Oil paintings don’t look that great in books but photographs do. This is part —but only a part—of the reason why photobooks are ubiquitous in the photo art world. No other art form seems so naturally inclined to the printed page, no other art form is so augmented (it is hoped) by being placed in sequence, a turn of the page informing the previous image as it reveals the next.
Take a stack of photographs and staple them together and you have a book. Staple a stack of paintings together and you have an ungainly stack of stapled paintings. The book and the photograph yearn for each other, the photograph and the book embrace one another.
When the first single-artist photography exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art on September 28, 1938, there was a book of photographs to go along with the exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs. It was the 34-year-old photographer’s first photobook.
Photo Book Photo List, the newest publication from San Francisco’s fourteen-year-old Pier 24, is probably its last. Pier 24 Photography, a somewhat under-the-radar photography institution, auctioned off most of its photography collection in May of last year as the foundation that supported Pier 24 (and which owned most of the works exhibited) reoriented itself to other charitable causes. It’s a loss felt mostly in the mind rather than the heart as Pier 24’s banker’s hours and location under the Bay Bridge made visiting the gallery (for me, for others) curiously difficult.
But when I did visit it was extraordinary.
Pier 24 did a number of things refreshingly correct, even innovative, from limiting the number of people in the space at any one time (you could choose a time slot for your visit from those available on their web page), to not charging at all for entry, despite the soul-crushing rent they paid each month for the space, to declining to attach wall labels next to each image (labels which often distract more than they inform), a booklet with names and dates and all the rest was available at the desk for you to walk around with, if you so inclined, allowing viewers to interact with the photographs, untainted by the metadata.
Other institutions should learn and copy these ideas. They should also take inspiration from Pier 24’s publishing program. Unlike so many other art museums and galleries, exhibitions at Pier 24 don’t just vanish once the show is over—there is a book, there is always a book. I have a stack of them. True, many of them are boyishly proud of the arrangement of the images, the positioning of the image in conjunction with other images, the documentary photographs in the books depicting entire rooms with unusual frame placements, the tiny photographs themselves dissolving on the page upon closer inspection into indecipherable half-tone dots. But other books from Pier 24 show the photographs large on the page, to put you once again in touch with the image itself, living on the page much like it lived on the wall.
Their new photobook is neither wall documentation nor re-creation. Its photographs are images (made by Josef Jacques) of sculptures, painted sculptures of photobooks, created by Libby Black—presumably, they are also in the final Pier 24 exhibit, it is not entirely clear.
The sculptures are wonderful, holding a heartfelt funhouse mirror to the original covers, in many cases revealing a benign golem, more magical in the copy than in the flesh. There’s the sculpture of the paperback version of Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor, a book I thought so wonderful that I gave away a dozen hardback copies a few Christmases back. The sculpture of the book, due to the handwriting on the cover of the original, already handmade, halfway between photography and painting. There’s The Decisive Moment, one of the books I used to have back in the 1980s before I had to sell my photobooks—at nearly giveaway prices in those days—to afford my minimum wage lifestyle, looking at first glance like the original book, the Matisse-painted book cover and handwritten title mirrored in sculpture form. Then there is Michael Light’s Full Moon, such a simple design, the painted craters inviting you to reach out and touch the surface. It’s one of my favorite books.
Libby Black’s sculptures are on the page and, if you are holding the book, in your hand. Libby took book designer Bob Aufuldish’s original cover for Photo Book Photo List and then made a sculpture painting of that–which Aufuldish then reproduced as the actual cover for the book. The book becomes its own subject or at least joins with its subject, making visual the idea of a photobook of photobooks.
Photo Book Photo List could have stopped right there with its seventy sculptures (seventy-one, counting the cover). I would have been happy. I would have valued this book. But, as the title of the book hints, there is more. Along with the pictures of the photobook sculptures we are given lists of books, selected by photographers, to represent books that are their favorites, have some special meaning to them, or were formative in their development. Each photographer’s list includes a dozen or so titles and perhaps a few words of introduction to their list. This, despite the delightfulness of the photobook sculptures, is the real heart and soul of Pier 24’s efforts.
