Anyone who was around in the late 1990s to experience the Internet’s seemingly unstoppable growth towards cultural domination would have heard loud and repeated declarations of the imminent ‘end of print.’ In an age of networked and ever-present screens, what need could there possibly be for magazines, newspapers, and books? While this has proven broadly true, those declarations should have left at least some space for what has turned out to be a significant renaissance of printed matter, if not as a truly mass medium, then at least as a more specialised set of cultural and artistic activities. For example, there are more photographic books and photographic publishers now than there have ever been. And there are books being made that are as ambitious, innovative, and significant as any from the past.

Moreover, this last quarter century of the Internet has also seen the rich history of photographic books come into focus as an object of study, canonised and counter-canonised, with book collections being formed by individual enthusiasts, scholars, and major institutions. Books are far more readily available. We need no longer trawl speculatively for years in old bookshops; once hard-to-find titles can be located in minutes, delivered to your door in days. Looking back, it is no coincidence that Internet commerce–from Amazon to eBay and independent sellers–focused initially on the book, that supremely un-screenlike and stubbornly material cultural form. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out back in 1964, new communications technologies do not make older ones redundant, but they do re-imagine, re-evaluate, and re-situate them. This has certainly been true for photographic books.

For much of the twentieth century, the formalised histories of photography had followed the models of established histories of art: connoisseurship, fine prints of exemplary images, with occasional nods to broader social impact and technological advances. But photography was always too wild, too promiscuous, and too prone to scramble distinctions and categories to be fitted neatly into modes of study that were not designed for it. Sooner or later, the photographic book would have to be taken seriously and on its own varied terms.

In 1980, the American photo historian Beaumont Newhall gave a public lecture titled ‘Photography and the Book’, published as a slim volume shortly after. His text is surprising for its lack of insight. Trained as an art historian, Newhall had nothing much to note beyond a few milestones in reproduction technology. As the author of countless illustrated volumes, the book form was clearly vital to Newhall but all those years collating and discussing exemplary single images somewhat blinded him to the decisive role of the book itself in the shaping and disseminating of photographic work. Photography isn’t just in books; it is books. Newhall was not unusual. Most photo historians couldn’t see the wood for the trees back then, but it is likely their inattention was inconsequential. The wild flourishing of photographic books, which had begun in the 1840s, happened largely beyond critical study. When the spotlight did finally arrive, it felt like the discovery of a vast, unexplored field that had somehow been hiding in plain sight. Suddenly it was clear that from whichever perspective one looked, most of the cultural and artistic landmarks in photography had been publications, rather than individual images or exhibitions. Everything would need to be rethought.

One of the significant challenges emerging from all this has been the question of what role books might need to play in exhibitions dealing with the photography’s past and present. Books are, one might justifiably argue, resistant to exhibition, antithetical, even. They are conceived differently, function differently, and circulate differently to exhibitions. How can a book be exhibited? As a writer, curator, and historian of photography, I have had a particular interest in this.

In November 2009 I was in Paris to attend the big commercial fair, Paris Photo, and to see a number of photographic exhibitions at the city’s museums. The fair was, and still is, at least as significant for its gathering of publishers as gallerists. If books ever appear in gallerists’ booths at fairs, it is usually to show prospective buyers that the prints for sale have a published pedigree. In museum exhibitions, if books are present, it’s usually to indicate that the images floating on the walls in frames were either made for publication in the first instance, or, in the case of some contemporary photographers, made for both wall and page. I recall a visit to the Jeu de Paume, to see an exhibition of the work of the American photographer Robert Frank. It was packed with visitors, especially the room dedicated to Frank’s mid-1950s body of work, The Americans. Visitors standing three or four deep waited to approach the small, framed prints. Looking around, I saw a young couple frustrated at how difficult it was to see anything at all. Dejected, they sat down on a circular sofa in the middle of the space and picked up a copy of the book of The Americans that was attached by a wire. They became engrossed, leaning over each page, studying the images one by one, in sequence. In truth what they had in their hands was the work itself. Frank’s achievement was the book, not the set of exhibition prints. For the price of their two tickets to the show, the couple could have bought the book, and owned The Americans. But all of those people were crowded into that room because of the cultural hierarchy that places museums and rare prints over mass-produced pages.

Photography belongs anywhere we see it. If you look at a photograph printed on a page, generally you don’t ask yourself where the ‘real thing’ is (the way you might if you see a painting or sculpture reproduced in a book). The same photograph framed on a wall might feel like it belongs there too, even if it’s first context was the printed page.  Indeed, a great deal of photography of the modern era had internalised the book as its primary dimension and context. For example, it now seems pretty clear that the whole picture making experiment in twentieth century street photography took place at the scale of the printed page. Most of those photographers worked commercially for the magazines and had ambitions, fulfilled or not, to make books of their work. If they ever exhibited it, it was printed barely larger than page size.

