Which is fine, as long as you are self-aware enough to understand the essential tedium and irrelevance of the whole two-ring circus.

Making a successful photobook is not about ticking boxes or showing your scholarship. It is about telling a story well. Using pictures, using words, using design, using paper. It can be smart, it should be smart, but no matter what the subject, it should look outwards rather than inwards. That is where the energy comes from.

I read Primo Levi's If this is a Man and the Truce again recently. I  couldn't put it down because he tells the story (which is horrific) so brilliantly, uncovering the tiny, transactional details of the horrors of Auschwitz and revealing the psychological strengths and sheer good luck needed to survive. And he reveals the strange medieval chaos of the months he spent getting home after the war. It was like a Brueghel in print, being part of the this mass of moving forces in a Europe that was traumatised and stunned in equal measure. We recently had the Victory in Europe celebrations here in the UK, but reading the Truce just made VE Day seem so irrelevant and our UK wartime experience so easy in comparison.

So Primo Levi tells his story and he does it beautifull. He's a story teller and the story came out naturally. He said that If this is a Man was there in his head in Auschwitz and wrote itself.

Levi's book sold and so did Art Spiegelmann's Maus. Again this is a book where the focus is on reaching an audience and telling a story in an engaging manner. Spiegelmann was inspired to write about his father's experience in Auschwitz after seeing the trial of Adolf Eichmann shown live on American TV. This was the first documentary of its kind and one where there was the idea that the TV show was more than a sober documentary about the bringing to justice of a Nazi war criminal  - it was also a TV show. It was, in its own way, 'entertainment.'

I think photographers forget this sometimes. There are so many photographic niches (and all the interesting ones are tiny, tiny niches) that people get stuck in them and end up circling around in swirls of self-mystifing smoke.

A Sex-Pumpkin! You're Kidding Me. From All Quiet on the Home Front

Pictures get stuck in the mythology of visual narrative (which is why you'll see so many pictures of rocks, waves, lightning blasts, cloudscapes, blossom, hanging fruit branches and other daft symbolism in photobooks - I know that clouds, blossoms and all the rest have a great tradition but really...) and a self-sustaining editing mythology of pairings, breathing spaces and across-the-gutters as though we were all aspiring Brodovitchs, Kawauchis or Moriyamas (actually, they're all great things to be. Oh well, never mind) - while paying scant attention to things like text or storyline or a real narrative flow.


One of the reasons this might happen is because it is difficult to tell a story well. Another reason is that to tell a story well, you sometimes have to be brutal. Primo Levi was brutal, Art Spiegelmann was brutal. They wrote things that were incredibly difficult to say. Most of us baulk at saying things that are far less difficult to say. We do this because we're too polite, we're too afraid, or we have a false sense of ethics that helps to preserve our modesty.

At the recent Liverpool/Look Festival 15, one of the real standouts for everybody who saw it was Richard Ross' Juvenile in Justice. The pictures were fantastic but it was the captions that really did it; short, snappy captions that were so tragic and so revealing of what happens when the banality of how layer upon layer of poverty meets up with a punitive and discrimatory justice system.

But they didn't happen by accident. They were deliberately and coldly thought out to see how they could best affect the viewer. It was difficult but it had its effect and it took you right into the pictures and the lives of the young people who Ross photographed and beyond.

In that sense, it had more to do with modes of documentary or the Seven Basic Plots than with sequencing or layout and perhaps that's what photobook-makers need to address.

Though to be honest I think people are addressing that already. The Epilogue by Laia Abril, In the Shadow of the Pyramids by Laura El-Tantawy, Wild Pigeon by Carolyn Drake, Live Through This by Tony Fouhse or Echolilia by Timothy Archibald all tell very difficult stories using brave and complex combinations of image and text.

They don't bottle it in other words. And that should be a lesson to us all.

And that is what I'll be talking about in Vienna; my German Family Album and the photobooks that have tried and succeeded in telling a story in engaging and entertaining manner. With the hope that somewhere along the line that engagement and entertainment value will spread to me.

Photobooks: "These don't sell." Graphic Novels: "These do."

Yesterday's post looked at the Golden Age of Photobooks; the conclusion from this blog is that there is a huge amount of energy, creativity and communication going on. If there is a Golden Age, it's a Golden Age of energy.

