The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond

The photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the publication of Henry Fox Talbot's "The Pencil of Nature" heralded a new genre in the history of the book, one in which the photograph was the primary vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal if sometimes conflicted partnership with the written word. In this book, practicing photographers and writers across several fields of scholarship share a range of fresh approaches to reading the photobook, developing new ways of understanding how meaning is shaped by an image's interaction with its text and context and engaging with the visual, tactile and interactive experience of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual works, the photobook from fetishised objet d'art to cheaply-printed booklet is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.

PATRIZIA DI BELLO teaches History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England (2007), and the editor, with Gabriel Koureas, of Art, History and the Senses (2010). She is currently working on photography and sculpture. COLETTE WILSON is Lecturer in French Studies and Director of the MA in Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London, where she also convenes the research seminar 'Photography: Theory, Practice, Debate'. She is the author of Paris and the Commune 1871-1878: The Politics of Forgetting (2007). Her current research focuses on French representations of Egypt. SHAMOON ZAMIR is Associate Professor of Literature and Visual Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. He has taught at the University of Chicago, York University and the University of London. He is the author of Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought (1995) and has recently completed a study of the photography of Edward S. Curtis.