The Photobook Within and As a Heterogeneous Media Environment

This proposal suggests that the multiple Artists and Photographs, rather than being an assemblage of photographic art works, constitutes a heterogeneous media environment in which the relationship between the book and photography is renegotiated and put into an intermedia perspective. I argue that, within this context, the relevance of the photographic book resides less in photography’s qualities in terms of documentation, representation and information, but rather in its capacity to transform the world into a museum (Malraux, Smithson) as well as its socio-cultural status as environment encountered, as Victor Burgin remarks, ‘in most aspects of daily life, as a fragmented or partial object’, and drawing thus upon ‘a heterogeneous complex of codes’. Artists and Photographs indeed takes into account the hybrid and heterogeneous nature of photography by gathering various approaches (artistic, documentary, media-critical, scientific), types of reproduction (books, brochures, fold-outs, prints, collections of loose sheets) and means of representation (photographs, text, schemes, maps, drawings). In this respect, the notion of “cultural series” (Gaudreault, Kessler) provides a helpful tool as it allows to understand how the items of Artists and Photographs inscribe themselves into various overlapping cultural systems in terms of technology (offset lithography, serigraphy, photography, film) and contexts of presentation and distribution (gallery, collection, multiple edition, catalogue, library). The photographic book, far from being treated as an autonomous medium or artistic practice, appears both as and within a complex media environment drawing on heterogeneous codes, symbolic systems and ways of distribution.