Alongside that sculpture of Full Moon we have Rinko Kawauchi’s list of ten photobooks which includes Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, Gabriel Orozco’s Gabriel Orozco: Photographs (both of which appear on other photographer’s lists) and titles like Paul Fusco: JFK (and a book which I am unfamiliar) and Full Moon, which were chosen only by Kawauchi.
Decisive Moment illustrates Lee Friedlander’s fourteen-entry list composed of many titles in the pantheon of the history of photobooks (Walker Evan’s American Photographs, Robert Frank’s Les Américains, Mashahisa’s Karasu (an unexpectedly powerful book of images of ravens), and books by curator John Szarkowski (who, importantly, was also a photographer). Friedlander breaks the rules here a bit, listing the photographer Edward Weston, one of the only two or three times Weston appears on any list here, and writing beneath “I couldn’t land on any particular book.” Weston, once at the center of what it meant to be an art photographer appears to be on his way out. (Thank you, art schools.)
The Rich and Poor photobook sculpture accompanies Dawoud Bay’s list. Weston appears here again (but as I just said, don’t get the wrong impression), saying that these books were important to him when he was developing as a photographer. Rich and Poor, published in 1985, and (Bey gets a bonus sculpture, photographed both front and back) In the American West, also published in 1985, are the most recent books on this list, the rest from the 1950s to 1970s, with one entry (August Sander’s Antlitz Der Zeit) published way back in 1929.
Spartan as they are, these lists—fifty-five of them—offer hours of contemplation and analysis. Many a rabbit hole can open up at the foot of the unwary reader.
Here’s one such rabbit hole: Les Américains by Robert Frank. This book, published in the late 1950s, is made up of images Frank shot on three road trips, one of them cross-country and back from Indiana to California to Florida, his grainy, sometimes somewhat blurry images casting an ungenerous gaze upon America. And though it appears on twelve photographer’s lists I suspect that this book should be on none of them. I suspect that few if any of the photographers here have ever held a copy in their hands, ever turned its pages. This book is not famous at all.
Frank’s famous book, the one that inspired so many photographers since its publication in 1959, is undoubtedly The Americans, a very different book than was published in France the year prior. Les Américains, part of a series of books, each representing a different country, was a book with short social-political texts, each accompanied by an image from Frank. The Americans had an introduction by Jack Kerouac but otherwise had no essays, no quotes, no texts at all aside from short, descriptive captions. The images were the same, though the sequence is changed, but the book is, by any measure, a different book—most notably that in the French book the photographs creep toward being mere illustrations.
Why did Pier 24 list the French edition in every case rather than the more influential English-language edition? I have no theories at all but note that Bey’s list is accompanied by a sculpture of the French edition but then turn the page and two American editions have their own sculptures (there are several more editions of The Americans with a new one coming this November, not even counting the many foreign language translations including, ironically, a French translation of the American The Americans, published by the same publisher who published Les Américains).
The Americans holds up better than you might think, given its age and the degree to which other books have borrowed its ideas. Even the short introduction by Kerouac is better than my memory would have it. I just went through the book again between this paragraph and the last. And now I’m wondering about the original French version, I’m wondering about the sequence of images and about those texts and why isn’t there a new edition or even an English translation of that version, the original going for $1500 or more on the used market?
The second most cited book? The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, by Nan Goldin, gets seven mentions. This came out in the mid-1980s, just as I was coming of age as a photographer and it is hard to explain how this book was just sort of everywhere, everyone knew about it or had a copy, not just people in the art world. There was no internet, no Amazon, but you could buy a copy at the B. Dalton Bookstore at the Mall (that’s where I think I got my copy). It was like Larry Clark’s Tulsa (also listed here, see below), but with even more drugs and in saturated colors starring drag queens. Although it hit me at the wrong time in my life you can see how it would be a powerful draw for young people aspiring to be photographers.
Next up is a tie, Evidence, by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan and Karasu by Masahisa Fukase. Both books have been reprinted in new editions as used prices for the originals go higher and higher. Evidence is a slim book of anonymous industrial photographs and what is depicted in each image is usually incomprehensible. More interesting than it might sound. Karasu is a book of images of ravens. Ditto.
