Photo-Texts: A Survey of the Rubenstein Library’s Photobook Collection
Essay by Lisa McCarty for the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University (2019) | Return to Selected Writings
This exhibition surveys the Rubenstein Library’s collection of photobooks. For the last five years the Archive of Documentary Arts has focused on building this collection which now includes over 1000 volumes. Much like artists’ books, photobooks are “conceived as artworks in their own right”1 and are often the primary medium for a series of photographs. Unlike an exhibition catalog or monograph authored by a curator or scholar, the photographer is the principal author of a photobook. As such, photographers not only make the images, but also become highly involved in all aspects of the book making process. In the photobook genre overall, the selection and arrangement of photographs and text are carefully and painstakingly considered by the artist and editor. Meaning accumulates through the interaction of successive images and text, much like in other forms of sequential art, such as films, graphic novels, or comic books.
The history of photobooks is almost as long as the history of photography itself. Books with original photographs emerged soon after the advent of photography was publicized in 1839. Anna Atkins’ handmade book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions from 1843 is credited as the first book of photographs and William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature followed soon after in 1844. Both of these self-initiated projects fostered “the conception of photographs in book form.”2 Atkins’ and Talbots’ books established many traditions that artists have revisited for the last 175 years. This exhibition traces one such tradition, namely, that of the Photo-Text.
A Photo-Text is a book that fully integrates and gives equal weight to photographs and text. To quote writer and curator Federica Chiocchetti a Photo-Text is, “a book where photographs and words share equal ontological dignity, or, less academically, equal importance in contributing to the narrative of the project – and where text is not a mere introduction, postface, or essay on the photoworks.”3 Chiocchetti addresses one of the main distinctions of the Photo-Text, namely that the text is not secondary to the photographs. Similarly, the photographs cannot be ancillary to a larger textual project. Walker Evans addresses this opposite pole in the introduction to his collaborative Photo-Text with James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.”4 The Photo-Text prioritizes the union of photographs and text.
Why address this distinct sub-genre within an already niche genre? As an Archive of Documentary Arts housed within a research institution, the preservation of context for photographic projects has always been a priority in our collecting. Without context, often in the form of text, photographers identities, their subjects, and their stories are lost or become anonymous over time. However, text not only preserves context, it also affects the interpretation of photographs. When text and image are combined, they create what theorist Roland Barthes describes as the “Third Meaning,” an allusion to filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of a “third something” created through montage in film. To quote Barthes, “The third meaning – theoretically locatable but not describable – can now be seen as the passage from language to significance.” In the most affective films and Photo-Texts, text and image work together as point and counterpoint, juxtaposing ideas in a manner that doesn’t didactically tell a story, but allows each reader to actively create meaning and significance in their own mind. Photo-Texts, much like films, can operate in this gulf between what is seen and what is felt, engendering empathy and creating space for reverence. Many documentarians hope to create social change or memorialize underrepresented stories through their work. Neither change nor memorialization is possible without empathy and reverence.
The Archive of Documentary Arts is also committed to expanding the perceived expectations of documentary practice and to creating a diverse collection that reflects the multitude of viewpoints and voices constituting the documentary arts today. Documentary artists can be self-taught or holders of graduate degrees; they sample from a variety of cultural traditions, academic disciplines, artistic techniques and their own life experiences to tell stories. They are also hybrid practioners; simultaneously writers, oral historians, community organizers, lawyers, natural philosophers, teachers, photographers, filmmakers, book makers, designers, painters, sculptors, and much more. Documentarians traffic in both first-person narratives and poetry. This exhibition foregrounds this continuum of approaches to documentary storytelling.
This survey of the Library's collection is a wide-ranging, but incomplete sampling of our holdings of Photo-Texts dating from 1844-2019. Forty-three books from forty publishers and self-publishers are featured with an emphasis on contemporary books published since 2010. The exhibit is divided into six prevalent themes within documentary practice and highlight a spectrum of approaches to writing and imagemaking.
—Lisa McCarty, Curator, Archive of Documentary Arts (2019)
1) “Artist Book.” Printed Matter, www.printedmatter.org/about/artist-book.
2) Parr, Martin and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History, Volume 1. Phaidon, 2004.
3) Chiocchetti, Federica. “What Is a Photo-Text Book?.” The PhotoBook Review, Spring 2019, pp. 9.
4) Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
5) Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977.
Featured Artists: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland • Laia Abril • Morgan Ashcom • Mathieu Asselin • Richard Avedon and James Baldwin • Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelly • Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell • Andre Bradley •Robert Burley • Teju Cole • Debi Cornwall • Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes • Cristina de Middel • Phyllis B. Dooney and Jardine Libaire • Eliot Dudik and Arielle Greenberg • Amy Elkins • Walker Evans and James Agee • LaToya Ruby Frazier • Lauren Greenfield • Orestes Gonzalez • Alex Harris and William deBuys • The Hampton Institute Camera Club and Paul Laurence Dunbar • Lauren Henkin and Kirsten Rian • Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor • Elizabeth Matheson and Michael McFee • Gideon Mendel • Wright Morris • Nicholas Muellner • Bea Nettles and Connie Nettles • Rebecca Norris Webb • Thomas Ogle and William Wordsworth • Sylvia Plachy • Mary Ellen Mark • Sally Mann • Zanele Muholi • Lauren Pond • Maggie Lee Sayre and Tom Rankin • Collier Schorr • Clarissa Sligh • Aileen M. Smith and W. Eugene Smith• William Henry Fox Talbot • James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops • John Willis