It's also a Golden Age of experimentation; with layout, paper, design and ideas. That doesn't mean there is a flood of outrageously fantastic books. There isn't. There are lots of flawed books. But just because these books don't hit all the high notes, the sense of adventure, obsession, anger, passion or just plain oddness makes these books of interest. These are the books I feature on my blog, books where photographers are trying to do something different, where hard work, originality, wit or intelligence are being used.

There are also those books where people are making books because that's what you do, where there is no originality, where there is a grant that needs to be spent, research that needs to be ticked off or a stagnation of thought. They're a waste of time. These are boring, stupid, lazy books. Or just pointless. There are lots of those.

The Time article caused lots of debate in the small world of Photobook-Online Land. One question raised by a few people was should the audience be made bigger? Does it need to be made bigger? Or can it just continue on its merry way? And if it does need to be made bigger, is the current photobook world actually capable of appealing to a wider audience?

It's worth thinking of what appeals to a wider audience. So here is a list that I carefully thought out in the last five minutes. This is what a blog is for by the way. It is not a carefully edited thing. It is a piece of chaos. That's why it's enjoyable and so often madly wrong.

Engagement with (and Knowledge of) what's happening in the world
Engagement with (and knowledge of) different forms of narrative
Use of Social Media
Striking Pictures
The Ability to Tell a Story
The Ability to Be Direct
Understanding who you want your audience to be
Understanding Pricing/Design/Marketing
Self-awareness (of yourself and the limitations of photobook land) and the ability not to take yourself too seriously
Being Interesting
Not being boring


So I can flash back over the years and think of books and projects that hit those spots and get out to a wider audience. Laura El-Tantawy, Timothy Archibald, Lina Hashim are just a few people who really hit some of those spots hard over the years in different ways.

But sometimes you get too much indirectness, where the story isn't told, but rather we rejig photography's fascination with telling how the story is told. That can be done really well. Anouk Kruithof has done it fantastically well and in a way that's fun. That's her thing and she makes great books out of it.

But sometimes I wonder if we don't take ourselves too seriously. I think of Broomberg and Chanarin's People in Trouble Laughing and Falling to the Ground. It's the project where they went to the archive in Belfast, took a bunch of pictures out and then photographed the spaces below stickers that were used to show the pictures had been used. So instead of being a project about Belfast it's a project about the photography of Belfast.

I like the pictures. They are fun. They are funny. But they are not really framed that way and you wonder how it is that the best known photographic representation of an archive that covers the last 30 years of life in Northern Ireland is a piece about stickers on pictures;  the conflict of the time, the surface politics and the low-level domestic stress and anguish are by-the-by.

Maybe the archive is not very good. I don't know. I haven't seen it. But it does not seem quite right somehow. It's not as though all these stories of the tail end of the Troubles have been told. And if they have been told, they can be told again, in a different way. In a better way. In a more interesting way.

But the dilemma is it's still a great project and photographers take it as their inspiration. So  then you get all these younger people flitting around a subject saying things like it's all been photographed, it's all been done, this is about the production, the act of looking, the archive, the control.

The same thing happens with Paul Graham, whose work I love. But God help us when people start trying to make work in the shape of a Shimmer of Possibility. You end up with awful sequences of non-pictures and people mumbling about montage.

It's like an endless circling around a story, a failure to look at something that is really interesting in favour of something that is, most of the time, not nearly so interesting.

If serious photography and photobooks want to punch at the weight we think they are entitled to we need to address that. We also have to think of the language that we use and who we are talking to. There is a sobriety in photography that can be stomach-churningly dull.

Sometimes looking at a photobook, or more commonly an exhibition (so lets go there), is just so depressing it makes your heart sink. How often have you been to shows where you wander around intently trying to get something out of it. And when you look around, you see other people walking around the sparsely decorated concrete space looking deeply into pictures, reading captions, and trying to fathom some kind of meaning out of something that has taken huge effort and cost to make, fabricate and show. But the work that is required to understand it for so little reward is immense. It really is a pointless exercise because essentially the work is a failure, the words are a failure, the idea is a failure. On the outside you try to put an intelligent face on, but on the inside you feel like one of the people in the picture up top.And so you leave feeling empty and something of a failure for not being smart enough to get it.  But really it might be that there is nothing to get.

I've seen this happen and people excuse it and say, 'well it's not a very interesting subject'. But I disagree; everything can be made interesting if you work at it. Something like Yann Mingard's Deposit (or A Shimmer of Possibility) can be long and complex and intelligent and take some effort, but still not be boring. So it's not the length or the subject, it's the approach, an approach where tedium is embedded in the heart of the project. So if  a project or a book can't be made interesting using pictures, why not just write a paper on it and forget about the camera. Surely then we will only be bored one way, rather than being both visually and verbally bored to exhaustion.

