The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond

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The photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the publication of Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature heralded a new genre in the history of the book, one in which the photographwas the primary vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal, if sometimes conflicted partnership, with the written word. In this book, practicing photographers and writers across several fields of scholarship share a range of fresh approaches to reading the photobook, developing new ways of understanding how meaning is shaped by an image's interaction with its text and context, and engaging with the visual, tactile, and interactive experience of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual works, the photobook, from fetishized objet d'art to cheaply-printed booklet, is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.