In 1922, the crypt of a minor pharaoh was discovered virtually intact, whipping up a frenzy of Egyptomania visible everywhere from the flapper’s severe bob to the spire of the Chrysler Building. Fifty years later, the wildly successful exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun toured the West, and New Age pyramids began to crop up throughout North America. Given the relative dearth of ancient monuments in the US, such structures offer the compensatory fiction of a mythic national past, a postmodern necropolis of corporate headquarters, amusement parks, defense contractors, data centers, casinos, and statement homes.

“I wanted to explore how the pyramid is a sacred architecture that has come across from antiquity—how it’s been emptied out of its original purpose and meaning and filled up with all these late-capitalist virtues,” said James, who has gathered more than a hundred of his photographs into a new book, Pyramids: Special Economic Vortex Zones of North America. Familiar facets include the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the Bass Pro Shops in Memphis, but lesser-known landmarks abound, each its own sphinxlike riddle.

The polychrome compound of the Buddha Maitreya’s Church of Shambhala Vajradhara Maitreya Sangha, on a mountaintop in Clear Lake, California, was designed by a man who claims to be Jesus Christ reincarnate, and who recruits people to peddle something called Soul Therapy. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, a rather nondescript pyramid serves as the meditation center for a religion called Summum, billed as the only provider of “modern mummification.” The Luxor’s 273,000-watt light beam, the most powerful lamp on earth, has spawned an entire ecosystem of insects, bats, and owls. Then there’s the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a concrete mastaba in North Dakota unveiled in 1975 as a radar system to intercept Soviet ballistic missiles, only to be decommissioned that same year; the ruin was bought in 2012 by a group of Hutterites, who recently sold it to a bitcoin developer (a missed opportunity for the Dia Art Foundation). Surprisingly absent amid these “economic vortex zones” is the most prominent American pyramid of all; just take out a dollar and it’s there, with its floating, all-seeing eye.

Like that of the New Topographics artists who transformed the landscape genre with their pictures of factories and tract housing in the deindustrializing 1970s, James’s medium is arguably found sculpture as much as photography. But unlike, say, the watershed water towers documented by Bernd and Hilla Becher, his subjects often appear at oblique angles, peeking out from trees or buildings, golden-hour mirages in the desert of the real. Their strange serenity belies the many perils of pyramid-hunting, recounted in a digressive travel diary James includes in the book. Among them: inclement weather, broken equipment, nefarious hotel breakfasts, and hostile property owners. Curiously, he almost never tries to go inside the buildings.

“Despite the form’s connotations with permanence and stability, the turnover rate for contemporary pyramid occupancy is high,” writes Aurora Tang in an essay for the book. “Pyramids are often novelty or vanity constructions, which prioritize aesthetics over utility. Their sloping walls make them costly to maintain and difficult to subdivide or adapt.” The world’s first wonder still stands, but everything else seems to be falling apart. These images arrive to us at a time when—as President Trump asperses affordability itself as a “hoax” perpetuated by his rivals—the American dream seems like the biggest pyramid scheme of all. In any case, James has begun to look farther afield. “I keep thinking, Should I stop photographing pyramids and do something else? But then I get lured back into it. I was traveling in Europe recently, and began thinking of a follow-up book.” He paused. “There are a lot of pyramids in Germany . . .”

Pyramids: Special Vortex Zones of America was published by Special Effects in October 2025.

His experimental spirit undiminished by mainstream success, Lanthimos has recently branched out to a new venture: the photobook. Although the images in Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (Void, 2024) and i shall sing these songs beautifully (MACK, 2024) were taken during the making of Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, respectively, these books are far from simple behind-the-scenes companion volumes. Instead, they allude to their own narratives and worlds, hovering somewhere between photography and cinema. Below, the director talks about how these books came to be, and what might come next.

Yorgos Lanthimos, Untitled, from Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (Void, 2024)
© the artist

Yorgos Lanthimos, Untitled, from Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (Void, 2024)
© the artist

Zack Hatfield: When did your interest in still photography begin?

Yorgos Lanthimos: I went to film school when I was nineteen. I bought a camera and started taking pictures randomly, without any purpose. This was in the ’90s, before the internet. I was looking at Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore, the classics. When I started making movies, I began taking pictures on set. I’m very shy when it comes to approaching or photographing people I don’t know, so this felt like a more normal, accessible thing to do. I’ve become more drawn to photography, in general, in the past few years. I even built my own darkroom next to my editing room, in Athens.

