When a photographer completes a project, the culmination of that body of work often takes the form of a publication. Editing and sequencing images into a book format is a complex art form in itself.
Making a photography book requires a massive commitment to the body of work and shifts the viewer’s experience from gallery walls to an intimate, paginated sequence.
Artist’s Book: A self-published, limited-run photography book where the photographer retains complete control over the design and sequence.
Zines: Small, cheap, DIY publications made of folded paper.
Ed Ruscha was a Los Angeles conceptual artist who intentionally rejected the preciousness of fine art. He created cheap, mass-produced artist books. Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations featured unironic, purely descriptive snapshots of gas stations along Route 66. Every Building on the Sunset Strip was a massive accordion-fold book showing exactly what the title suggests. It wasn’t seamless; the tape and artifacts of the splicing process remained visible, emphasizing cold data collection over romantic artistry.
Understanding how photography functions as art requires interrogating the structures that legitimize visual objects.
Institutional Legitimacy: The concept that an object gains the status of “Art” not just through inherent quality, but through the backing of Western cultural institutions.22. This aligns with institutional theories of art, which argue that an object is art primarily because the “artworld” (curators, critics, galleries) deems it so and places it within a framework of artistic appreciation.
Some artists actively push back against the clean, exclusive walls of the museum by embedding their art in the grit of everyday materials.
Material Disruption: The practice of creating fine art out of discarded or non-traditional materials to challenge institutional exclusivity.
Vik Muniz is a Brazilian photographer who believes art should interact directly with working-class people, not just wealthy gallery patrons. In his project Waste Land, he traveled to Jardim Gramacho, a massive Rio de Janeiro landfill. He photographed the “catadores” (garbage pickers), then hired them to help him recreate their portraits on a warehouse floor using the very garbage they collected. He climbed a scaffold, photographed the massive garbage murals, and sold the final prints at auction, giving the money back to the picker community.
A heavy, expensive, highly produced book published by a major publishing house or museum, usually acting as a retrospective of a famous artist’s career.↩︎
This aligns with institutional theories of art, which argue that an object is art primarily because the “artworld” (curators, critics, galleries) deems it so and places it within a framework of artistic appreciation.↩︎