It is worth remembering that the market for photographic prints emerged initially as an offshoot of the used book trade, towards the end of the nineteenth century. This market was not for contemporary images, but older ones. In the 1880s the new technique of halftone printing had allowed photographic images to be converted into dots of various sizes so that they could be printed alongside typeset text on the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers. This process both sped up and lowered the cost of illustrated printed matter. It also reduced the quality. Before that, photographs either had to be transposed as woodblocks or engraved on metal plates for printing, or hand-made darkroom prints had to be glued directly to the pages (‘tipped-in’, to use the correct terminology). The emerging market was for these older tipped-in prints. Books would be broken up so that the prints–more tonally nuanced and detailed than the cruder halftone imagery fast becoming standard–could be sold individually. A lot of the artistically ambitious photography of the nineteenth century, as well as the most beautiful architectural, topographic, industrial, and portrait photography had been produced as tipped-in prints for publications, sometimes in quite large numbers.

Not long after this, a more emphatically modern photographic art began to emerge, and the American Alfred Stieglitz had an interesting place in this story. He is a figure renowned in fairly equal measure for his own photographic art and for his canniness as a gallerist and publisher. Stieglitz hedged his bets between the wall and the page as sites for photography. He set up galleries but also a finely printed journal of photographic art, Camera Work (1903-17). He often found that the prints made for the pages of Camera Work, in techniques such as gravure and collotype, were superior to the photographers’ darkroom prints of the same images. At times, he took to exhibiting these prints intended for tipping-in. Framed on the wall of his gallery, they blurred any easy distinction between publication and exhibition. Modern photography would belong to both page and wall, but rather more to the page, at least until the late 1960s.

Exhibitions are events in time. They open and, after a while, they close. In between, the public sees them, and they might be documented in one way or another. In this sense, exhibitions are connected with their cultural moment and its values whether this is by expressing them, commenting upon them, or pointedly ignoring them to present something else. But the essential thing is that they come and go, and while they might be remembered, their significance is related to their timeliness. Books, by contrast, last. We might well discard a magazine when the next issue appears but throwing a book in the trash? That feels like cultural barbarism. Even fascism. To make a book is to engage, at least on some level, with a timeframe that stretches ahead. As the photographer Dayanita Singh puts it, “a book is a conversation with a stranger in the future”. While there are commercial and even artistic pressures for a book to find its audience as soon as possible, the history of photographic publishing is full of books that found their moment later and unexpectedly. One of the most notable is Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s Let us now Praise Famous Men. Their photographs and words about the plight of three Alabama tenant farmer families were rejected by Fortune magazine in 1936, and published as a book five years later, in 1941. Sold just 199 copies in its first two years, and was remaindered at 19 cents a copy. 750 copies were priced at a loss, although it eventually sold out its print run of 1,025 copies. It is not until its original ‘moment’ was seemingly long past that the book reached a substantial audience. In 1960 it was reprinted, and heralded as a work ‘ahead of its time’, founding its own genre of experimental modernist documentary. It has remained in print ever since, and is as significant now as it ever was. This is a well-known example but in a sense, all books function this way, since they all contain at least the potential to be part of a “conversation with a stranger in the future”.

When I think back over my working life so far as a curator, it is clear to me that I have always been trying in one way or another to present books within exhibitions. I first curated back in 2010, three shows in one year, which I only now realise all contained books. And in the forty or so exhibitions since, books have almost always been present. It might be as simple as an artist’s book on a table or plinth. It might be multiple copies laid out so viewers can see a lot of, or maybe all of the pages. It might be a reading room within a show. I have presented videos of page turning. I have dismantled books and pinned the pages on the wall. I have shown work by artists using books as sculptural forms. I have worked with performance artists interacting with books. A few months back, I curated a show of the work of Jeff Wall, a photographer who really committed himself to large scale tableau photographs with no relation to the printed page. But in the catalogue, I reproduced details at the size they appear in his exhibited works (if I couldn’t get a book into the exhibition then I had to get the exhibition into the book!)

I’m currently working on a show about the wonderful blossoming of photobook making in the USA since the turn of the millennium (50 books will be presented), and another about the events that led to the posthumous publishing of the first book of the Parisian photographer Eugène Atget’s work in 1930. Very often, I work with photographers to present both the exhibition prints and the books of their projects.

It is always a challenge to present a book in the context of an exhibition. Nobody really wants to see just the cover under glass in a vitrine. But the challenge has led to a real profusion of strategies and creative solutions. At this point, it is almost unusual to visit a show about photography without books or magazines being present in one way or another. And I can’t see that this is going to change anytime soon.

David Campany
Curator, writer, editor, educator and Creative Director of the International Center of Photography, New York.