Hatfield: For years, you’ve enlisted the photographer Atsushi Nishijima to document the making of your films. But your own images are up to something else. They’re autonomous artworks, existing both inside and outside those cinematic worlds.

Lanthimos: The beautiful thing about photobooks is that they often allow for a story that’s not tied to the conventions of narrative. With Dear God, I didn’t want to make something that was in addition to Poor Things, but something that could stand on its own. Even more so with the second book. When I was making Kinds of Kindness, shot on location in New Orleans, it was already in my mind that I was taking pictures that weren’t necessarily related to the film. In the book, there are all these details that you’ll never get a sense of while watching the movie.

Interior spread of Yorgos Lanthimos, Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (Void, 2024)

Hatfield: i shall sing these songs beautifully feels more classical, whereas Dear God makes use of double gatefolds, which often reveal evidence of artifice—rigs, scaffolding, boom stands, cycloramas.

Lanthimos: I love how different the books are. Michael Mack hadn’t seen the Dear God book when we began the project, hadn’t seen a lot of my pictures. I showed him Dear God, and he said that the Kinds of Kindness book needs something different. The first book is a very complex, designed book. The second one includes way more black and white, a lot of flash. I wanted to make a more traditional photobook, in a more American tradition. And I wanted to create a narrative that has a more mysterious relationship to the pictures, that exists more in the gaps between pictures. At Michael’s suggestion, I added some of my own fragmentary texts. I would look at a photograph and let random thoughts, observations, and experiences take over. There’s one little text that is inspired by an R. D. Laing Knots type of style and structure. That’s a book I love.

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Yorgos Lanthimos, Untitled, from Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (Void, 2024)
© the artist

Hatfield: Can you talk about the role collaboration played in creating the books?

Lanthimos: It was very liberating to work with these other people, Myrto Steirou and João Linneu of Void and then Michael at MACK. I relied on them because it’s not a process I’ve done before, sequencing a photobook. There is some overlap with how you edit a film with images, but it’s so much freer. It feels like there are fewer rules tied to conventional narrative.

Hatfield: How did the actors help you make these pictures?

Lanthimos: The experiences were quite different. Dear God was a very particular experience. We were in Hungary in huge film studios surrounded by sets. I used a large-format camera to make all those black-and-white photographs, and medium format to make the color portraits. Photography became a punctuation in between scenes. It was called “portrait time.” Whenever I had a few seconds between setups, I shouted, “Portrait time!” and brought out the large-format camera. Sometimes, Atsushi would see that I was frustrated with something that didn’t work while trying to film a scene and would suggest to me, “Portrait time?” I tried to do it really fast, which, of course, is counterintuitive with a large-format camera. At the same time, it was this little bit of frozen time within making a film and performing. It was a kind of game that we enjoyed.

Interior spread of W: The Art Issue (2023)

Interior spread of Yorgos Lanthimos, i shall sing these songs beautifully (MACK, 2024)

Hatfield: I read that Emma Stone helped you develop the photographs in the bathtub of a Budapest hotel.

Lanthimos: Emma got really interested in the process of loading film and processing the negatives, even though she has no interest in taking pictures. She likes the technical aspect of printing. She basically printed the black-and-white photos for a project we did for W magazine. I don’t know how we had the strength to do it—after a whole day of filming, twelve hours, going back to the hotel room, processing film and scanning it. But it really gave us strength. It helped us forget about the stress of filmmaking. You get the result of it immediately: “Look, we just processed this portrait that we got this morning, and we’re looking at it!” Or, “We fucked it up and scratched it, but it’s still beautiful.” It enriched our experience of making that film.

I take pride in having gotten a lot of people shooting film again. Jesse Plemons, who starred in Kinds of Kindness, has become an obsessive film photographer. Will Tracy, the writer on Bugonia, the new film we just shot, has taken up film photography. He goes out and takes night pictures with a tripod. I think my excitement about photography is a little contagious.

The beautiful thing about photobooks is that they often allow for a story that’s not tied to the conventions of narrative. 

Hatfield: Are other artists’ photographs and photobooks important to your creative process? I noticed that Richard Misrach’s 1983 photograph Diving Board, Salton Sea, from his 1987 book, Desert Cantos, was cited in the credits for Kinds of Kindness.

Lanthimos: I have been moved over the years by many photographers. I think that in itself is a great influence, without necessarily being a visible, obvious one. I love the work of Sage Sohier, Mary Frey, Chris Killip, Rosalind Fox Solomon—her latest is a very powerful, moving masterpiece—Mark Steinmetz, Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander, Larry Sultan, Alec Soth, Gregory Halpern, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Masahisa Fukase. I can go on forever. I really loved Melinda Blauvelt’s book. Michael Mack introduced me to Lewis Baltz only recently. I was gifted an incredible book, Sex. Death. Transcendence. (2024) by Linda Troeller. Paul Graham’s a shimmer of possibility (2018). Whenever I look at it, I tear up.

Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (MACK, 2024)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (MACK, 2024)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Hatfield: It’s hard to think of other photobooks that merge cinema and photography in such an open-ended way. Do you know about Annie on Camera?

Lanthimos: What’s that?

Hatfield: In 1982, John Huston invited nine photographers, including William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, and Stephen Shore, to take images on the set of Annie. It’s great.

Lanthimos: I’m writing that down.

Hatfield: Do you consider a particular audience for your photobooks?

Lanthimos: Not really. I don’t think I could try to make something for an audience. You do something you want to make or see, and then you hope for the best.

Hatfield: Right now, you’re editing Bugonia, a sci-fi satire. Did you have another book in mind while filming it?

Lanthimos: I’m not sure. It’s a very contained film, so it might be harder to make a photography book that can feel independent from the film and strong in its own right. I’m trying to concentrate more on doing photography which is not film related. Lately, I’ve been taking landscape photographs in my travels around Greece, but also in Athens. I want to start taking more portraits but I need to ask people, so I’m very slow at it, procrastinating. Hopefully at one point I’ll make a book that’s not related at all to one of my films.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Bruno Munari, Untitled, date unknown

Ugo Mulas, Untitled (Bruno Munari), 1967
© Ugo Mulas Heirs

Chiara Bardelli Nonino: Why forty-seven?

Jason Fulford: It’s a restriction. I picked a couple of numbers I liked: thirty-three, my favorite, and forty-seven, the favorite number of a writer I used to collaborate with, a good friend of mine who died. I knew that I wanted to add pictures of my own, but they had to be fewer than Munari’s, so out of the forty-seven images, thirty-three are Munari’s. Then I did what I usually do to edit: I printed images out small, and I started to play with them, like a deck of cards. When you do that, you just start to see things, to find connections, to feel a flow. Our images were activating each other, like a chemical reaction.

Bardelli Nonino: Basically, you played a Munari game with Munari. How did you discover his work?

Fulford: A friend gave me and my wife a book about his life, and it just . . . blew our minds. Immediately, I wanted to know more, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

Bardelli Nonino: What resonated with you?

Fulford: The fact that he was a Futurist in his teenage years and left them because he felt uncomfortable with their dogmatic nature. The fact that he always made his own way, that he was really difficult to define. His freedom of movement through mediums, from the hardware store to museums.

Bardelli Nonino: He had a penchant for subverting rules. I remember listening to an interview where he said that to spark creativity in children, you have to teach them a rule, and then tell them to break it.

Fulford: He is a great teacher. And there’s a specific type of play that he does. It’s a play that’s rigorous, that’s both on the surface and deep. It reminds me of a quote from a 1970s novel by Don DeLillo. The character is a football coach in college, and when he’s trying to psych up his team before a game, he tells them: “It’s only a game but it’s the only game.”

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Bardelli Nonino: Munari was very invested in the idea of democratizing culture. “While the artist dreams of museums,” he wrote, “the designer dreams of street markets.” He thought that there should not be beautiful things to look at and ugly things to use.

Fulford: Almost every year, I teach a workshop in Urbino, in a school that people such as Bruno Munari or Italo Calvino visited, people who remain major influences in Italy. It seemed like they all came out of World War II with a lot of ideas about rebuilding things, redesigning society.

Bardelli Nonino: And making things simpler. Another Munari quote: “Complicating is easy; it’s simplifying that’s difficult.”

Fulford: One of the things that I learned through studying graphic design is how you can take something complex and reduce it to a simple form. I apply it to my photographs: I want them to have an easy entry point, but with deep levels of things the pictures can give you if you spend time with them or if you think about your life through the picture’s filter.

Bardelli Nonino: Have you ever felt intimidated by Munari?

Fulford: I put a lot of pressure on myself. I worked on the book as if I had to show it to him, and I wanted him to be happy with it. I even tried to add some writing into the book, to channel his voice—but it didn’t feel like me, and it didn’t feel as good as his. So I removed it all. What I like to do with images is to show very specific things that are also open. It’s really difficult, at least to me, to do that with words. You either sound totally pretentious or overly sentimental.

There’s a specific type of play that Munari does. It’s a play that’s rigorous, that’s both on the surface and deep.