A few months back I was in Bath's best bookshop, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights. Ed, who stocks the visual arts shelves, pointed at the Photobooks and said "Those don't sell." And then he pointed at the graphic novel section and said "But these do."

One reason the photobooks don't sell is because most of the books on offer at Mr B's are trade books, books put out by big publishers. But now the market has shifted to more bijou small-published and self-published books and that's where the money is going. The idea here is that the market hasn't grown, it has just changed.

But even the small and self-published books don't sell. Compare their sales to the mass audience and mass global appeal of graphic novels and manga. There is no comparison.

I don't know if this matters. The photobook world is a niche and let it be so. A great book can sell a few hundred copies and still be a great book. So what. Who cares.

But at the same time, because there are so many photobooks around and people are looking at them in different ways, there is an increased sophistication in how we read images, how we tie them together, how we tell stories.

I think of relatively modest books like The Spook Light Chronicles, Yolanda or Will they Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty and I see people really trying to engage with their audience in visually and verbally engaging manners. It's probably nothing new but it's something that connects to the idea of how we communicate pictures to an audience in a way that is interesting, that is outward-looking and mindful of the audience rather than inward-looking and lacking in self-awareness.

Whether that will ever translate to a mass audience I don't know. Because the really big problem with photobooks is price. As I mentioned in this post, we had an artist's book fair in Bristol a few weeks back and with ten pounds my daughter came out with loads of stuff, some free, some paid for. It had an appeal. If she went to Offprint or the stands at one of the upcoming photobook festivals, she'd come away with nothing - almost everything would be beyond her price range or she wouldn't be interested. So if people are talking about a bigger audience, you have to make it happen. And pricing is part of that.



By sheer coincidence, the subject of photobook narratives is one of the topics of a talk I'll be giving at Photobook Vienna in two weeks time. The other topic that I'll be connecting that to is my German Family Album and the question of how I can make that interesting! Because the last thing any of us need in our lives is more boredom.

Read the full programme here. I get a great tagline and William Klein is the undoubted headline of many great speakers. Ahhh, Vienna....

This week's claim to fame: I saw Midge Ure in Tony's, my local greengrocer once.

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

Life Advice from Sam Harris: It's Raining! It's Cold! It's London! Let's Go to India!

The Middle of Somewhere is a lovely book about growing up, about being a child, about experiencing the world, about being part of nature.

The world of the Middle of Somewhere is ostensibly India and Australia, but really in an ideal world it could be anywhere where there are open spaces, clear skies and a family where freedom, adventure and discovery are the norm. And the children are Uma and Yali, daughters of  Sam Harris. He photographed their lives, their joys, their tears and their traumas as they grew up in the most idyllic surroundings. But again, in an ideal world, it could be any child.

It's a joyful book then, one that starts with a picture of a line of green clad girls, their feet pushing through the grass of a forest clearing, their arms pushing against the barriers of our imagination. Flick forward a page and we see  Uma (I think) lying in a meadow, her eyes closed as she falls into the ground upon which she lies.

There's a pagan element to the book, a sense that we are, or should be, one with nature, and that is emphasised through repeated pictures of birds, animals, flowers and fruit. A double-page spread shows a dead red-beaked finch held in the palm of a hand that is adorned with bangles and bead, together with Yali (I think) holding a mashed up bunch of blackberries, her lips stained red, her eyes gazing directly into the camera from hair that is reminiscent of the well-dwelling Sadako of The Ring.

So we have coming of age and we have mortality and there is half a nod to Sanguinetti's Sixth Day and the lyricism of the Immediate Family landscape, but the symbolism is never heavy handed and the book can be read as a straightforward journal, especially because it is made like a journal.

The journal inserts help in this. We hear from Yael, Harris's partner, as she sits with a young Uma in a one-bedroom flat in London. It's raining and she needs a change, they all need a change. The next entry comes from Goa. The change has come and life becomes a romantic tale of travelling in India, on the road in places where hungry cows, blue seas and freak storms create memories that have a value beyond value. Then Yael is suddenly pregnant, one month from term and ready to give birth, 'just like millions of other women..' in an Indian village.

And on life goes.



There's a great picture of gleaming eucalypti (I think?) shot from the inside of a car. It's a familiar shot with the dashboard in the foreground but is evocative all the same, a sign of the move to Australia, and the beginning of a new kind of life.

