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Copyright of GeSec: Revista de Gestao e Secretariado is the property of Sindicato das Secretarias e Secretarios do Estado de Sao Paulo (SINSESP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of GeSec: Revista de Gestao e Secretariado is the property of Sindicato das Secretarias e Secretarios do Estado de Sao Paulo (SINSESP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Interuniversitaria de Formación del Profesorado is the property of Asociacion Universitaria de Formacion del Profesorado (AUFOP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Transforming Landscapes, Manipulating images, collected from the papers and discussions of the research workshop organized by Alexander Streitberger and Anne Reverseau on the 9th of December 2022 at the WIELS (Brussels). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three different projects photographer Laura Van Severen has approached (or is still approaching) the landscape in three distinctively different ways. For the images that became her book Land. On the brink of some formidably complex matter, Van Severen photographed the landscape from her childhood memories with no preconceived subject or idea, using the practice of landscape photography as a method (a way of working), rather than a goal (a way of gathering information about a place). Experiencing a lot of freedom in this photographic investigation, the resulting images offered abstraction, geometry and fragmentation - and not much for a viewer to hold on to in terms of depth and scale. The book, then, became an invitation for a reader to take these fragments and design his own (visual) landscape. Just one of many human interventions, it were landfills and the way they altered the landscape that caught her eye and interest next. This could not be merely addressed photographically Van Severen felt, - although the question of the 'realness' of a hill or mound in the landscape comes into play - as it comes with ecological, global and as result of that also political implications. A very concrete subject now, it meant that photographs alone were not enough to comprehend this issue; data and further research into the global connections and implications of landfills were now also needed. The third project discussed here focusses on women in a rural environment, and turns the roles around. Now it is not about the (invisible) human and his impact on the land, but about the impact of the land on these women, and about how they inhabit it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Signa is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Esferas is the property of Esferas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Literatura y Lingüística is the property of Universidad Catolica Cardenal Raul Silva Henriquez and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract Background Improving understanding about dementia in nursing is a priority area for educators and policymakers. This is due to poor professional understanding about dementia and suboptimal healthcare practice. While many educational interventions exist, there has been a paucity of research which has considered the use of artist-produced photobooks to improve knowledge and understanding about dementia. The aim of this study is to understand the impact of an artist-produced photobook on nurses’ attitudes and beliefs about dementia. Results Following a thematic analysis of four focus group interviews with 22 nurses and nursing students from Northern Ireland, three themes emerged. Theme one was about how the artist-produced photobook helped participants to humanise the person living with dementia. Theme two related to how the artist-produced photobook supported participants to actively construct their own meanings about dementia based on their previous professional and personal experiences. Theme three explored how an artist-produced photobook could be successfully used to complement existing dementia education in the future. Conclusions Using an artist-produced photobook was an innovative way to learn about dementia for nurses and nursing students. The photobook functioned as a tool underpinned by arts-based pedagogy (ABP), supporting nurses to understand the person behind the dementia disease. As such, an artist-produced photobook has the potential to be a useful complementary resource for supporting professional education about dementia.

This article examines how photographs of women taken by Marc Garanger during his army service in Algeria (1960–1962) have become sites of multiple, often competing mnemonic projections. At the height of the Algerian War of Independence, Garanger produced nearly two thousand identity photographs of those displaced by the French army from villages to detention camps. The photographs of women are some of the most cited images from the war, having been popularised through Garanger's own photobooks. They are either read as strictly exploitative or, following Garanger's narrative, as bearing witness to Algerian suffering. The article departs from attempts to fix the 'true' meaning of these images and examines their afterlives, while reflecting upon the hyper-visibility of women as images. It discusses newly recovered archival material, alongside Garanger's decision to return to Algeria in 2004, revealing inconsistencies in Garanger's carefully crafted narrative and reflecting upon the speculative futures of these contested images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview with the authors of How to Look Natural In Photos, a 2021 photobook featuring images from archives containing secret police records from Poland before 1989, Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica outline their approach to the republication of this material. They reflect on the nature of images which represent violence or trauma alongside the seemingly banal photographs of mundane scenes and objects recorded by the security forces, as well as the ethics of reproducing portraits of secret police officers. The material on which the book is based is in the possession of Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (The Institute of National Remembrance), an organization created in 1998 by act of the Polish parliament that has been subject of heated debate in the country. Critics have accused it of producing an overly simple view of modern Polish history, one populated by heroes, victims and villains. Bartecka and Rusznica reflect on their relations with this institution and the potential for open interpretations of such material.

