5B4 Photography and Books Year II
The way many photobooks are being marketed is the perfect capitalist wet dream. Small quantities mixed with the hype that if you miss out in the very beginning, that same book will be very expensive in just a matter of months. This increases pressure to act quickly with clouded judgment and the wrong reasoning.
I had a funny moment with a friend who approached me in a store carrying a book that I would never have thought he’d be interested in. I skeptically asked him if he liked the work and he replied, “I feel like if I don’t get it now then I’ll never have the chance to really know whether I like it or not.” That pretty much sums it up right there.
Photobooks are basically a collector’s market, which is bad for everyone who likes photobooks for the art, and not for how much money they can make on them. Or so 5B4 contends:
If you look at the consequences you may realize that over 90% of the recognized landmark photobooks are now out of the hands of people who may be interested in exploring the content. These books, which are visual artistic statements, in most cases have been turned into words. Now in order to learn about an older book of photographs, you read about it in short 500 word essays without seeing any of the content. What is detrimental is that each of these objects will have a multitude of reactions from different sets of eyes. The sad fact is that we no longer have the ability to see for ourselves what these works mean to each individually. There are now a couple of voices that “explain” the work to you as if we all saw through the same collective peephole.