And so on. Here are the top ten:
1) Les Américans, by Robert Frank (12 entries)
2) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, by Nan Goldin (7 entries)
3) (each with 6 entries)
Evidence, by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan
Karasu, by Masahisa Fukase
5) (each with 5 entries)
Looking at Photographs, by John Szarkowski
a shimmer of possibility, a 12-volume work by Paul Graham
7) (each with 4 entries)
The Photographer’s Eye, by John Szarkowski
The Work of Atget, by John Szarkowski
Sweet Flypaper of Life, by Roy DeCarava
The Animals, Garry Winogrand
Tulsa, by Larry Clark
William Eggleston’s Guide, William Eggleston
If some sort of canon is trying to form then perhaps this is the beginning. And right here, right now, I was about to write that yah, sure maybe this is a canon forming but how is that possible when so many of these books are unaffordable? How can any young photographer, or any photographer without significant disposable income hope to see these books, given the prices? Then I glanced over the top ten list again, noting how many have been reprinted in modern editions. Szarkowski’s books (all three entries disconcertingly out of print) are available inexpensively on the used market. The only holdout is Paul Graham’s a shimmer of possibility, which has indeed been reprinted by Mack Books but at $675. It’s wonderful to see that the photo world is taking its own history seriously.
Outside the canon, in the books being published for the first time within the past ten or fifteen years, what we have is fragmentation. Book runs are often tiny—300, 500, a thousand copies. Many of the books on these lists are difficult to obtain, and difficult to look at, not so much because they are expensive (though they often are) but simply because there are no copies available. Books come, books go, the state of photobook publishing contradictory in its best-of-times/worst-of-times paradox where photobooks have never before been so popular while artists self-fund their publications even when a well-known publisher’s name adorns the spine.
Lee Friedlander, in his brief comment on his own list, says it best: “If you’d asked me thirty years ago, maybe forty, what my favorite photobooks were, I could have said ‘all of them.’”
In a way, Photo Books Photos Lists is a companion book to another Pier 24 book, Photographers Looking at Photographs. Both ask photographers about their favorite things (with ‘favorite” being broadly defined). In the earlier case, it was their favorite photograph, in this case, their favorite books. These two books do two things simultaneously, shaping an indirect portrait of each participating photographer and sharing photographs (and books of photographs) that matter, at least to these photographers. Gratefully, there are no Marxist intellectuals included, no sociology professors, no critics (good god), nobody from the periphery. You may not like all of the photographs in the first book, you might not like all of the books in the second, and you might not like all of the photographers in either, but the image choosers and the book list makers are photographers and that really matters.
Photo Books Photo Lists is an unexpected book from Pier 24 in that it contains no photographs. Yet it contains so many photographs, the lists providing an interested mind a rapidfire immersion in photography, at your fingertips with a little googling. If only they could have provided links for each book (and maybe they do? Online somewhere?). There are books here I know well, books I’m familiar with, and books I’ve never heard of. There are books here I love, some I’m indifferent to, and some I would burn if no one was looking. Sure, there is a homogeneity and certain biases in the photographer’s choices (only one mention of Ansel Adams, really?—I know he is not cool to the art school crowd but still…) and a certain divergence of what books younger photographers favor (there’s that tendency toward fragmentation) versus what books older photographers chose (there’s the pantheon). The more you look the more you see, patterns emerging from so much data like a silver print coming up beneath the ripples of the Dektol, you peering and peering and then suddenly the image emerges.
This book comes with homework, though not explicitly stated. After spending hours with the lists, after re-looking at the books on the list that I still own, after googling so many others, after following this rabbit hole and that, there is still work to do, still work that obviously must be done: I need to make my own list.
Photo Book Photo List
Published by Pier 24 Photography in 2024
Essay by Vince Aletti, an intro from Pier 24 Director Chris McCall, and amazing photobook sculptures by Libby Black which were photographed by Josef Jacques.
Book design by Bob Aufuldish
Available from Pier 24 for $25