Using the example of two books by Eustachy Kossakowski (1925–2001) – August Zamoyski (1974) and Lumières de Chartres (1989) – the text addresses the issue of reproducing works of art in the form of a photo album (photobook). The work of the photographer who makes reproductions of works of art is compared to the task of the translator, a reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay. The text is divided into two parts corresponding to albums. A detailed analysis allows us to see the differences between the books, as well as the change in Kossakowski’s approach to reproduced works of art. The first album consists of black-and-white photographs depicting in an original way the works of the prominent Polish sculptor August Zamoyski. Kossakowski recontextualizes individual objects photographed in the artist’s French studio. In the second book, the photographer publishes color photographs of the titular “lights of Chartres.” Taken inside the early Gothic cathedral, the photos move away from the documentation of the object, and the weight shifts to a near-abstract record of the artist’s emotions. Published alongside Anne Prache’s scholarly study, engravings and documentation of the edifice, Kossakovsky’s photographs constitute an original monograph of Chartres Cathedral. In the author’s view, Kossakowski’s photobooks go beyond the framework of a typical album of reproductions offering the mass public a substitute for contact with art. The photographer creates autonomous objects by translating the reproduced work of art into an object that fosters an aesthetic experience and becomes art itself. Kossakowski’s approach is juxtaposed with Mieke Bal’s reading of Benjamin’s text. While the album dedicated to Zamoyski seems to be based on unconventional documentation, in which the procedure of recontextualizing objects plays a dominant role, the Chartres monograph approaches the “ecstatic aesthetic” proposed by Bal. Lumières de Chartres provides a different perspective on the reproduction album, which, in addition to basic information and illustrative reproductions, is a carrier of emotions, a record of experiences and a medium of art. An analysis of the author’s publications, which include reproductions of August Zamoyski’s sculptures and documentation of Chartres Cathedral, emphasizes their autonomous and artistic character. Kossakowski observes and interprets Zamoyski’s work by looking at it from a distance. But in Chartres, we observe how he lets himself be captivated by the cathedral. The transformation of the cathedral into sensual light completely absorbs its subject - the metamorphosis of Zamoyski’s sculptures does not. Photography is not art, nor is it reproduction. It is only in the process of interpreting an object by looking at it with a camera to the eye that the artistry of translating a work of art into the format of a photograph and, further, a photo album is revealed. The photobook as a work of art is the true task of the photographer.

A conversation with André Príncipe and José Pedro Cortes, editors of Portuguese publishing house Pierre von Kleist, conducted by José Bértolo.

Questionnaire on the photobook conceived by José Bértolo and David Campany. Featured artists: Aaron Schuman | Alec Soth | Amak Mahmoodian | António Júlio Duarte | Brad Feuerhelm | Daido Moriyama | Gerry Johansson | Guido Guidi | Hoda Afshar | Jason Fulford | Jo Ractliffe | Lieko Shiga | Manuela Marques | Mårten Lange | Martin Parr | Pacifico Silano | Paul Graham | Rinko Kawauchi | Sakiko Nomura | Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa | Terri Weifenbach | Wouter Van de Voorde

