“Photobook”: An Introduction

The experience of a photobook is an intimate one: the weight of the book in one's hands, the texture of the paper, the perfume of its materiality, the way it moves like a contortionist as one goes through its pages. At their essence, photobooks are photographic images arranged in a sequence and presented in a book format. One can argue they have been with us since long ago, from nineteenth-century souvenir photo albums produced in multiples to the 1960s photo-heavy Time Life Books series that Aperture senior editor Denise Wolff has called the “accidental photobook.”¹ Photobooks can also take the form of book-objects that play with the relationship between image and text; the nature, material, and size of pages; how pages unfold, one after another; and the way photographs speak to each other through adjacencies and across the book. Each choice contributes to the overall message the photobook delivers. The recent growth of photobook production is noteworthy, with the geographic imaginary of Asia playing a major role.

The great interest in photobooks that began with the new millennium is still going strong.² This photobook phenomenon has also manifested prominently in the trans-Asia context, from Varanasi to Manila, from Seoul to Sydney. Japanese photobooks have been a core component of the global canon emerging from field-defining publications such as Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History—Volume II (2004) or more-recent publications like What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 (2021), coedited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich.³ Key anthologies on Japanese and Chinese photobooks also appeared recently, led by or featuring Asia-based photo scholars.⁴ Over the past decades, Asia has witnessed a vibrant photobook scene with frequent global exchanges among artists, publishers, and institutions. For example, in 2016, Gwen Lee in Singapore brought an exhibition featuring the photobooks of publisher Steidl to DECK, an independent space for art and photography, where Steidl also invited artists across Asia to submit photobook dummies for the Steidl Book Award Asia. Jiazazhi, a small organization in China that did not start photobook publication until 2011, now boasts a long list of noteworthy, boundary-pushing photobooks. Between 2017 and 2019, the Kitab in India ran seven photo festivals and over fifty exhibitions, many on Asian photobooks, in five Indian cities.⁵ Additionally, Offset Projects, BIND (now JOJO Library), and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts Photobook Grant are platforms that have supported a generative space for the production of photobooks in India, where access to good quality, affordable publishing from the 1990s onwards has made this production possible. Thanks to these platforms, as well as to specialized photobook or art-book stores in many Asian cities and to booming Asian photo festivals and art book fairs, the photobook—as a medium, as a mode of creation, as a way of connecting—has infused great creative energy into Asian photographic practices. This special issue aims to engage with the contemporary embrace of the photobook through research and reflection. The articles in this special issue—discussing topics ranging from the early twentieth century to the current moment, from individual creators to state initiatives, from East Asia to South Asia—amount to a collective attempt to address how Asian photography can be understood via the photobook. They also show how the photobook can be better understood via a trans-Asia context, where, in some locales, limited opportunities to display photographs and increased access to affordable printing technologies have combined to produce a culture of self-publishing. The clandestine/private nature of such photobooks and their intimate networks of circulation lend themselves to expressions of resistance in the face of oppressive regimes.

Despite the growing interest in photobooks in the trans-Asia context, in-depth studies of individual photobooks remain rare.⁶ The three research articles in this issue testify to the necessity of close reading. Sreerupa Bhattacharya analyzes Adil Hasan's When Abba Was Ill as a retrospective account of dealing with his father's cancer diagnosis, which paradoxically obfuscates the memory it seeks to preserve. Bhattacharya patiently unpacks, or, in her own words, “parses through,” the various narrative strategies enabled by the photobook, highlighting the medium's unique capacity, both within its physical structure and in the images it contains, to mirror memory's tension between remembering and forgetting. Bernd Spyra and Sanja Hilscher examine the three catalogs produced in different locations accompanying the exhibition Humanism in China, the first large-scale presentation of contemporary documentary photography initiated by a Chinese institution. Through a close look at the differences in design as well as the selection of photographs in the three catalogs, Spyra and Hilscher illuminate the transformation of this project from a critical appeal for reform to an element of official Chinese cultural diplomacy. Xinyue Lulu Yuan introduces an important yet little-known photobook, Records of the Japanese Army's Atrocities (1938), which was edited and published by the Nationalist government in China at the height of the Japanese invasion. Yuan's rich contextualization situates this photobook in various circles of transnational flow, from the rise of machine-age aesthetics in design to the visual tropes of anti-Fascist struggles in the Spanish Civil War.

