Visual narratives have a long history in the context of human cultural artifacts. In any sequence of images, the juxtaposition of visual signs gives rise to narrative potential. The narrative ...qualities of photographic images have been explored since its early days through the medium of the book. Borrowing the book artifact from literature, photography has adapted it for its own purposes. Such appropriation invites an examination of the strategies that are employed in photobooks to promote the emergence of narratives. Drawing upon the field of Narrative Studies and the concepts of storyworld and worldmaking, this paper investigates the narrative construction in the photobook Niagara (2006), produced by photographer Alec Soth. The paper demonstrates that certain strategies used in literary texts are analogous to the photobook space. In conclusion, I argue that photobooks are cultural objects that offer invaluable narrative possibilities, especially because they afford agency for the reader’s/viewer’s worldmaking.
In this interview, Moritz Neumüller reflects on the nature of the photobook as a specific medium, and examines its place in contemporary photography. The interview was made by João Queiroz and Ana ...Luiza Fernandes in February and March 2021.
This essay will discuss the book Maldicidade (2014) by the Spanish-Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco with a special attention to its organization as a narrative and poetic unity as a ...photobook. In focus is the book’s composition as an implicit dialogue between text and image and the use of modernist avantgarde techniques of montage and collage aiming at the expression of a contemporary reality of misery and hardship in the big cities of the Americas. The overarching argument is that the unity of the book as a photobook surpasses the referential nature of photography through visual narrativity in the effort to reveal the common condition of its posthuman urbanity.
In this article, I compare the strategies of visual representation employed in the two 1969 photobooks Gli esclusi (D’Alessandro-Piro) and Morire di classe (Berengo Gardin et al.). These photobooks ...have been the photographic protagonists of the reform of psychiatric health care that, fed by the upheavals of the late 1960s, brought about the closure of psychiatric asylums in 1978 thanks to the famous Law 180. I will specifically focus on the representation of claustrophobic spaces in their relationship with the bodies of inmates compared to the traditional iconography of madness. This article aims to show that these photobooks (while employing radically different strategies of representation) aim at providing a visual translation of the pivotal philosophical coordinates that guided the reform of psychiatric health care.
The Road is Wider than Long is a paradoxical artist’s book created by Roland Penrose in 1939. At the same time documentary and poetic, a travel report and a lyrical production, it comprises free ...verse, typographic poetry, “papiers collés”, and photographs. This heterogeneous nature allows to explore the contrasts and contradictions between but also the coming together of avant-garde poetry and photography. First, this article shows how The Road is Wider than Long draws from amateur practices by focusing on Penrose’s method of handling the pictures. Then, turning to the actual text, it elaborates on the notion of “poetic rendition”. Finally, it discusses the power of poetry when it is interwoven with and combines different aesthetics and intentions, and this at the crossroads of memory and document. Originally a keepsake to keep a record of a couple’s trip memories in the Balkans, The Road is Wider than Long belongs at the same time to Surrealist books with photography illustrations and to the tradition of the photobooks focused on territories.
This paper argues that Journey into the Fantastic, by Boris Kossoy, is an exemplary case of montage working as a creative process in photographic books. The work is an important contribution to the ...world of photobooks. Full of experimentation, it relates exercises of photographic expression to the exploration of conventional aspects of the support. By using Eisenstein's theory and typology, we describe how combinatorial patterns can be observed acting as meaning-making processes in this photographic book. We observe that juxtaposition types known as intellectual montage are the main processes regulating the relations established between its parts, scaffolding it as a whole.
En este artículo proponemos un análisis de los fotolibros publicados a partir de 2019 sobre la Guerra Civil como una forma de posmemoria. Ese año coincide la publicación de El laberinto mágico, de ...Julián Barón, Flowers for Franco, de Toni Amengual, War Edition, de Roberto Aguirrezabala, Cristos y anticristos, de Javier Viver y el año siguiente, en 2020, El paseo, de David García y Hombrecino de Susana Cabañero, que inauguran una forma de posmemoria específicamente fotográfica, tanto por cuestiones generacionales, contextuales, discursivas y de publicación. Creemos que estos creadores pueden sumar una cuarta generación a las tres generaciones fotográficas que dibuja Antonio Ansón, que hemos llamado la generación de la memoria colectiva.
This article proposes a methodology for the analysis of photobooks from a semiotic perspective, understanding the book as a device for sequencing images that is in itself signifying materiality, not ...only a vehicle for the dissemination of photographic projects. To develop the methodology, we have combined proposals from photographic analysis, film analysis and editorial and typographic design theory. The proposed methodology unfolds into seven categories -preliminary elements, contextual approach, physical qualities, expressive elements, page layout, serialization/sequencing and expression-. The methodology is applied to the photobook Ricardo Cases's Paloma al aire (2011).
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