I analyze the oeuvre of contemporary Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi through the notion of imperfection. An approach that gives precedence to process over product and combines conceptual art with vernacular traditions makes her pictures happily imperfect. Departing from Kawauchi’s transmedial concept of the image, often lying between word and image and mainly materialized through photo books, I propose that Kawauchi’s photographs are imperfectthanks to her experimentation with technical mistakes, the vernacular subject-matter of everyday snapshots, seriality, sequencing, and format variation, elliptical visibility, the aesthetics of color, and a non-linear temporality. Imperfection emphasizes the materiality of the medium, and positions photography far removed from the referent-centered documentary domain by way of aisthethic, rather than semiotic, significance. Imperfection also activates reception as it kindles emotional involvement and participant viewing. The question remains: What is perfect then? ”Imperfect” compared to what kind of standards? Are there such? My article proposes a notion of “imperfect” defined against a received norm of technical mistakes, the vernacular subject-matter of everyday snapshots, seriality, sequencing, and format variation, elliptical visibility, the aesthetics of color, and a non-linear temporality. The text is not centered on perfection, yet the term appears defined against boundaries, temporal culmination or the single individual shot configured a la Cartier-Bresson. My entire essay pivots around the imperfection concept. I believe the reader is eventually convinced that the concept works very well - if not perfectly! for reading Kawauchi’s work. What is a mistake after all? For sure some of them are mistakes, if we have standards based on photography technique guides. But fine art photography has seldom followed these rules. My text progressively unpacks the notion of “mistake”. At this point (abstract), the text seeks to present ideas and call upon a common usage of terms to communicate with readers easily. Complications come in the development. As you also remarked, “mistake” will later appear in my text between quotation marks. Do these really make the pictures imperfect, like this sentence suggests? Is it really imperfection that activates reception? Or is it perhaps intimate/limited viewpoint and restrictions of the frame and camera technique?

Book review of Vortex, by Kikuji Kawada, published by Akaaka in 2022.

This paper scrutinizes American photographer Ralph Gibson’s photobook trilogy published by his own company Lustrum Press: The Somnambulist (1970), Déjà-vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1974). The success of the trilogy verified a sizable market for highly personal photobooks, which would become a defining trend in contemporary art photography. Focusing on the structure of visual signification in each volume, the paper performs for the first time a close analysis of Gibson’s sequencing method materialized in the book form. The inner logic of each publication is further elucidated in relation to the major sources of reference in 20th-century art, photography, and literature, such as the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the cloud photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, and the Nouveau Roman of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The paper argues that sequencing was an epistemological strategy for Gibson to prioritize arbitrary relations between two neighboring pictures, without impairing each photograph’s truth claim to the perceptible reality. This was the photographer’s tactic to reconcile the purported objectivity of the camera image and the subjective propensity for narrative and imagination in his photobooks. Gibson’s avoidance of heavy-handed manipulation and shocking subject matter led his work to the “surrealism of the perception,” which can be situated in the tradition of Surrealist photography advocated by André Bazin and Brassaï.