Bardelli Nonino: Why is this openness so important to you?

Fulford: Probably two things. One is that the aesthetic experience lasts longer. You can think of pictures that expose something or teach you something, but then you don’t need to look at them again. I remember reading Benjamin Buchloh, a German art critic, talking about Gerhard Richter’s paintings as these puzzles that remain a vexation for the viewer, that resist any attempt to solve them. There’s something in that.

Bardelli Nonino: I remember that Munari in an interview was talking about the importance of toys being open-ended, otherwise they kill children’s creativity.

Fulford: I love that.

Bardelli Nonino: What’s the second reason?

Fulford: When I was growing up, I was raised in a pretty intense fundamentalist Christian faith. The only thing I want to preach now is an open mind.

Jason Fulford, Sea Circus, 2009. Photogram

Bruno Munari, Untitled, date unknown
© Bruno Munari and Courtesy Corraini Edizioni

Bardelli Nonino: You know, Munari used to say that his name in Japanese meant “to make something out of nothing.” I think you have a similar approach to photography.

Fulford: I remember talking to a curator once, he was looking at some work of mine and asking questions like, “Why this picture?” And I said something along the lines of, “Oh, I could have just grabbed stuff from the garbage and made something, it would have been the same.” I never heard from him again. But it was true.

Bardelli Nonino: What do you think about Munari’s relationship with photography?

Fulford: I worked on a book last year about Corita Kent, the Catholic nun who became a famous Pop artist, and there’s a lot of crossover. Looking at her archives, I realized that the camera for her was just a tool that was always around. She used it for many different things: to remember something, to make aesthetic images, or as a scanning tool in the process of making silkscreens. Photography was a tool to make something else, in the same way that Munari takes a fork, bends it, and makes it into all these different characters.

Bardelli Nonino: Like in your work, where a photograph can be a whole universe or just there to affect the meaning of another.

Fulford: When I teach, I ask the students to bring images. We print them small, and we put everything into the middle in a big ocean of images. We use them for most exercises, but I don’t let anybody use pictures that they brought themselves. They have to work with other people’s images, so nothing is precious, or definitive. That immediately makes things go faster, looser. As soon as they change the sequence of the images, they realize their meaning changes, that they become alive.

Bardelli Nonino: Photobooks are your primary creative language. Does it ever bother you that they can be kind of niche?

Fulford: It’s hard to say. If you make a thousand or two thousand books, that’s a lot of people but also not many people at all. Numbers are really difficult. People get obsessed with them on social media. Let’s say you have a few hundred people who like something, but you wish it was a few thousand. A few hundred is still a lot of people. I mean, think of how many friends you have.

Bardelli Nonino: Oh, like, three.

Fulford: [Laughs] I was thinking about this today, though. When the Velvet Underground’s first album came out, it didn’t sell very well. But people said that everybody who bought that record started a band, and all of those bands were great. So they had a huge influence. It’s the same with books. You can go back to them at different times in your life, and they tell different stories, because you are a different person. Your book can speak after you are dead, it can find its way to people by accident. I love that a book can do that.

Bardelli Nonino: You can enter into people’s minds through books.

Fulford: That’s why I feel this affinity for Munari —through the printed page.

Bardelli Nonino: What books are you working on now?

Fulford: There’s one I’ve been working on for several years, and I recently printed it in Italy. It’s called Lots of Lots, and it’s eighty pages of grids of images.

Bardelli Nonino: Why the three-by-three grids?

Fulford: Well, Sol LeWitt made two books that I love, Photogrids, from 1977, and Autobiography, from 1980, and mine reference those a lot, in a whimsical, less conceptual way.

Bardelli Nonino: It looks like a captcha test or a beautiful visual Turing test.

Fulford: I hadn’t thought about that. That’s hilarious. I remember one time I got an email from someone who found my 2006 book Raising Frogs for $$$. He said that he loved how I connected the images, that he was working on this computer-learning model and wanted to replicate my way of working, and asked me if I wanted to get involved. It must have been early AI research. I wrote back an email that said something like: “That sounds awful. It sounds like Satan. Why would I want to do that?” I never heard from him again either.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Small books are in. There is both an intimacy and an air of rebellion to small books (think diaries, underground zines, manifestos). Without a doubt, the content of a book determines its scale. “It’s mostly a gut feeling, whether I choose a smaller or larger size,” says Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, founder and primary designer of the Marseille-based publishing house Chose Commune. Jeux de mains (about 5 by 6 1⁄2 inches), a 2022 book filled with images of hands, is based on the size of Poimboeuf-Koizumi’s own hand.

