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| © Sebastião Salgado/courtesy Taschen |
| Salgado's "Dinka group at Pagarau cattle camp, southern Sudan, 2006." Click photo for more images. |
Art on paper
In an art world where the price of an original print by an established photographer is beyond mortal means, photo books are the next best thing. And like prints, the finest of them only seem to increase in value. Go to eBay and you'll find dozens of out-of-print titles, monographs especially, selling for much more than their original price.
A photography book is its own unique medium, of course, involving aesthetic considerations beyond those of the individual images it contains. Its success is in the sum of its parts -- picture choice and sequencing, sizing and pacing, production values.This year's best books go way beyond monographs and photo histories. Publishers are taking more chances to catch the buyer's eye, and not just with big, elaborately packaged tomes. This year we saw everything from photographic board books, a format that brings back memories of childhood, to diminutive volumes that make a virtue of their preciousness. (One of these, Kadir van Lohuizen's 5x5-inch Diamond Matters, has a rhinestone embedded in its cover.) Even Aperture, which can always be counted on for cutting-edge photography books, has produced its largest volume ever, Richard Misrach's handsome, 17x24-inch On the Beach.
The most daring of these books come from smaller publishers at a time when many of the big names in the business have not only cut back on the number of photo titles they release but also become more conservative in the subject matter they consider. We sometimes worry about the economics of photography books, wondering how, let alone why, so many get produced. But with the remarkable range of offerings we have seen this year, we won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
-Russell Hart
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