This article aims to investigate the role of the photobook in architectural education and production through the case study of the publication One Year from Venice to India by the Land Route. 1956: Photosketches of a Slow Journey (2009). This engages with the formative travel overland from Venice to India (and back) undertaken in 1956 by the young Swiss architect Dolf Schnebli and his wife Clarissa Hall. The slow journey influenced the architect's life, both in a general attitude as well as in his architectural practice. Among the different media used to collect memories from the journey - hand sketches, text, letters, photographs, objects - only black and white pictures shot by Dolf Schnebli's Leica were included in the photobook. The architect referred to these images as photosketches, standing at the crossroads between a traditional hand-sketch and a photograph. In this essay the translation of the private memories collected in different sketchbooks into a published biographical photobook will be examined as a representation on the formative journey and as an educational tool itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"A child's hands" was chosen as the cover image for a monograph by photographer Aenne Biermann (1898-1933), published in Weimar Germany (1930) as part of a small series of paperback publications edited by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Volume 1 of the same series, also published in 1930, was dedicated to photography by László Moholy-Nagy, who in a different context had advocated for photographic literacy. Even though Biermann was published amongst the forerunners of the New Vision, as evidenced by her photobook 60 Photos, she had been forgotten for a long time. By calling attention to her photographic oeuvre, my essay poses questions about the mechanisms of writing photobook history (and which books are omitted from it). In the discourse surrounding the photobook, the child's hand as depicted on the cover is viewed as a symbol of the activity that the photobook unleashes, both as a tangible object and as a thinking device. Biermann's photo-constellations oscillate between training manual and atlas for seeing, between perception primer and picture book; they offer a surprisingly humorous complexity, taking full advantage of the photobook as a medium of artistic expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Improving understanding about dementia in nursing is a priority area for educators and policymakers. This is due to poor professional understanding about dementia and suboptimal healthcare practice. While many educational interventions exist, there has been a paucity of research which has considered the use of artist-produced photobooks to improve knowledge and understanding about dementia. The aim of this study is to understand the impact of an artist-produced photobook on nurses' attitudes and beliefs about dementia. Results: Following a thematic analysis of four focus group interviews with 22 nurses and nursing students from Northern Ireland, three themes emerged. Theme one was about how the artist-produced photobook helped participants to humanise the person living with dementia. Theme two related to how the artist-produced photobook supported participants to actively construct their own meanings about dementia based on their previous professional and personal experiences. Theme three explored how an artist-produced photobook could be successfully used to complement existing dementia education in the future. Conclusions: Using an artist-produced photobook was an innovative way to learn about dementia for nurses and nursing students. The photobook functioned as a tool underpinned by arts-based pedagogy (ABP), supporting nurses to understand the person behind the dementia disease. As such, an artist-produced photobook has the potential to be a useful complementary resource for supporting professional education about dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia y Comunicación Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Book review of Sakiko Nomura and Ango Sakaguchi. Ango. Tokyo: Bookshop M, 2017.