Here, the open spaces and the big skies open up before Harris and Yael. We see them standing beneath the stars, looking at a gleaming mood, a moment of peace as a quiet domesticity (toys, make-up, washing, chickens - the quieter pictures that punctuate the stronger double page spreads) makes a home in the smallholding that the family now calls home.



Amidst all this there are tears and conflict. Uma and Yali fight, then make up. We see this in little kiss-and-make-up notes stuck into the pages of the book.

The girls grow and so does the family's Australian home. Uma and Yael reach up with brooms to dislodge water trapped in an awning. But now Uma is almost Yael's height, more nimble and stronger. The generational 'surpasso' beckons.



And that is almost how the book ends. It's a gorgeous book with a gorgeous cover that is a pointillist rendition of the bush surrounding the Australian home. It's romantic, populist and beautifully produced; as well as the post-it notes and journal inserts, it comes with rounded corners to edge off that travelogue feel.

Buy the book here. 

A Book to Wipe Your Arse With

I visited my family in Germany last year for the first time for a long time. It was a rare pleasure to see my aunt and some cousins after all these years.

It was a special pleasure to meet my cousin Laurenz. He's big in facial analysis. He developed the idea of slow feature analysis which is an algorithm (that word is making me shaky already. Remember that only 80% of what you read on this blog is scientifically proven to be true) that creates a continual recognition of a thing, an object, a face whatever the change in the angle of view.

If you look at a chair and walk around it, get above it and go under it, you'll get an idea of what that might mean. Even though you are seeing very different things, you still recognise the handiness of it. You don't always have to re-see it and re-see it, you understand the hand-ness of it.

That corresponds quite closely to philosphical ideas of being - the Kantian noumenal world where a chair is absolutely a chair. the thing-in-itself where the chair is solid in its chairiness.

When I got back from Germany I found Daniel Mayrit's book, You Haven't Seen Their Faces in the post. It's a book of the faces of the 100 most powerful people in London and it gets my slow feature analysis going in that it fits into a pattern of books that feature faces and are openly critical, and almost satirical in their mocking of those in power. You can walk around it and it will seem different but somehow there is a shared aesthetic and sentiment that gives the middle finger to the world.

The most notable of these books are Christopher Anderson's Stump (see my review here) and Brad Feuerhelm's Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men which I reviewed in a post called Photography Filled with Hate (but in a good way) which I'm still rather proud of as far as blog post titles go.

These are fuck-you books and so is You Haven't Seen Their Faces.




The book consists of a series of images that run like surveillance images, but rather than being portraits of looters for example, they are pictures of the most powerful people in the City of London.

The book statement asks:

How much does technology itself affect the reading of the image? Is it the inherent features of this type of technology that confers their truthfulness? What happens when those features are replicated precisely with other devious devices of digital manipulation?

Quite a lot happens. So it's a book about the language of printing and in shares a resemblance to both the distancing effect that the tight facial crops and grain/colour explosions create in Stump, and the sense of sleaze that the duotone and pixel mix has in Let us Now Praise Inframous Men.

And in that sense, the recognition that we have, the slow features that we assimilate are not so much those of faces, but those of printing technologies and the meanings that have been given to them over the years by their use in identifying looters, rioters, terrorists or football hooligans. Here those same technologies are used to malign wielders of power and wealth.

The book is printed on wrapping paper which has a horizontal grain so there is a lining that is reminiscent of analogue TV. It feels like screengrabs are being shown here from some old-school name-and-shame World In Action type show. But mixed in with it there is the basic cover message which is  'Use These Images At Your Own Discretion.' Which given the grab-and-pull nature of the book is a virtual invitation to wipe your arse on these faces. For all the high seriousness of the artist's statements, that is what it boils down to - and that's a good thing.

As for the pictures. Well, they're as rough as you like, with captions detailing positions and wealth, and then added annotations giving updated information on scandals, promotions, connections and controversies they are involved in. 'Sometimes the image is blank because no image is available and on one page there's a post-it note reading Need More Info.

But ultimately, it's not about the pictures, it's about the paper and the printing and the texture of the printed page. Everything looks rougher and feels rougher in book form. It looks like crap on the computer screen, but it looks great in the printed version. That's not because of the image quality. It's practically collapsing into the page (and up your arse?) in the printed version, it's far rougher than you can see on the screen. And that's the way it should be.

Buy You Haven't Seen Their Faces here.