This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the photobook. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographers book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. Focusing on North American, British and French photobooks from 1920 to the present, the chapters revisit canonical works by Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas and Roland Penrose while also delving into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, DIY communities and the poetic impulse. They throw new light on the way that gendered, racial or colonial assumptions are resisted. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a better understanding of how the meaning of a photobook is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.

Paul Edwards is Associate Professor of English at Université Paris Cité and Research Associate at the Maison Française, Oxford

Introduction: the photobook as confluence Paul Edwards

Part I: The photobook market
1 Towards an understanding of the market for photobooks Moritz Neumüller
2 Theorising encounters with contemporary photobooks: situation, materiality and plurality Briony Anne Carlin

Part II: Feminist self-fashioning, 197090
3 Wonder Woman and other fantasies: Joan Lyons and the photo-based artists book Jessica S. McDonald
4 Mothers of invention: Barbara Norfleet, Elsa Dorfman, Bea Nettles, Clarissa Sligh and Susan Meiselas Mary Panzer

Part III: Commitment and visibility
5 Missing photobooks: a symptomatic reading on the reasons for and impact of the lack of publications by Black British photographers in the 1970s and 1980s Taous R. Dahmani
6 The photobook as event Jessie Bond
7Camden, NJ, 2013: a digital photobook Nicolas Baudouin

Part IV: Institutionalv. clandestine
8 Photographing race and madness: annual reports of psychiatric hospitals in the US South in the early twentieth century Élodie Edwards-Grossi
9 Photobooks and the architectural imagination of California Volker M. Welter
10 Experimental confluence:Amazônia by Claudia Andujar and George Love Vitor Marcelino
11 Dead time: the collectivist photobook in the prison work of Mohamed Bourouissa Andy Stafford

Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral
12The Road is Wider than Long, by Roland Penrose Antony Penrose
13 An unmade book: Walker Evanss 1970s alphabet Polaroids Caroline Blinder

Index