Dayanita Singh (b. 1961) has long pursued a practise of close relationships with her subjects, human and otherwise. In pairing this commitment with disseminating her photographs through book and portable museum formats, in which photographs are reused over the course of decades, she has developed a practice that she recognises as fundamentally archival. This article examines two distinct elements of Singh's oeuvre: Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a book created with her friend Mona, a self-described 'eunuch' cast out of her community in Delhi; and File Room, a constantly unfolding project appearing in multiple book and museum formats, focused on the materiality and temporality of the archive. I read both as part of Singh's 'intimate archive', and understand this thread in her work as a feminist practise, one that extends to her invitation to viewers to engage with the book and museum objects, reworking these images into new intimate archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this research is to analyse the pioneer architectural photobook, Internationale Architektur (1925), studying the convergence between Gropius' ideological approach and Moholy- Nagy's editorial design in order to build a solid message about the emerging modern architecture. By comparing photobooks designed by Moholy-Nagy previously, and taking into account the significant changes made by Gropius for its second edition (1927), it may be easier to understand the importance of dissemination as a modern, specific phenomenon; therefore, today we may see the International Style as a perfect commercial tag for advertising architectural Modernism, started with the launch of the first Bauhausbücher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1973, Italian photographer Tony D’Urso met Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret and photographed the performance Min Fars Hus from above, lurking in a hidden place. The following year, D’Urso took part in the organization of the first barters in Carpignano Salentino, which he photographed mixing documentary, stage, and anthropological photography. Two books, one from 1977 and one from 1990 (reissued 2000), collect the traces of the years that followed, during which D’Urso experimented with theatre as a place of experience and relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on two Italian case studies of the 1970s – The Living Book (1971) and La storia di un soldato di Dario Fo (1979) – this article suggests a critical approach to viewing photobooks devoted to theatre as a new kind of performative act. In these works, the photographer and performers collaborate to create a communicative object that captures the theatrical experience within their pages. The article highlights the various visual and editorial choices made in the narration of each book and contextualizes them within their respective cultural settings, while at the same time acknowledging the crucial role that photobooks play in the process of re-semantization of a theatrical event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of two books by Eustachy Kossakowski (1925-2001) - August Zamoyski (1974) and Lumieres de Chartres (1989) - the text addresses the issue of reproducing works of art in the form of a photo album (photobook). The work of the photographer who makes reproductions of works of art is compared to the task of the translator, a reference to Walter Benjamin's essay. The text is divided into two parts corresponding to albums. A detailed analysis allows us to see the differences between the books, as well as the change in Kossakowski's approach to reproduced works of art. The first album consists of black-and-white photographs depicting in an original way the works of the prominent Polish sculptor August Zamoyski. Kossakowski recontextualizes individual objects photographed in the artist's French studio. In the second book, the photographer publishes color photographs of the titular "lights of Chartres." Taken inside the early Gothic cathedral, the photos move away from the documentation of the object, and the weight shifts to a near-abstract record of the artist's emotions. Published alongside Anne Prache's scholarly study, engravings and documentation of the edifice, Kossakovsky's photographs constitute an original monograph of Chartres Cathedral. In the author's view, Kossakowski's photobooks go beyond the framework of a typical album of reproductions offering the mass public a substitute for contact with art. The photographer creates autonomous objects by translating the reproduced work of art into an object that fosters an aesthetic experience and becomes art itself. Kossakowski's approach is juxtaposed with Mieke Bal's reading of Benjamin's text. While the album dedicated to Zamoyski seems to be based on unconventional documentation, in which the procedure of recontextualizing objects plays a dominant role, the Chartres monograph approaches the "ecstatic aesthetic" proposed by Bal. Lumieres de Chartres provides a different perspective on the reproduction album, which, in addition to basic information and illustrative reproductions, is a carrier of emotions, a record of experiences and a medium of art. An analysis of the author's publications, which include reproductions of August Zamoyski's sculptures and documentation of Chartres Cathedral, emphasizes their autonomous and artistic character. Kossakowski observes and interprets Zamoyski's work by looking at it from a distance. But in Chartres, we observe how he lets himself be captivated by the cathedral. The transformation of the cathedral into sensual light completely absorbs its subject - the metamorphosis of Zamoyski's sculptures does not. Photography is not art, nor is it reproduction. It is only in the process of interpreting an object by looking at it with a camera to the eye that the artistry of translating a work of art into the format of a photograph and, further, a photo album is revealed. The photobook as a work of art is the true task of the photographer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how contemporary artistic practice seeks to re-evaluate, re-interpret and re-imagine (historical) Arctic exploration narratives that have generally been considered gendered and dominated by men. It particularly examines the work of contemporary Norwegian artist Tonje Bøe Birkeland, whose entire practice emerges from embodying and staging imagined turn of the century woman explorers. One of Birkeland's explorers travels to the Arctic and the circumpolar North and explicitly references persisting narratives deriving from the so-called heroic era of polar exploration. In order to change these narratives, I argue, Birkeland employs two feminist strategies: firstly, by storytelling and speculative fabulation (Haraway); secondly, by simultaneously complying with and disrupting re-occurring Arctic motifs and representations. Photography, travel writing and found objects are hereby her primary artistic mediums and "accomplices" in fulfilling these strategies, carefully orchestrated in a photobook in order to establish her story and view on the Arctic world. As a result, Birkeland not only reveals which stories about the Arctic are missing and could have been told. She also asks us to imagine how our relationship to the Arctic could have been shaped differently and how, through this process, it is possible to influence a future narrative of a (still) gendered Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I compare the strategies of visual representation employed in the two 1969 photobooks Gli esclusi (D'Alessandro-Piro) and Morire di classe (Berengo Gardin et al.). These photobooks have been the photographic protagonists of the reform of psychiatric health care that, fed by the upheavals of the late 1960s, brought about the closure of psychiatric asylums in 1978 thanks to the famous Law 180. I will specifically focus on the representation of claustrophobic spaces in their relationship with the bodies of inmates compared to the traditional iconography of madness. This article aims to show that these photobooks (while employing radically different strategies of representation) aim at providing a visual translation of the pivotal philosophical coordinates that guided the reform of psychiatric health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Road is Wider than Long is a paradoxical artist’s book created by Roland Penrose in 1939. At the same time documentary and poetic, a travel report and a lyrical production, it comprises free verse, typographic poetry, “papiers collés”, and photographs. This heterogeneous nature allows to explore the contrasts and contradictions between but also the coming together of avant-garde poetry and photography. First, this article shows how The Road is Wider than Long draws from amateur practices by focusing on Penrose’s method of handling the pictures. Then, turning to the actual text, it elaborates on the notion of “poetic rendition”. Finally, it discusses the power of poetry when it is interwoven with and combines different aesthetics and intentions, and this at the crossroads of memory and document. Originally a keepsake to keep a record of a couple’s trip memories in the Balkans, The Road is Wider than Long belongs at the same time to Surrealist books with photography illustrations and to the tradition of the photobooks focused on territories.