Cover of Cookie Mueller, Garden of Ashes (Hanuman Editions, 2024)

Spread from Bindi Vora, Mountain of Salt (Perimeter Editions, 2023)

Or consider Hanuman Editions, the recent reboot of Hanuman Books, an imprint founded in the mid-1980s. All the books are 2 by 2 inches, with a simple cover design and gold lettering. Originally, the “playful kitsch” size referenced a book of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, but the books also fit in our back pockets, much like our smartphones.

Those dopamine dispensers have undoubtedly influenced the rising popularity of small books, especially photobooks. “Everything is filtered through our screen or phone,” says the book designer Brian Paul Lamotte. “We’ve kind of consciously become more and more comfortable with seeing imagery smaller. And we’re also reading things on our phones. So the jump to things being printed in that scale isn’t really so drastic.” Over the years, Lamotte has designed books at a range of scales, but recently, he’s been drawn to making and collecting smaller tomes.

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In 2021, Bruno Ceschel’s SPBH Editions launched its Essays series, designed by Lamotte. These slim white volumes are all the same size (about 4 by 6 inches) and have the same cover design of black sans serif type on a white backdrop. The series’ latest entry, Charlie Engman’s Hello Chaos, a Love Story, published in March 2024, revels in screen culture, deploying text-message bubbles and layered screenshots. Though small, this book is thick (182 pages) and feels similar to holding a phone—unlike one of the earliest titles in the series, Carmen Winant’s Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now (2021), which clocks in at 120 pages and is much smaller than many of her large-format photobooks. The size of the book matches the conversational tone of the text, an open-ended manifesto about how-to photography’s potential to deepen self-understanding.

“Carmen was commissioned based on a lecture,” Ceschel explains. “I suggested making it into a visual essay.” Lamotte’s design gives the book a literal weight but also suggests it can be read in one sitting.

Scale is more than height, width, and page count. When TBW Books founder and creative director Paul Schiek is designing a book, he thinks of “constant Venn diagrams in my head: What size, what color paper, what kind of printing, what price point do we want the book at?”

Cover of Carmen Winant, Instructional Photography (SPBH Editions, 2021)

Cover of Ryan Spencer: There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light (TBW Books, 2024)

Take Ryan Spencer’s There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light (2024), which sequences rephotographed neo-noir film stills into visuals for an unrealized movie to accompany the Afghan Whigs’ 1996 album Black Love. Reflecting this intricate premise, the photobook is modeled after a pulp paperback in scale (4 1/4 by 7 inches) and design, with a limited color palette of black-and-white images and red-tinted page edges. But the photographs would lose registration on cheap paper, so Schiek asked, “What if we use a paper that’s referencing pulp paper, but it’s semi-coated to accept photographs?” The final result looks much lighter than it is, lending a surprising weight to the dramatically lit photographs.

There Is No Light is not the first photobook modeled after a cheap paperback: In 1955, Roy DeCarava published a series of photographs of Harlem alongside fictional text by Langston Hughes in a small softcover titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life (recently reissued by David Zwirner Books). The book was a massive commercial success and remains one of the greatest photobooks of the twentieth century —but DeCarava was shocked at the small scale at which Simon and Schuster had reproduced his images. “I knew that it was not supposed to be as large as the usual book of photographs,” he once said in an interview, “but somehow I still expected a big, glossy book, with my photographs lavishly laid out.”

Cover and spread from Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Stephen Ellcock, Jeux de mains (Chose Commune, 2022)

“Small books might be cheaper to produce than larger ones, but artistically, they can be much more demanding to make, and to make sense of,” says the photography historian David Campany. “Every image and every design decision counts. But when a small book works, it really works, with an economy of means that can be profoundly rewarding.” Some examples of those that “work,” in Campany’s estimation, include Jacqueline Hassink’s The Table of Power (1996), whose diminutive form contrasts with the enormity of its subject matter (the boardrooms of some of the largest corporations in the world); Gallimard’s “tiny and perfect” 1931 monograph for the pathbreaking modernist photographer Germaine Krull; and “the best-selling photobook of all time,” the passport-size Point It: Traveller’s Language Kit (1992) by Dieter Graf.

The modern coffee-table book originated in the 1950s. “Coffee-table books had come to mean large, handsomely bound art books, picture collections, and various kind of picture-text combinations that were intended to be evidence of culture when displayed on living room coffee tables,” John William Tebbel wrote in A History of Book Publishing in the United States (1972). “Where once they had been read, they were now considered to be only display pieces.” But if the coffee-table book hastened the commercialization of photobooks—once popular vehicles for social commentary—it also offered a more accessible way for people to bring art into their homes.

