Bettina Lockemann E-Book

Bettina Lockemann

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

 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 of an effect on the viewer as the selection of images, their positioning in the layout, typography, and the 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 theories, her phenomenological discussion complements methodological lines of thought. An important contribution to the photobook as an independent field of research, Lockemann elaborates precise terms for analyzing this medium. Through a practice-based examination of contemporary photobooks, this guide emphasizes the status of the photobook as an artwork in its own right.  BETTINA LOCKEMANN (*1971) is an artist and scholar specialized in artistic documentary photography. After studying art photography and media art in Leipzig and earning a PhD in art history at the ABK Stuttgart she was professor for practice and theory of photography at the HBK Braunschweig for five years. She lives in Cologne.

Leseprobe

Thinking the Photobook

Thinking the Photobook

A Practical Guide

Colophon

Author

Bettina Lockemann

Project management

Fabian Reichel

Copyediting

American Manuscript Editors

Translations from the German

Bettina Lockemann

For the chapter “The Photobook: An Approach”: Cadenza Academic Translations and Bettina Lockemann

Graphic design

Neil Holt

Typeface

Arnhem

Production

Vinzenz Geppert

Paper

Munken Print White Vol 1.5, 90 g/m2

Printing and binding

GRASPO CZ, A.S., Zlín

© 2022 Hatje Cantz, Berlin,

and Bettina Lockemann

© 2022 for the reproduced works of Elisabeth Neudörfl: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, and the artist

© 2022 for the reproduced works of Michael Schmidt:

Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst with Archiv Michael Schmidt

© 2022 for the reproduced works of Susan Lipper, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ad van Denderen, Paul Graham, Keiko Sasaoka, John Gossage: the artists or their legal successors

Published by

Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH

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10629 Berlin

www.hatjecantz.com

A Ganske Publishing Group Company

isbn 978-3-7757-5271-8

isbn 978-3-7757-5272-5 (e-Book)

Printed in the Czech Republic

Contents

Introduction: The Photobook as an Object of Research

The Photobook:An Approach

When Is a Book a Photobook?

The Photobook in the Framework of Activity

The Photobook: A Literary Novel in Visual Form?

Facticity versus Fictionality

Narrative

Narrativity: Susan Lipper’s Trip

Performativity: Susan Lipper’s Domesticated Land

Phenomenon Photobook:A Visual Studies Approach

The Photobook

Series and Sequences

The Series: Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Wassertürme

Phenomenology and Points of Indeterminateness

The Sequence: Ad van Denderen’s Go No Go

Paul Graham: Troubled Land

Keiko Sasaoka: Park City

Elisabeth Neudörfl: E.D.S.A.

Time and Montage:Beyond the Decisive Moment

The Single Image versus the Image in Plural

Chronophotography

Photographic Sequences and Film

Film and Photobook

Standstill and Movement

Time and Movement in the Photobook

Paul Graham: A Shimmer of Possibility “Louisiana” and “California”

Page-Turning:Performativity and Temporality

Page-Turning

Temporality

Group, Series, Sequence—Organization of Movement

Pacing—Rate of Execution

Michael Schmidt: Lebensmittel

Narration:When Is a Photobook Narrative?

Basics: Narratology

Transmedia Narratology

Cognitive Approach

Perspective / Narrator

Showing versus Telling

Story and Discourse

Changing Media

John Gossage: The Pond

Outlook:Desiderata for a Future Photobook Research

Bibliography

Original Publication

Photobooks and Artist’s Books

Research Literature

Introduction

The Photobook as an Object of Research

Since the turn of the millennium, the photobook is being increasingly examined from multiple perspectives. Numerous anthologies have been published to establish a canon of the most important photobooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; others describe and research national characteristics of the photobook, for example, in Switzerland, Spain, and Japan.1 Further anthologies, in turn, engage in specific topics characteristic of photobooks, such as those from Vienna, Paris, and Germany.2 Multiple photobook festivals have been established around the globe. Starting in Cologne, Germany, the project Photo-BookMuseum travels the world with exhibitions in container format and hosts workshops for photobook lovers.3

A brief online search using the German term ‘Fotobuch’ produces offers by printing companies through which photographers at all levels can get individually designed photobooks printed—the photo album of the digital age. This definition—to some extent captured by the photo industry—is the primary definition in the German Wikipedia article, while the English language article shows an—albeit frugal—attempt to frame the medium in the context of its history. There seem to be not enough authors willing and able to produce a universal, differentiated, and comprehensive lexical entry as seen for countless terms from other disciplines on Wikipedia. This could be evidence of fragmented and diverse research on the photobook, hosted in multiple academic disciplines and followed along with researchers’ individual and personal interests. An institutional attachment seems to be missing.4

Subsequently, today there exists neither a general definition of the photobook medium nor an underlying methodology generally implemented in the scholarly analysis of photobooks.