In this interview, Moritz Neumüller reflects on the nature of the photobook as a specific medium, and examines its place in contemporary photography. The interview was made by João Queiroz and Ana Luiza Fernandes in February and March 2021.

This paper argues that Journey into the Fantastic, by Boris Kossoy, is an exemplary case of montage working as a creative process in photographic books. The work is an important contribution to the world of photobooks. Full of experimentation, it relates exercises of photographic expression to the exploration of conventional aspects of the support. By using Eisenstein's theory and typology, we describe how combinatorial patterns can be observed acting as meaning-making processes in this photographic book. We observe that juxtaposition types known as intellectual montage are the main processes regulating the relations established between its parts, scaffolding it as a whole.

Visual narratives have a long history in the context of human cultural artifacts. In any sequence of images, the juxtaposition of visual signs gives rise to narrative potential. The narrative qualities of photographic images have been explored since its early days through the medium of the book. Borrowing the book artifact from literature, photography has adapted it for its own purposes. Such appropriation invites an examination of the strategies that are employed in photobooks to promote the emergence of narratives. Drawing upon the field of Narrative Studies and the concepts of storyworld and worldmaking, this paper investigates the narrative construction in the photobook Niagara (2006), produced by photographer Alec Soth. The paper demonstrates that certain strategies used in literary texts are analogous to the photobook space. In conclusion, I argue that photobooks are cultural objects that offer invaluable narrative possibilities, especially because they afford agency for the reader’s/viewer’s worldmaking.

This essay will discuss the book Maldicidade (2014) by the Spanish-Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco with a special attention to its organization as a narrative and poetic unity as a photobook. In focus is the book’s composition as an implicit dialogue between text and image and the use of modernist avantgarde techniques of montage and collage aiming at the expression of a contemporary reality of misery and hardship in the big cities of the Americas. The overarching argument is that the unity of the book as a photobook surpasses the referential nature of photography through visual narrativity in the effort to reveal the common condition of its posthuman urbanity.

In this article, I compare the strategies of visual representation employed in the two 1969 photobooks Gli esclusi (D’Alessandro-Piro) and Morire di classe (Berengo Gardin et al.). These photobooks have been the photographic protagonists of the reform of psychiatric health care that, fed by the upheavals of the late 1960s, brought about the closure of psychiatric asylums in 1978 thanks to the famous Law 180. I will specifically focus on the representation of claustrophobic spaces in their relationship with the bodies of inmates compared to the traditional iconography of madness. This article aims to show that these photobooks (while employing radically different strategies of representation) aim at providing a visual translation of the pivotal philosophical coordinates that guided the reform of psychiatric health care.

