Books, Books, Books.

Books are becoming more and more popular with photographers and artists as a medium of displaying their work. They have always been around as more people can buy a book than go to gallery thus making it the easiest way for larger numbers of people to see a large body of work. It also conveys a sense of a time line within the work that can be avoided or lost in the non-linear format of a gallery. You can't make large numbers of people all walk the same way around a room, but no one reads a book backwards. 

They can be very restrictive in the way that they are just a series of pages one after another. For some projects this works. The Day-to-Day life of Albert Hastings is very nice example of such a book.

           

I had initially intended to do an in depth review of this book. which would have started by buying my own copy. After seeing that it was priced at over £140 on Amazon I decided against that.

More information can be found about this book here.

Some books are a bit non-standard for example Ed Ruscha's book Every Building on Sunset Strip. This book is literally what it says on the tin. It is simply a photograph of every building on both sides of the street. The book's layout is rather difficult to describe but it's a concertina so it can be viewed as a continuous 'strip' or can be turned page by page. 

Now the only thing that remains is what do I do for my book. Do I make a monograph, find a single theory, a single focus and work upon that? Do I look at a story or take on a documentary type brief? Time to have a think.