Parr & Badger - The Photobook: A History, Volume III

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 Post subject: Parr & Badger - The Photobook: A History, Volume III
Unread postPosted: Sun Aug 14, 2016 3:05 pm 
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I suppose I would have acquired Volume III of this series, if only to satisfy my obsessive/compulsive nature. However, I am glad to report that I found Volume III every bit as well-produced, thoughtful and interesting as it's predecessors. This jacket blurb accurately places Volume III in context:
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Since the publication of the first volume in 2004 and a second in 2006, The Photobook: A History has become established as the leading authority on the evolution of the photobook for enthusiasts, academics and bibliophiles alike. The Photobook: A History, Volume III continues the authoritative survey by examining the changing face of the photobook in the decades of the Cold War, the new millennium and the internet. It features publications by many well-known photographers from Joel Meyerowitz, John Gossage and Kazuo Kitai to Walter Pfieffer, Susan Meiselas and Roger Ballen. But it also introduces many innovative books by unknown or overlooked photographers who are helping to re-examine and redefine the photobook at a challenging yet exciting time for professional photography.

Members of LVL may, from time to time, hit a dry spell during which it is hard to imagine what to photograph. I certainly feel that way from time to time. It seems that every subject has been addressed in photographs, that there is nothing new to excite the eye and the mind, and that everything has been done to death. One of the strongest impressions I got from this volume, and indeed the whole set, is that the world offers us an unlimited, wildly diverse range of subject matter for us to capture according to each photographers own unique vision. The photobooks selected for Volume III prove that. You may not value, like or even understand some of the selections in terms of your own mindset and taste. Fine. The point - that there need be no barrier at all to broadening one's photographic subject matter and photographic approach - is still made. That seems to me to be one of the values of this series, and one of the wonderful things about Misters Parr and Badger's highly subjective choices. I may not want to follow in the footsteps of some of the selected photographers, but I have less justification for complaining that there's nothing interesting to photograph.

The chapter headings give a good sense of the range and organization of Volume III:
(1) Progress Reports - The Flourishing of the Propaganda Photobook;
(2) Documents of Anger and Sadness - Protest and the Photobook;
(3) The Kids are Alright - Desire and the Postwar Photobook;
(4) Monuments to our Moment - Modern Life and the Photobook;
(5) From There to Here - The Photobook and Place;
(6) Killing Fields - Conflict and the Photobook;
(7) Looking at Ourselves - The Photobook and Identity;
(8) Momenti Mori - The Photographic Book and Memory: and
(9) Cannibalizing Photography - Representing and Re-Presenting the Medium.

The Photobook: A History, Volume III was published in 2014 by Phaidon, and is available through Amazon.


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