This contribution focuses on the digital curation of Weimar Germany's new visual literacy, using Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfi eld's photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles as a case study to examine in which ways a photobook and accompanying research can be showcased online. Tucholsky and Heartfi eld's work is an example of the photobook genre that rose to prominence in the 1920s, also for its potential to serve as an "Übungsatlas" (Walter Benjamin) for the new visual literacy. In curating the photobook online, using the publishing platform Scalar and the media repository Critical Commons, the photobook and the accompanying research not only become easily accessible to fellow researchers, students, and the public, but it also becomes possible to emulate and thus explore Weimar Germany's new visual literacy online. Curating Tucholsky and Heartfi eld's photobook and the related analysis online allows for a refl ection on digital curation as scholarship, its use in the classroom, and its implications for the trajectory of photobook research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julio Cortázar partnered with visual artists on projects throughout his entire career. This diverse list of works includes graphic novels, illustrated poetry books, mixed media books, or as he put it, "libros almanaque," and photobooks. Buenos Aires Buenos Aires (1968), the first of two collaborations he had with Sara Facio and Alicia D'Amico, two Argentine photographers, has received relatively little critical attention. In this essay I argue that the relationship between Sara Facio and Alicia D'Amico's images, Cortázar's text, and their subject, Buenos Aires, reveals a complex dialectic at play in its attempt to represent a place that is simultaneously familiar and foreign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The independent Lithuanian publisher NoRoutine Books, founded by Vilma Samulionytė and Gytis Skudžinskas in 2014, has produced 15 photobooks. They treat the photobook as a medium which has its own material qualities, its own language and ways of producing meaning. The strictly kept print run of 99 copies not only turns the books into rare collectible items, but also functions as a statement about the books as objects to be appreciated and read slowly, with pleasure, while taking time to decipher the message conveyed by the structure of the book. In order to demonstrate how such a reading works, the article discusses five books: Album by Gytis Skudžinskas, Burning Slides by Aurelija Maknytė, Photoobjects by Arūnas Kulikauskas, Invisible Images by Ieva Balode and Liebe Oma, Guten Tag by Vilma Samulionytė. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how contemporary artistic practice seeks to re-evaluate, re-interpret and re-imagine (historical) Arctic exploration narratives that have generally been considered gendered and dominated by men. It particularly examines the work of contemporary Norwegian artist Tonje Bøe Birkeland, whose entire practice emerges from embodying and staging imagined turn of the century woman explorers. One of Birkeland’s explorers travels to the Arctic and the circumpolar North and explicitly references persisting narratives deriving from the so-called heroic era of polar exploration. In order to change these narratives, I argue, Birkeland employs two feminist strategies: firstly, by storytelling and speculative fabulation (Haraway); secondly, by simultaneously complying with and disrupting re-occurring Arctic motifs and representations. Photography, travel writing and found objects are hereby her primary artistic mediums and “accomplices” in fulfilling these strategies, carefully orchestrated in a photobook in order to establish her story and view on the Arctic world. As a result, Birkeland not only reveals which stories about the Arctic are missing and could have been told. She also asks us to imagine how our relationship to the Arctic could have been shaped differently and how, through this process, it is possible to influence a future narrative of a (still) gendered Arctic.

In this interview with the authors of How to Look Natural In Photos, a 2021 photobook featuring images from archives containing secret police records from Poland before 1989, Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica outline their approach to the republication of this material. They reflect on the nature of images which represent violence or trauma alongside the seemingly banal photographs of mundane scenes and objects recorded by the security forces, as well as the ethics of reproducing portraits of secret police officers. The material on which the book is based is in the possession of Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (The Institute of National Remembrance), an organization created in 1998 by act of the Polish parliament that has been subject of heated debate in the country. Critics have accused it of producing an overly simple view of modern Polish history, one populated by heroes, victims and villains. Bartecka and Rusznica reflect on their relations with this institution and the potential for open interpretations of such material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]