Encounters with Photobooks: How Art and Experience Matter

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 and new materialism, 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.

Author: Briony Carlin
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Published: 05/15/2026
Pages: 300
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.23h x 6.12w x 0.73d
ISBN: 9789462705128