Photography

According to Tate's Art Terms:

The photobook is a book of photographs by a photographer that has an overarching theme or follows a storyline – a convenient and reasonably cheap way of disseminating the work of a photographer to a mass audience.

Early photobooks were used to illustrate the work of individual photographers or a new type of photographic process. William Henry Fox Talbot published a photobook in 1844 called The Pencil of Nature in order to promote his calotype photographic process.

Over the years, photobooks have helped to establish the idea that a sequence of images represents a narrative in its own right. The German photographer August Sander published Face of Our Time, in 1929, part of his life-long project to create a comprehensive photographic index of the German population.

Today photobooks are crucial for financing and circulating modern photography enabling enthusiasts access to a wide range of photographers from across the world.

Searching for photobooks isn't exactly straightforward. Here's why:

• Most photobooks don't self-identify as a photobook anywhere within the publication

• Most library catalog records for photobooks don't feature the word/phrase "photobook" or "photo book"

• The subject heading of "photobook" is unevenly employed among libraries, in part because the term "photobook" itself is recent, rarely appearing in pre-21st century writings--David Campany describes this in his article about the term photobook from The Photobook Review (Aperture, 2014)

• Materials that might be described as photobooks exist in various discrete locations in our library, including the open, circulating Brooklyn Stacks, in Special Collections or Rare Books, or in the Artists' Books Collection

• There is no discrete collection or location for "Photobooks", so it is not possible to limit by location to get a comprehensive list of Pratt-owned photobooks.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective (Prestel, 2023)

While there is no one-and-done method to find photobooks in our collections, do not be discouraged! Various methods can be used to discover these materials.

depending on the users' topic, individual needs, preferred library collections/locations to access, etc.

Here are some strategies for locating photobooks at Pratt:

Border Crossings, recurring column by Barry Schwabsky about new photobooks

digital and print access

Global, geographically-organized list from shashasha

Some selections:

• Aperture
• Conveyor Editions
• Dashwood Books
• Fulcrum Press
• Loose Joints Publishing
• Mousse Publishing
• Radius Books
• shashasha

• Daido Moriyama
• Nan Goldin
• Saul Leiter
• Ed Ruscha
• Mary Manning
• Carrie Mae Weems
• Wolfgang Tillmans
• Deena Lawson
• Shirin Neshat
• Bill Bernstein