While coffee-table books have a place in mind, small photobooks are often designed toward a specific reading experience. “I think small books feel more digestible,” says Ben Denzer, a book artist and designer who has made many books of unusual sizes and shapes (including a roll of toilet paper and ketchup packets). “Maybe they also feel more useful. I’m thinking about guidebooks and other small books you bring with you to places,” he notes. Denzer points to the influence and ingenuity of the Dutch designer Irma Boom, without mention of whom any piece on small books would be remiss. “I read Boom’s mini Biography in Books (2010) all at once in Madison Square Park on a sunny day,” Denzer recalls. “My eyes hurt for a while after.” Boom’s book (1 1⁄2 by 2 inches) documents her expansive career in almost a thousand tiny pages, giving it an almost comical thickness.

With a sturdy softcover, Carla Williams’s Tender (TBW, 2023), a slim book smaller than the laptop with which I currently write, is filled with mostly black-and-white images, printed on heavy matte paper, of the artist’s own nude body. When I received the book in the mail, I was surprised by its satisfying heft.

“I remember very clearly her saying, ‘I would love it if it was something that lived next to the bed,’” Schiek, who designed and published the book, recalls Williams telling him.

Shala Miller’s Tender Noted (Wendy’s Subway, 2022), another book about the body, combines photographs, film stills, and short poetic texts in a softcover with a tipped-in image. “I referenced the size of an average journal notebook to capture that intimacy,” explains Kyla Arsadjaja, the book’s designer. Arsadjaja also designed another book for Wendy’s Subway, Na Mira’s The Book of Na (2022), an even smaller little red book replete with grainy black-and-white abstract photographs, typewritten entries, and scarlet page edges.

“Scale and the form are decisions that a reader can feel before they even open the book,” notes Denzer. In many cases, it is the scale of small photobooks that encourages readers to open them. Their private feeling is much of the appeal. And in the age of smartphones, where the power of an image is not determined by size, more and more publishers are welcoming this opportunity to make photobooks meant to be held and, most important, read.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture no. 257, “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Dalia Al-Dujaili: Tell me about your journey into bookmaking, curation, and design.

Roï Saade: After a few years in the corporate world, I felt the need to get out of it and work toward something more creatively fulfilling. While studying graphic design at USEK University, in Lebanon, I had taken some photography courses. I found that photography was a means to access communities that I don’t belong to, to break these religious and social barriers and just explore Beirut.

And photobooks allowed me to work at the intersection of design and photography. As an editor, I want to recognize work that is not being acknowledged by the industry’s gatekeepers, and to counter stereotypical depictions of West Asia and the Arab world. My practice is very research-driven and relies on close collaboration with other artists. I’m attracted to the process rather than the end result.

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Al-Dujaili: Can you tell me about the motivations behind Bound Narratives?

Saade: Bound Narratives is a growing archive of photobooks from and about the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region. It strives to build a broad and open repository of visual materials to stimulate education and critical discourse through photography and digital narrative. In doing so, the archive seeks to remedy an imbalance of cultural knowledge between the Global South and North. The MENA region is very familiar with the American and Eurocentric canon of photography. Our bookstores, libraries, and homes are filled with Western photobooks. Yet it’s rare to find photobooks from the region itself in these collections. It was first an internal critique.

We have no shortage of artists or storytellers. In fact, it’s the opposite. We have an overwhelming amount. It is the economic and political realities—and the lack of resources and publishers—that disconnect us from each other and from the world. We depend heavily on the West to acknowledge us first and publish our work. And that’s why my initiative is to try to create exposure, however minimal it is. Whatever the problems are, try to solve some of them yourself. So, I started a public inventory and started asking my network of artists to share photobooks by artists in the region.

Al-Dujaili: I’m wondering what the challenges are. I know you live and work in Canada, but you also do work in Lebanon and in the region as well.

Saade: Yeah, I work and live between Lebanon and Canada. The challenges are economic, no doubt. We can’t underestimate how the lack of resources and money control what is being seen and how it’s being seen. Most of the artists I collaborated with are self-published. Everyone is struggling, fighting for crumbs from Western institutions. And so, you have to try to be creative. You’re very limited, and in these limitations, you have to dance and find ways. By contrast, when foreigners parachute to our region to work, they get easily published by someone in the West. It’s very interesting to see that struggle for locals to amplify their voices while foreigners are easily published. At the same time, you can also see a pattern where most of the published artists from the region get to be published in the West by either immigrating, or by living for a period of time or creating these networks in, let’s say, France or New York. When it’s not foreigners, it’s mostly diasporic artists who get wider visibility.