However, it is easy to identify characteristics specific to the photobook: the photobook is a location-independent medium, usually affordable across a broad audience. Independent of place, exhibition, or opening hours, it holds completed projects within book covers that can be viewed anywhere. Additionally, the photobook is an intimate medium. It is often regarded individually so that viewers are involved in a personal dialogue. The photobook is experienced through the activities of page-turning and perception. It presents its contents on double pages that are viewed after another. The viewer individually decides on the speed and direction of page-turning. The photobook can be art, but it can also hold reportage, information on foreign countries, propaganda, or scholarly findings. There are no limits set on photographic genres or topics. The photobook can operate exclusively with photographs, but it can also include “copious amounts of text,”5 even though the term ‘photobook’ implies a primacy of the pictorial.6

For most of photography’s history, only single pictures were considered. The photobook, however, opens not only the opportunity to present the best individual images of an author but to hold a succession of photographs in a fixed connection, thus producing and underlining content-related, aesthetic, and formal relationships between the pictures. The latter characteristic—the connectedness of the imagery—indicates that the discipline of art history may not yet understand the photobook as an object of research in its own right. Although the growing number of photobooks has led to an increased scholarly preoccupation, however, art historic analyses often still focus on the interpretation of individual pictures and content-related criteria while medium-specific aspects are rarely considered. When individual images or double pages are singled out and analyzed, omitting formal and design-based issues—such as the arrangement of the photographs within the layout—the photobook as a specific form of art has not yet won acceptance. The analysis of the medium far too often remains occupied with the content and pictorial aspects of printed photography. The way photographs are put in order, how they are positioned within the layout has an impact on the perception of the work. To understand these issues and develop a methodology, how parameters of the book can be introduced to the analysis of photobooks is one of the aims of this publication.

Disregarding parameters of the medium book also results in a missing practice to generally and adequately speak about photobooks. The vocabulary is missing. In the analysis of photobooks, terms are often used in a way that I understand as vague and occasionally inapplicable. I find it problematic when photobooks such as Robert Frank’s The Americans7 are called ‘filmic’ because all images are arranged on the right pages, thus being viewed only one after another, just as film sequences. This and other reasons for a description with borrowed terms not only misjudge the unique quality of works that rely on an ordering of pictures according to photographic principles. The Americans exemplifies that we are advised to use filmic terms to describe the photobook only on the occasion that the project decidedly works with filmic methods, for example, with filmic sequences or arrangements that are comparable to filmic montage.8

The use of terms originating from other fields is continued with the word ‘narrative,’ which derives from the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies. Photographs and photobooks are often called narrative without clearly defining this term for specific use in analyzing a visual medium such as photography or the photobook. Presentations of activity generally tend to be described as narrative, as is photojournalistic reportage that forms as the epitome of storytelling without defining what this means.9 Photobooks are frequently called narrative because they hold an arrangement of photographs viewed in temporal succession. If and by what means a photobook effectively tells a story remains largely unnoticed.

These examples of applying terms to the photobook that stem from other genres lead to a core problem: While the term ‘photographic’ in connection with other media or real-life circumstances (for example, painting, memory) is culturally anchored and clearly defined as an exact, detailed, framed, and stilled likeness, there is no definition of this photographic in photography, or—considering the photobook—the ordering and arrangement of photographs. I consider it truly desirable to clearly designate the photographic in the arrangement and order of images in a photobook, thus understanding their cohesion, function, and how they take effect—instead of using sweeping vocabulary from other media contexts. There is no question that terms like ‘filmic’ or ‘narrative’ have their place in the analysis of photobooks. However, it is necessary to precisely delineate their use so that not every author has a different understanding of their meaning when using these terms. Thus, a further aim of this publication is the work on concepts it contains toward finding terms and definitions that allow for the differentiation and, therefore, more precise analysis of photobooks.

