Matt Johnston. Onomatopee 220, 2021.
With an overarching goal of increasing accessibility of photobooks to a broader readership, Matt Johnston’s Photobooks & provides useful insights into the cultural and logistical qualities that contribute to this growing genre. Johnston discusses many facets that affect the perception of and experience with photobooks including the role of technology, a readership community, devising a shared vocabulary, and the multiple acts of reading photobooks. Johnston addresses the multiple definitions that have been applied to photobooks (e.g., artist book, photographic book, and photo essay) to emphasize the fluidity of experience, perception, and aesthetics this format can support; and offers a working definition for the community to move forward with:
The photobook is a single or multi-authored, bound work with photography as its primary content. It is an expression of a unified thought, subject, position, location or time, that has been constructed with awareness of the physical book as output.
In accounting for the variety of interpretation, Johnston acknowledged that this format has developed within a niche and insular creator-centered community of readers that continues to present barriers to engagement, despite a growing community of photobook readers since 2000. The expense of production and subsequent cost to readers, limited distribution, and the perceived exclusivity of this format, are a few of the barriers to increasing readership of photobooks.
While Johnston identifies the parameters of the nuanced reading experience photobooks provide in merging tactile, visual, and textual elements, he does not address the use and impact of different layouts within a photobook. Despite touting the appeal of photobooks as direct and structured communication between creators and readers, there is much more to explore about reader response to various structural options. Additionally, the jarring layout of Photobooks & is a missed opportunity to demonstrate the strength of a linear narrative through the design of a physical book.
Johnston offers a clear approach for readers to access photobooks on their many levels by describing in depth the “eight acts of reading” that are seemingly applicable to any format of a photobook. Those eight acts are:
Distance reading: becoming familiar with a text through reviews, mentions, and reputation;
Material reading: a physical inspection that is often a subconscious appreciation for the materiality;
Inspectional reading: perusal rather than focused reading;
Navigational reading*: explore the text either as linear or multi-directional, which may be an active or passive observation;
Conceptual reading*: an emphasis on the intent of reading, often analytical and reflective, with the pursuit of understanding why and how the book was constructed;
Assimilatory reading: where the reader contextualizes observations and analysis developed during navigational and conceptual reading and connects the text with other works;
Shelf-reading: a variation on distance reading, a general awareness of the text such as placement on shelf;
Re-reading: returning to a work, possibly in search of or for something specific or a general perusal.
* indicates phases of reading occurring simultaneously
These layers of reading emphasize the ways in which a photobook engages multiple senses and intelligences, particularly challenging visual literacy and appreciation for the construction of the physical object. Johnston highlights this innate multisensory nature of photobooks with Ruth Gilberger’s position that the genre has great “participative potential” to help make our world “visible, understandable and alterable.” In a world where photographs are omnipresent, our society may have grown more accustomed to visual images but that does not necessarily correlate to being visually literate. It is possible that developing a broader readership of photobooks could improve our collective visual literacy by raising awareness of the intent of photographs, and providing a direct and deliberate communication outlet between the creator and the reader.
Aliza Leventhal, Head of Technical Services, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress