Thinking the Photobook

What are the unique properties of the photobook? A practitioner’s material analysis of the form

The photobook gives shape to arrangements and sequences of photographs and brings them into a sensually tangible form. The book format, the materiality of the paper and the type of binding have just as much effect on the viewer as the selection of images, their positioning in the layout, typography and text. In Thinking the Photobook, photographer and theorist Bettina Lockemann approaches the medium from a research perspective, enumerating the various properties that are unique to the form and that distinguish it from other kinds of visual publication.