The photobook opens opportunities to connect photography and typography in a plurimedial way.10 Thus, it creates a difference to the presentation of photographs on the wall or in other media. Accordingly, it is necessary to research how photographs—in interplay with parameters of the book and under consideration of the latter—reach the outcome that is presented to us in book form. We have to think about the way cohesion is created within the succession of photographs and the overall parameters’ contribution to this end, such as layout, book format, chosen paper, texts, and paratexts.11

This volume forms a guide that points out ways to understand the photobook as a specific structure that is more than a container of accumulated photographic images. The photobook should be analyzed as a work that contextualizes photographic projects and molds them into a fixed and unchangeable format. The plurimediality of the photobook contributes to the impact of the photographs presented, thus significantly shaping their critical reception. The cohesion of the images within the book and how it is created is the core question: beyond the topic and aesthetic of the photographs, the material qualities of the book, as well as the succession and arrangement of pictures on double pages and the use of typography, shape how we turn the pages and how we look at them, thus constituting our overall perception of the photobook.

To enhance the comprehension of the interplay between the book’s and photography’s parameters, this volume introduces methods, terms, and definitions applied in exemplary analyses. In these analyses, I focus on the perception and close observation of the respective photobook. Despite the present focus on photobooks as works of art, the demonstrated methods and terms may also be applied to productions from other photobook genres.

Three essays were published after 2013 in various contexts and languages, while the fourth was published in an abbreviated version. The German texts are published here in English for the first time, and the English texts were modified and extended for this volume.

The chapters

The chapter “The Photobook: An Approach” was written for an anthology on artists’ books and presents an introduction to this field of research. Starting with the historical formation and the multiple efforts to reach a precise definition of the term ‘photobook,’ this chapter focuses on the parameters of materiality and design. The text discusses different approaches to establishing cohesion between photographs within the photobook, including aspects of narrative and the performativity of page-turning. In a brief analysis of two photobooks by American artist Susan Lipper, the concepts of narrative and performative are exemplified. The focus lies on questions concerning the presentation of coherent interrelations within the photobook depending on either a narrative or performative structure implemented. The photobook is conceived as a space of activity where page-turning and the temporality of perception are constitutive elements.

Photographs, especially documentary ones, are often read in a semiotic way. They are understood as signs that refer to the objects depicted. On the other hand, phenomenology initially approaches its subject by its visibility. Whether the conception and production of a photobook—knowingly or unknowingly—brings forward a specific visual studies approach is discussed in the chapter “Phenomenon Photobook: A Visual Studies Approach.” With examples of numerous works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ad van Denderen, Paul Graham, Keiko Sasaoka, and Elisabeth Neudörfl, phenomenological and semiotic approaches in photobooks are explored. This—significantly modified—chapter is based on a lecture delivered during a symposium organized by Valand Academy and Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg in 2012.

The chapter “Time and Montage: Beyond the Decisive Moment” takes the succession of pictures into account regarding filmic stylistic devices and the specific mediality of the photobook. The text is based on a lecture held at the conference Photofilmic Images in Brussels in 2014. It introduces cinematic, photographic sequences that challenge the individual photograph and the concept of the depiction of a decisive moment. With examples from Paul Graham’s twelve-volume photobook A Shimmer of Possibility, the chapter discusses the implementation of sequences and their arrangement on double pages, considering the temporality of viewing and the movement through the photobook. In a further step, the discussion is extended to using the stylistic device of montage.

The parameters of page-turning that are already discussed in the groundwork chapter are further enhanced in the chapter “Page-turning: Performativity and Temporality.” A highly abbreviated version of this text was published in a special issue of the magazine Fotogeschichte in 2021. The subjects under discussion are multiple aspects of page-turning that shape the photobook experience. The material qualities of the photobook—such as format, binding, paper quality—are taken into account, as well as the arrangement of photographs to form groups, series, and sequences and their positioning within the layout. The temporality of page-turning picks up aspects from the previous chapter.

