Thinking the Photobook

The photobook visually and materially contextualizes arrangements 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 texts. The artist and theorist Bettina Lockemann provides an approach to the medium from a research perspective: considering the photobook as an independent subject of art studies, phenomenological discussions complement methodological lines of thought. An important contribution to the photobook as an independent field of research, Lockemann elaborates precise terms for analyzing this medium of renditions. Through a practice-based examination of contemporary photobooks, this reader gets to the root of the field of photo books.