I’m interested in showing these books to local Middle Eastern and North African communities—for them to see what has been produced and what are these cultures around them that are so disconnected and so disrupted by regional politics. I also want to share them with the Global North to say: These narratives exist. There’s more than one modernity and contemporary. There are so many worlds in one world, and they can all fit together.

I see this project as helping to mitigate the construction of otherness.

Al-Dujaili: I love that, many worlds in one world.

Saade: With Bound Narratives, I focus on the book’s journey after its production. It’s a correspondence of the past and the present. It’s an exchange between the artist and the viewer. People sit on the carpets and focus on the book and consume it as a ritual. At Bound Narratives, you don’t have to buy a book. You can come to this gathering and look at the books and experience these books without the need of a financial transaction. What’s important is people being together, studying, playing together.

Cover and interior spread of Tamara Abdul Hadi’s Picture an Arab Man (We Are the Medium, 2022)

Al-Dujaili: In 2022, you designed Tamara Abdul Hadi’s Picture an Arab Man.

Saade: Tamara’s book is an attempt to reframe the visual representation of contemporary Arab men. The design choices were informed by how she sees her father, how she sees her cousin, her nephew. So much of the effort was put into small, subtle details—the texture of the cover, the weight of the paper, the bouncing of reflective colors, the empty pages, the repetition of cropped images. I love this cover and the burgundy color of its endpaper. Her father is included. He was an amateur photographer, and she’s very inspired by him. The linen texture—how the image almost fades inside it—contributes to an ambiguity we were trying to communicate, as well as the softness and beauty that is very absent in mass-media representations of Arab men.

Al-Dujaili: That year, you also designed Dry, the second photobook by the Algerian photographer Abdo Shanan.

Saade: Abdo was very generous and trusting from the start, which is key to any collaboration. He gave me full access not only to his body of work but to his ideas, to his history. It’s about struggling to belong to a place that you feel doesn’t want you. I can relate to that in a way, given Algeria and Lebanon’s history of colonization. During the making of the book, I looked at the history behind these uprooted feelings to better understand the experience of postcolonial struggle. I read Frantz Fanon for the first time. I read The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952), which informed my editorial and design decisions. Later, I read Colonial Trauma (2021) by Karima Lazali, which ended up being part of the book.

Al-Dujaili: That’s an insert in the book?

Saade: Yes. It’s a beautifully written insight into the psychopolitical effects of colonialism in Algeria. It fits very well in Dry because there are the personal stories and the collective reckoning with inherited trauma. Both Shanan, who is Algerian Black with mixed ethnic parentage, and the people he photographed are confronting their conflict with belonging. The book opens with a kind of descent. We see his window. Then, we go downstairs into a cemetery, and it’s silver ink on black paper. Then, his hand and his imaginative world. And then you start the book.

Al-Dujaili: You’ve named Samer Mohdad, the Lebanese Belgian photojournalist, visual artist, and writer, as an important influence.

Saade: Mohdad’s Mes Arabies was essential to my beginnings. It was a revelation seeing Arabs portrayed outside of an anthropological and orientalist framework. When I saw the work, I was just beginning photography. It was published in 1999. It’s one of the oldest books in my collection, actually. It’s a very ambitious, rare document of a specific time in the Arab world. He journeyed around twelve countries and documented humble people he met along the way. I find that everyone in his book has pride and respect. He doesn’t fetishize or glorify his subjects.

Spread from Nadhim Ramzi’s Iraq: The Land and the People (Iraqi Cultural Centre, 1977)

Maen Hammad, Untitled, 2015, from Landing

Al-Dujaili: I’m curious about other books that have inspired you.

Saade: I love Nadhim Ramzi’s Iraq: The Land and the People (1977). I relate to him a lot because he was a graphic designer and photographer, like me. He’s one of the rare photographers we know about from the older generation, other than Latif Al Ani from Iraq. Many photographers existed and still exist, a huge variety, but it can be a challenge to find and access their work.

And there’s Maen Hammad’s book Landing, which layers journal entries, poetry, and images to talk about Palestinian resistance through the eyes of young skateboarders, framing the act of skating as a purposeful escape. Landing is one of the projects that continued to evolve way after I began working on it. Maen came to me with a group of images to create a standard photobook, but after I read some of his very eloquent writing, I suggested he write more. A month or two later, he came back to me with so many insights about Palestine. He shared facts; he shared stories, including his personal stories; he shared poems he wrote.