“Narration: When Is a Photobook Narrative?” asks this chapter dealing with characteristics of narrative. Considering various parameters from transmedial narratology, this text discusses terms that can help develop criteria to identify, define, and understand narrative to form cohesion between images in a photobook. The required prerequisite is developing a not too broad concept of narration, which makes it possible to recognize narrative in photobooks. The pragmatic approach established in this chapter provides a method for investigating elements of narration. In an exemplary analysis of the photobook The Pond by American photographer John Gossage, theoretical considerations are applied and reviewed for their practicability.

The final chapter titled “Outlook: Desiderata for a Future Photobook Research” focuses on research aspects that have not been considered in previous chapters and relates them to the approaches and methods discussed before. This includes topics like shared authorship, economic circumstances, and digitization. Again, this poses the question of what can be classified under the term ‘photobook’ and how it is possible to conceptualize the plural manifestations of photography in the book. Taken together, these aim to reach a meaningful theoretical specification that is of use for further exploration of the medium photobook.

Background

My personal biographic experience with photobooks has led me to the lines of thought explored within this volume and the concern to establish the photobook as an autonomous object of research with specific characteristics.

Even at the start of my life as a photographer, I was already aware that in photographic practice, the photobook is more than a transport box for individual pictures to be viewed in an isolated way. If I had not been shown Michael Schmidt’s photobook Berlin-Kreuzberg: Stadtbilder12 from 1984 at the adult education center in Berlin Neukölln in 1989, would I have developed the desire to become a photographer? This photobook became my key experience. It showed that photography has more to offer than beautiful, aesthetically sublime, and spectacular imagery, as were presented in coffee table books, magazines, and many exhibitions at the time. The possibility to express banal everyday situations—such as the experience of stepping into a pile of dog poo on a Berlin sidewalk—by a succession of images in a photobook and thus to convey the attitude toward life at the time, well and truly won me over. This discovery subsequently led me to spend every minute of my spare time at the Bücherbogen, the art bookstore at Savignyplatz, where I pulled every photobook and immersed myself in each at least once. I produced my first photobook as a participant in Michael Schmidt’s photography class at Sommerakademie Salzburg in Austria. Many more photobooks followed. Some exist only as unique copies or sketches, while others were printed and published.13

During my photography studies in Leipzig, the photobook played a major role for us students. Not only did the library contain material to study multiple photographic approaches, but the photobook opened the opportunity to assemble extensive photographic arrangements without waiting for the annual student exhibition. With the extension of the digital labs, it became easier to realize unique copies of photobooks as the work with photographic document paper in the darkroom had massively restricted the creative means. The use of layout applications provided insight into the realm of typography and the imperative to follow up further by delving deeper into this field. As an intern and occasional employee of the design agency Lambert und Lambert in Düsseldorf, I became more familiar with aspects of photobook-making beyond photography. For example, I participated in the typographical design of Michael Schmidt’s photobook EIN-HEIT (U-NI-TY)14 and experienced the cooperation between artists and designers firsthand.

Eventually, I began to pursue scholarly research on photobooks, starting with my dissertation Das Fremde sehen. Der europäische Blick auf Japan in der künstlerischen Dokumentarfotografie(Seeing the Other. The European View on Japan in Artistic Documentary Photography).15 The exploration of the arrangement of photographs into groups, series, and sequences in the photobook laid the foundation for further research in this area.

1 See for example, Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001); Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1–3 (London and New York, 2004; 2006; 2014); Manfred Heiting et al., eds., Autopsie: Deutschsprachige Fotobücher 1918 bis 1945, Vol. 1–2 (Göttingen, 2012; 2014); Peter Pfrundner, ed., Schweizer Fotobücher 1927 bis heute: Eine andere Geschichte der Fotografie (Baden, 2012); Horacio Fernández, ed., Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2014); Ryuichi Kaneko, ed., The Japanese Photobook: 1912–1990 (Göttingen, 2017).

2 Cf. Michael Ponstingl, Wien im Bild: Fotobildbände des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 5: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Fotografie in Österreich (Vienna, 2008); Hans-Michael Koetzle, ed., Eyes on Paris: Paris im Fotobuch. 1890 bis heute (Munich, 2011); Thomas Wiegand, Deutschland im Fotobuch: 287 Fotobücher zum Thema Deutschland aus der Zeit von 1915 bis 2000 (Göttingen, 2011).