All of this issue's research articles are important not only for their sustained consideration of single photobooks but also for the strategies and methodologies they put forth for analyzing the photobook in general. They also foreground the collaborative nature of the making of a photobook, which is not a static object but instead should be understood as a space that documents the encounter between creators and readers/viewers and that generates new kinds of encounter. This approach to photobooks continues to manifest itself throughout the rest of this special issue. It is most obvious when we read well-respected photobook designer Teun van der Heijden's artist reflection and Fiona Rogers's review of Poulomi Basu's photobook Centralia. To articulate his own practice and teaching method, Van der Heijden borrows concepts from neuroscience to emphasize the “pre-attentive and ‘bottom-up’ processes” triggered by visual stimuli before the generation of meaning. Van der Heijden's reflection offers a unique glimpse into Asian photobook culture as he shares his experience of conducting workshops for photographers in Asia. He emphasizes the necessity to acknowledge what precedes and underlies semantic cognition when we make and read a photobook.⁷ Van der Heijden's argument is beautifully demonstrated by Rogers's review of Centralia; Van der Heijden worked as a designer on this photobook and details the collaboration process. Rogers contextualizes this book in Basu's long-term interest in the activism of women, explains the ten-year research behind this project, and positions the significance of the book in representing women's defense of land rights. Leading readers through the “disorienting artistic approach” employed by Basu, Rogers's review demonstrates, both as a reader and to the readers, the reading experience of a photobook that aims to go beyond the “limiting techniques of documentary photography.”

It is not surprising that two pieces in this issue focus on Dayanita Singh, one of the most prolific and innovative artists with a focus on photobooks who comes out of and is still located within the Asian region. Singh has consistently pushed the boundaries of this medium. Her exploration and advocacy for photobooks that leverage the rich affective power of forms—to transcend the confines of documentary photography—have now become a shared goal for many creators, including those discussed in this issue. The interview with Singh, conducted by Daniel Boetker-Smith—who served as the director of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive for nine years before becoming the director of Australia's Centre for Contemporary Photography—provides an intimate glimpse into the artist's training, working process, and artistic trajectory. Kim Sichel, whose recent book Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France (2020) is a major contribution to the in-depth study of photobooks, reviews three of Singh's 2022 publications, including her photo-novel Let's See and a catalog of her first major retrospective exhibition, shedding further light on how Singh draws creative energy from the tension between the photobook and exhibition and between personal narrative and public archive.

One provocative question Singh raises in her interview with Boetker-Smith concerns what photobooks and photo history would look like today if Anna Atkins, who hand-made thirteen editions of her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843) with new additions of images, had been as recognized and embraced like her contemporaries Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre. A reevaluation of the photographic canon, biased by a gender hierarchy, needs to be addressed in the context of trans-Asia photography. Despite a few recent efforts, including those appearing in the pages of Trans Asia Photography,⁸ female voices and viewpoints continue to be marginalized in historical narratives. Kasahara Michiko and Kelly Midori McCormick's essay, “Sexual Politics: Photobooks by Japanese Women, 1976–79,” discusses photobooks by women photographers within the rise of feminist activism in the latter half of the 1970s. While brief, this essay introduces Yoshida Ruiko, Matsumoto Michiko, Watanabe Hitomi, and Imai Hisae, in addition to their better-known peer, Ishiuchi Miyako, to English-language readers. The images in this essay are difficult to come by and hence provide a rare glimpse of a little-documented photobook history.

Responding to widespread interest and the burgeoning field of scholarship on photobooks within trans-Asia photographic studies, we launched a call for papers for this special issue. It was a fortunate coincidence that many articles naturally formed dialogues without any deliberate coordination on our part. All articles place significant emphasis on sequencing, the materiality of photobooks, and the potential of photobooks to challenge or transcend the indexicality and linearity commonly associated with photography. They advocate for an approach to photobooks as relational events, aiming to challenge the singular focus on the auteur while preserving the unique power of the photobook medium. This issue invests considerable energy in exploring photobooks that deliberately experiment with innovative forms, materiality, and conceptual frameworks. Often crafted for a discerning, self-selected audience, these photobooks break free from the conventional confines of what Brian O'Doherty called contemporary art's “white cube,”⁹ yet they simultaneously prompt critical inquiries into the infrastructure fueling the photobook boom, as well as its political and social underpinnings.

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