It is an interesting moment for the medium of the photobook. The boom dust is beginning to settle as inflation makes the market less navigable. The price of producing photobooks is ont he rise and coincides with a shrinking market size. This is based on a broader conversation with publishers and artists over the past year. Numbers do not define it, but by the firsthand experience of those involved, including me. Conversely, even though the financial landscape of photobooks and their production is shrinking and becoming less tenable, the interesting discussion regards education, workshops, and the rise of the photobook as a medium that more people are interested in using to express their subjectivity.

Though it may seem like a strange time to be making books, artists are interested in expanding the medium. I suspect some of this concerns the books’ lasting permanence compared to exhibitions, and also that the market capitalization for photography in galleries is also on the decline, with fewer and fewer brick and mortar establishments opening doors and a dearth of new gallerists focused on photography opening spaces for the continued championing of the medium and its artists. There is also the AI factor and the general downward trajectory of sales for the industry. This is augmented by uncertainty, and with education being an expensive way to enter the market, artists are finding themselves in a position to rectify their desires to produce work and to have it seen.

Times like these shake the tree, letting those unprepared for the rigors of economic hardship and not determined to make art at all costs as part of their lives fall to the ground to be left behind and to rot. It is a time that suggests we escape the mildewed blueprint and find new ways to coordinate ourselves to produce within the margins of what is possible without expecting sincere reward. This means finding clever ways to economize, motivate, and revolutionize tired forms for new ones.

I have been thinking about the problem the photobook medium suffers from for the past two years. The context of how to exhibit a photobook to the public has been one of the unfortunate problems for the medium. I suggest that I see the photobook as a medium, but I also believe that books are objects. These hermetic objects deserve to have their contents shared and celebrated in an exhibition format where a larger public may see them. Despite being skeptical about exhibitions, I have searched for a way to integrate these two forms. There have been a few attempts through our photobook course and recently published books that combat this problem in the form of an art object.

The first version I came across recently is from Jeff Wall. TBW Books designed and published a book on the artist’s famous re-envisioning of Hokusai’s famous print, A Sudden Gust of Wind. It is a well-known Wall photograph and even more well-known Hokusai image. Wall recreated the image photographically in 1993. The publishing house took this image and made a large Jeff Wall-sized photograph cut into smaller pieces, which could be mounted onto the wall as an installation in which the pages would presumably flutter with a sudden gust of wind, reminding people of the materiality implied within the image Wall re-made. In this, the book becomes an art object, a way to integrate the photobook to the wall, albeit calling it a book is arguable. Calling it a photograph is equally tricky. One might imagine it as the hybrid form that it is. There have been other experimental versions similar. In 2024, during our workshop, we made an exhibition of books on a gallery wall with the only proviso that you cannot simply put your photographs from the book on the wall without significant formal change, with a third dimension being the operable change. Our participants rose to the occasion, and we had an exciting exhibition that tested the forms of photographs and the book forms.

Patrick Tsai is an American artist living in Japan, whose last book, Self-Portrait (2022), we spoke about on the Nearest Truth Podcast. It remains a book I use for teaching and when I need a checkle, as one of Patrick’s talents is humor. The images in Self-Portrait reflect his sardonic wit and his ability to take the piss out of the medium and himself, which I highly applaud. His new “book” is entitled Photographic Memories, published through Dooks, and comprises 12 offset A1-sized posters. The artist suggests the viewer can function as an unbound photobook and a private exhibition that can be hung or refolded after viewing. This creates a form of play and open interpretation that I find very liberating, even if I do not plan to open the box, preferring to know its contents until I have a space to exhibit the material. Besides feeling liberating, fusing the wall to the book is another step in pushing the medium to be seen. I believe Patrick has, like TBW Books, cracked open a speculative way in which the photobook can graduate into a hybrid form, acting as a shelf object with potential for hanging.

Within Patrick’s work, the same humor applies as before, as he riffs on everyday photographic communication of shared moments and how we observe snapshot tropes. Still, he subverts their obvious nature with a playful intervening hand so that the photographs present as hyperreal and hyperrealistic like memory. The result is a playful investigation of the photograph as a fallacy to the nature of memory and vice versa, that he employs the objects to be hung suggests extending the dialog to that of projection, removing the snapshot aesthetic from the hard drive or family album to the wall, asking a point of reverent artistic appreciation of the offset prints. There is quite a bit going on in what at first appears as a simple tactical project, which layer by layer reveals its potential. This is a fantastic sign that the photobook medium is progressing—highest Recommendation.