3 Cf. Montag Stiftung für Kunst und Gesellschaft, ed., The Photobook in Art and Society: Participative Potentials of a Medium (Berlin, 2019).

4 In Germany, this applies fundamentally to research in the field of the theory and history of photography. There is only one full professorship with the denomination ‘theory and history of photography’ at German universities—located at an art school. There is no question that in Germany, despite multifaceted research on photographic topics, the medium of photography does not receive the scholarly attention necessary to grasp its complexity and diversity.

5 Jörg Colberg, Understanding Photobooks: The Form and Content of the Photographic Book (New York, 2017), p. 1.

6 As I understand it, the category of ‘photobook’ does not include literary works that also rely on photographs or for which photographs are made, either for the book cover or to support and supplement the literary content. I certainly consider the exploration of the connections between text and photography in such books to be worthwhile, but I see no need for this under the rubric of the photobook, even though Jan Wenzel states: “A history of the photobook will hardly do without this corpus of images created for concrete [literary, B.L.] books.” Jan Wenzel, “The Revolving Bookshelf: Heartfields Schule,” Camera Austria International (Vol. 134, 2016), p. 91.

7 Robert Frank, The Americans (Göttingen, 1986 [1959]).

8 Cf. Elisabeth Neudörfl, “Wiederholen als Wiederholung: Wiederholungsstrategien in einem fotografischen Künstlerbuch: ‘E.D.S.A.,’” in Wiederholen – Wiederholung (Heidelberg, 2015), pp. 111–13.

9 Cf. Agnes Bührig, “Mehr als die reine Abbildung,” Deutschlandfunk, (June 26, 2018), https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fotojournalismus-mehr-als-die-reine-abbildung.2907.de.html?dram:article_id=421240 (accessed February 3, 2022).

10 Here I use the term ‘plurimediality’ from drama theory, in which it is used to reflect the different (sensory) levels of the text in performance. In theatrical performance, all senses are addressed. In relation to the photobook, this term takes into account that the whole object appeals to more than just the sense of sight, but rather can be perceived in many ways through haptics, smell, and sound (when turning the pages). Also, this term seems appropriate for taking into account that photographs in a book layout and those in the context of typography have a different effect than photographs on the exhibition wall. Cf. Stefan Scherer, Einführung in die Dramen-Analyse (Darmstadt, 2013), pp. 17–18.

11 Cf. Gérard Genette and Marie Maclean, “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History (Vol. 22, No. 2, 1991).

12 Michael Schmidt, Berlin-Kreuzberg: Stadtbilder (Berlin, 1984).

13 A list of my published photobooks can be found in the Bibliography in the Photobooks section. Information about my artistic work: http://archivalien.de/ (accessed February 11, 2022).

14 Michael Schmidt, EIN-HEIT (Zurich et al., 1996).

15 Bettina Lockemann, Das Fremde sehen: Der europäische Blick auf Japan in der künstlerischen Dokumentar-fotografie (Bielefeld, 2008).

The Photobook

An Approach

The medium of photography seems particularly well suited for bringing together images in the context of images—and, therefore, also within the book. Books containing photographs have existed since the invention of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) presented the positive-negative photographic process, which he had invented, in a book entitled The Pencil of Nature1 published in six fascicles from 1844 to 1846 and illustrated with original photographic prints. The reproducibility of the photographic images generated using the process he created made this possible. The daguerreotype process, introduced by François Arago (1786–1853) in 1839 predominated this period after having been made available unpatented by the French state; however, this early form of the medium had the distinct disadvantage of producing unique, non-printable copies. Daguerreotypes could only be reproduced through graphic adaptations, such as lithographs or engravings.2 While Talbot had to produce as many photographs as the number of copies published and individually glue these into each book, the invention of autotype printing—a halftone process based on photography developed in the eighteen-eighties—ultimately made it possible to print photographs and text simultaneously and in high volumes.

When Is a Book a Photobook?