When you’re dealing with a subject such as Palestine, you want to inform people about the geopolitical context of the place and not just rely on their interpretation of things. When I exhibited this work in Italy, I emphasized to Maen that some images need captions. For example, a refugee camp that is the most tear-gassed place in the world. The museum fought to remove these captions. They wanted to remove information about who inflicted this pain—the Israel Defense Forces—but they had no problem with presenting the Palestinians as victims.

Al-Dujaili: What’s next for Bound Narratives?

Saade: Bound Narratives is expanding. This includes digitization, exhibitions of photobooks and images in galleries and pop-up spaces—like Takeover, in Beirut—along with talks and workshops around the book form. I’m hoping to find funds to create an online repository and commission artists, writers, and academics to engage with the library. I prefer this localization of situated knowledge. I think universalism, more often than evoking all of us, imposes one narrative and determines its value. I see this project as helping to mitigate the construction of otherness—how we’re always creating barriers and categorizing others.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture no. 256, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” in The PhotoBook Review.

At the historic Langley Avenue All Nations Pentecostal Church, Lee took one of the most captivating images of his career. A church leader, a Black woman, stands at the pulpit dressed in white robes, testifying before the congregation. She is animated, eyes closed, head thrown back, mouth open mid-speech, right arm hovering as if steadying herself against some unseen force. The photograph radiates a sense of spiritual surrender. It tells a different story than the images most often associated with the FSA: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of Florence Owens Thompson (the “Migrant Mother”), for instance, or Walker Evans’s photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, iconic portraits of the twentieth century that elide as much as they illustrate what it looked like to be poor in America during the Great Depression.

By the time Lee arrived in Chicago, the FSA, under the aegis of program administrator Roy Stryker, had begun to document poverty in urban centers. A master propagandist, Stryker understood that the hard-luck, Dust Bowl imagery the agency had been producing since the mid-1930s was sidelining other narratives. What was the experience of the millions of Black Americans who had moved to northern and midwestern cities from the rural South during the First Great Migration? To fulfill the FSA’s goal of introducing “Americans to America,” the scope of the images expanded.

Lee’s photograph of the Pentecostal leader appears in the opening pages of Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive, 1935–1944, which reimagines the project of the FSA through a study in radical contrasts. Edited by Mexican designer León Muñoz Santini and Colombian photographer Jorge Panchoaga, the book draws on images from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs of the New York Public Library to feature work by eight of the FSA’s twelve full-time photographers: Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, and Jack Delano.

A phantasmagoria is a succession of real or imaginary images, as in a dream. Omen fully embraces this concept, both through its sequencing, which creates a loose, unsettling narrative, and through particular pairings that suggest oneiric fictions, possession as much as dispossession. Lee’s aforementioned photograph, for instance, is juxtaposed with the solitary tent of a pea picker, photographed by Dorothea Lange two years earlier in California’s Imperial Valley. Taken nearly two thousand miles apart, the pictures collapse time and distance, together conjuring evangelical tent revivals and faith healings.

Another spread pairs two photographs taken in 1935 by Carl Mydans. The first, shot at the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland, depicts several blindfolded men and women—all white—taste-testing meat while seated around a kitchen table. Opposite is an image taken in Forrest City, Arkansas, which shows a Black man and woman waiting in line for food at a camp for flood refugees. The photograph is cropped to show only their torsos and left arms, empty plates in hand. The striking, ominous racialized contrast illustrates the chasm between blind abundance and true need.

Cropped, blown up, refocused, and uncaptioned, these pictures lose their old propagandist veneer, revealing a stranger, more vulnerable America. A man and woman roller skating in shadow are brought to light. Young boys at a Halloween party are cropped and centered as a man with demon eyes gazes from beyond. A dead eagle, the right wing clipped from the frame, hangs totem-like against a razor-wire fence. A field of burning wheat stubble is magnified into a firestorm.

Muñoz Santini and Panchoaga—who met in 2019 after being invited by the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo to lead an editing workshop at EN CMYK—characterize their work as “excavations,” which is apt, given how deeply they have mined the New York Public Library’s archive of forty thousand FSA photographs. That the book includes 124 images is a reminder that national histories are always incomplete. Looking through the library’s archive, the editors would have encountered few if any images of the protests, riots, and strikes that convulsed 1930s America, when New Deal programs sought to stave off socialist revolution and resurrect capitalism following the 1929 crash.

Omen belongs to a growing canon of creative work reinterpreting the FSA’s archive. For Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), William E. