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This volume challenges the art-market definition of the photobook as a photographer’s book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. The chapters revisit canonical works and delve into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, collectives and the poetic impulse.

<p>Introduction: the photobook as confluence – Paul Edwards<br><br>Part I: The photobook market<br> 1 Towards an understanding of the market for photobooks – Moritz Neumüller<br> 2 Theorising encounters with contemporary photobooks: situation, materiality and plurality – Briony Anne Carlin<br><br>Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 1970–90<br> 3 Wonder Woman and other fantasies: Joan Lyons and the photo-based artist’s book – Jessica S. McDonald<br> 4 Mothers of invention: Barbara Norfleet, Elsa Dorfman, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas – Mary Panzer<br><br>Part III: Commitment and visibility<br> 5 Missing photobooks: a symptomatic reading on the reasons for and impact of the lack of publications by Black British photographers in the 1970s and 1980s – Taous R. Dahmani<br> 6 The photobook as event – Jessie Bond<br> 7 <i>Camden, NJ, 2013</i>: a digital photobook – Nicolas Baudouin<br><br>Part IV: Institutional <i>v</i>. clandestine<br> 8 Photographing race and madness: annual reports of psychiatric hospitals in the US South in the early twentieth century – Élodie Edwards-Grossi<br> 9 Photobooks and the architectural imagination of California – Volker M. Welter<br>10 Experimental confluence: <i>Amazônia</i> by Claudia Andujar and George Love – Vitor Marcelino<br>11 Dead time: the ‘collectivist’ photobook in the prison work of Mohamed Bourouissa – Andy Stafford<br><br>Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral <br>12 <i>The Road is Wider than Long</i>, by Roland Penrose – Antony Penrose<br>13 An unmade book: Walker Evans’s 1970s alphabet Polaroids – Caroline Blinder<br><br>Index</p>

Paul Edwards is Associate Professor of English at Université Paris Cité and Research Associate at the Maison Française, Oxford

<p>This volume offers a radical challenge to our idea of the photobook, arguing that the genre should be understood not as the artistic vision of one person but as a collective endeavour created through the confluence of individuals and competing interests.<br><br>Today’s market is geared for photographer-driven books and buoyed by the theoretical framework proposed by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. But <i>The photobook world</i> casts a wider net, paying particular attention to anonymous photographers, institutional publications, digital opportunities, unrealized projects, illegal practices, collectives, poets and the reader. Investigating North American, British and French photobooks from 1900 to the present, the chapters uncover forgotten social objects and show how personal histories are bound to broader historical movements. At the same time, a number engage with canonical authors – notably Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas, Roland Penrose and the Visual Studies Workshop – to reveal the original contexts and “biographies” of the photographs.<br><br>Featuring contributors from a variety of professional and disciplinary backgrounds, including photographers, curators, historians and other researchers, <i>The photobook world </i>provides a better understanding of how the meaning of photobooks is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.</p>