The Photobook

Photographers have been making photobooks, bound collections of photographs and texts, since the 1830s when Talbot first developed a paper-based system producing multiple prints to be pasted or directly printed onto pages. Photobooks have played a crucial role in the creation and dissemination of photographic culture, yet they remain an under-researched field, practically and intellectually fragmented: language scholars have tended to focus on the text, while art and photography historians have concentrated on the photographs as single canonised images, without much consideration of their original sequence and relationship to the text. The aim of this network is to bring together different approaches and disciplines, and to consider the photobook in its totality.

Photobooks have recently attracted the interest of curators, historians and collectors. The publication of The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, edited by Andrew Roth (2001); and Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook (2004), have stimulated the interest of collectors and, reputedly, driven prices up. A few international exhibitions have been devoted to photobooks, such as The Open Book at New York's International Centre of Photography in 2005; and more generally exhibitions in museums have started to include actual books, rather than photographic prints that had been intended for one. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, for example, now displays photobooks in its Photography Galleries.

The main objectives of this network are:
To convene a series of five workshops to discuss pre-circulated short papers.
To organise a conference presenting the papers developed at the workshops.
To publish a collected volume of essays developed through the workshop and conference.
To strengthen and formalise informal interdisciplinary networks that are emerging around the topic of the photobook.

Its topics include:
What are the examples that define the genre of the photobook, and what are the examples that test and explore its outer limits?
What are the dynamics of reading and looking at a photobook? How do the text and image inform each other, and how do other material considerations (design, print quality and format) influence this relationship?
How can we discus photobooks without fragmenting and reducing them to the visual or the textual? What are the different conceptual models and organising principles of the photobook?

This Network breaks disciplinary boundaries by inviting academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to learn from and collaborate with one another; as in the photobooks themselves, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck has an international reputation for its pioneering integration of 'old' and 'new' media, giving equal emphasis to objects and practices that have historically been given low and high cultural value. Just as crucial to the project are its partner organizations. King's College American Studies Department, also in London, is one of the leading centres in Britain for the study of the culture, society and the arts of the United States, where so much photographic culture has developed; its research and teaching strengths encompass literature, history and cultural studies, including photography. The University of Kent's internationally recognised research provides the framework for their School of European Culture and Languages, which includes French, Italian, German and Hispanic; Comparative Literary Studies; and an MA in Writing, Theory and Visual Culture. Together they give this Network a unique interdisciplinary context central to the examination of objects combining images and text into a material artefact to be experienced haptically and kinaesthetically as much as read or looked at, and that is at once mass-produced yet is becoming invested with preciousness and artisic value.