Encounters with Photobooks

How Art and Experience Matter

Briony Carlin (Author),

Paperback
Epub
PDF

Category: Art, Gender Studies, Media and Visual Culture, Photography

Language: English

DOI: 10.11116/9789461667434

ISBN: 9789462705128

Publication date: April 15, 2026

€55.00 (including 6% VAT)

Buy Now

Number of pages: 300

Size: 234 x 156 x 18 mm

Illustrations and other content description:
Illustrated, 37 pages in colour

Funded by: Path to Open

Stock item: 171740

Standard delivery time for print books:

For Belgium: 5 to 8 working days

For EU: 2 to 3 weeks

For other countries: 4 to 5 weeks

Category: Art, Gender Studies, Media and Visual Culture, Photography

Language: English

DOI: 10.11116/9789461667434

ISBN: 9789461667434

Publication date: April 15, 2026

€47.00 (including 6% VAT)

Buy Now

Easy access with the Glassboxx app

Number of pages: 300

Illustrations and other content description:
Illustrated, 37 pages in colour

Funded by: Path to Open

Category: Art, Gender Studies, Media and Visual Culture, Photography

Language: English

DOI: 10.11116/9789461667434

ISBN: 9789461667427

Publication date: April 15, 2026

€47.00 (including 6% VAT)

Buy Now

Easy access with the Glassboxx app

Number of pages: 300

Illustrations and other content description:
Illustrated, 37 pages in colour

Funded by: Path to Open

Summary
Contents
About the Author
Reviews

The materiality of photobooks.

Photobooks are an art form on the move. They travel physically, as copies are bought, traded, treasured, forgotten, and rediscovered around the world. They move conceptually, as their meanings evolve through changing use and value. Photobooks combine languages of photography, text and design into a distinct medium that breaks from the confines of galleries and libraries, entering unexpected or intimate environments, such as our homes.

Encounters with Photobooks marks a shift in scholarship by showing how meaningful experiences with photobooks are shaped by the situated, material, and political circumstances of these encounters. Weaving together creative writing about photobook encounters with critical traditions in museology, phenomenology, art history, new materialism and feminist praxis, this innovative book illuminates the photobook’s multiplicity: its unique potential for its many copies to matter differently to makers and readers in each momentary encounter.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction

Part 1: Experiential Perceivings

Encounter 1: An Absent Book
Chapter 1: The Phenomenal Photobook: Sensory Perception and Time

Encounter 2: Another Black Darkness, Sakiko Nomura
Chapter 2: Social Sense-Making: Readers and Subjectivity

Part 2: Discursive Matter

Encounter 3: A Stranger in My Mother’s Kitchen, Celine Marchbank
Chapter 3: Issues with Bookishness: Photobooks and Book Culture

Part 3: Epistemic Environments

Encounter 4: Photobook Fair Diaries
Chapter 4: Sites of Photobook Production

Encounter 5: From Here to Eternity, Sunil Gupta
Chapter 5: Labels That Stick: Photobooks and Institutions

Part 4: Expanded Encounters

Encounter 6: Sent a Letter, Dayanita Singh
Chapter 6: Plurality and Mutability

Encounter 7: In Flagrante, Chris Killip
Chapter 7: Encounters Remembered, Re-mediated, Reimagined

Conclusion

Appendix: List of Photobook Encounters
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Briony Carlin

Briony Carlin is Lecturer in History of Art at Newcastle University.

This knowledgeable and considered study makes a persuasive case regarding the world- and sense-making dimensions of the photobook encounter. It deals in serious concepts and scholarship, yet zips by weightlessly thanks to Carlin’s sparkling prose and illustrative case studies. While this study makes a significant contribution to Photobook scholarship specifically, its new materialist arguments are illuminative of readerly encounters more widely. - Victoria Horne, Northumbria University

This book reimagines the photobook as a living companion rather than an object. With striking originality, it shows how reading becomes a practice of imagination, intimacy, and connection beyond the human. Using techniques such as autoethnography grounded in feminist new materialist theory, it models an ethics of attention and perception that traces the entanglement of human and more-than-human agencies, illuminating the photobook as phenomenon while exemplifying a generous, rigorous way of doing research. - Moritz Neumüller, curator and writer on photography and new media

Related titles

A Companion to Tom Phillips

Livio Belloï (Editor), Michel Delville (Editor),

December 2026

Collective Traumas and Future Fantasies

Raika Khorshidian (Editor), Birgit Mersmann (Editor), Cathrine Bublatzky (Editor), Julia Stenzel (Editor),

November 2026

A Kinshasa Star

Nancy Rose Hunt (Editor), Pedro Monaville (Editor),

November 2026

Cross, Crown and Crusade

Henrik von Achen (Author),

November 2026

Feminists Resisting Gendered Violence

Hemangini Gupta (Editor), Fiona Mackay (Editor), Jan Breckenridge (Editor), Louise Chappell (Editor), Rachna Mehra (Editor), Rukmini Sen (Editor), Mailin Suchting (Editor),

October 2026