Not every book that contains photographs is a photobook. It can be problematic to define and, therefore, differentiate between genuine photobooks and those which use photographs in a different way, such as illustratively. Interest in photobooks, which has increased since the beginning of the two-thousands, and the associated debate around this field have led to numerous attempts to define the photobook. These definitions frequently refer to the photobook anthology published by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in 2004. The authors first of all describe the photobook as “a book—with or without text—where the work’s message is carried by photographs. It is a book authored by a photographer or by someone editing and sequencing the work of a photographer, or even a number of photographers.”3 This sweeping description, however, does not go far enough, so the authors try to provide a more detailed definition. The photographer (or the editor) is described as the author who, like a “director,” is responsible for the overall concept and the realization of the book.4 Several factors are crucial here: the photobook presents a theme that, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes clearly visible. The photobook does not present a collection of “greatest hits”5 or strong individual images by a photographer; rather, the content is cohesive and carried by the book’s overall concept, and thus also through factors such as the title, texts (if included), the design, the paper, and the printing quality.6 Parr and Badger describe the primary criteria of the photobook as follows: “that it should be an extended essay in photographs, and that it follows its theme with ‘intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection’…. The photobook, in short, is the ‘literary novel’ amongst photographic books.”7

Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir rightly point out that in some of the works selected by Parr and Badger, it is not necessarily the photographs that carry the primary message of the book, thus emphasizing one of the problems of this definition.8 They assert, however, that the photographs in photobooks go beyond a pure illustration of the text: “image and text work within a dialectical relationship.”9

Mareike Stoll sees the photobook as:

the compilation of a series of photographic images in book form, and published by a publishing house…, which is framed by very little text and which lays claim to curatorial coherence within the book as a whole. Essential here is the photographic sequence, which, in addition, may be structured both linguistically and visually by the title of the photograph or page numbers, but is not reliant on these.10

However, Stoll centers her study of the photobooks of the Weimar Republic around the book 60 Fotos11 by Aenne Biermann, which is rather a compilation of ‘greatest hits,’ that is, of strong single images, according to Parr and Badger’s definition. As such, it does not comply with at least one of the criteria they consider essential to the definition of photobooks. Even according to Stoll’s definition—emphasizing the importance of the “photographic sequence”12—it cannot necessarily be classified as a photobook as it does not feature a coherent or thematically consistent succession of photographs. Additionally, Stoll’s emphasis on publication by a publishing house needs to be critically evaluated, for—both in the early stages of photography as well as today—many photographers self-publish their photobooks or, as has been the case more recently, use so-called self-publishing platforms.13 Once more I want to underline the importance of the coherence of the overall project as of its visual structure. The latter points on the one hand to the contextualization within the succession of images—Sweetman emphasizes the relation between “[t]he power of the single photograph and the effect of serial arrangements”14—which is more than a collection of single images. On the other hand, this involves not only typography and text but, in the first instance and unavoidably, aspects of design, such as the format of the book, the size of the photographs, the framing, and the arrangement of photographs across the double-page spreads.15

The concept of authorship introduced by Parr and Badger is often difficult to define unequivocally. This is because even when the photographer’s name alone is given on the cover, the photobook is usually the result of shared authorship.16 While the photographer provides the photographs, the selection of photographs or the determination of their order may be decided in collaboration with designers, curators, publishers, or editors. Although we may assume that the published book is in line with the ideas of the named author, other players are also involved. In particular, both the design and the texts influence the perception of the photographs in the book, but also the quality of the printing or the materiality of the paper affect the experience of reception.17

These definitions do not take into account the purpose of the book. Photobooks are produced with very different intentions and for various audiences. Travel books, company presentations, and propaganda books stand in opposition to photobooks as works of art. At the same time, photobooks that were once orientated towards a specific purpose may, at a different point in time, be regarded as art objects, because, for example, the photographers or designers also worked as artists, or because the original context of the publication has lost its relevance.18 In this context we can look at Jörg Colberg’s attempt to define the photobook who is using a rather pragmatic approach: “A photobook is a book that is being viewed because of the photographs inside.… Unlike most books, producing a photobook begins with the photographs; everything else, which might include copious amounts of text, is added later.”19 The purpose of the book is of no relevance to Colberg as the reception is carried out primarily because of the photographs and the production begins with them. Thus, the photographs are not accessory parts of other elements of the book as for example in cookbooks.20 Colberg thinks from the production side which is problematic for the classification of historic books when neither documents nor contemporary witnesses may provide information on the formation of the book.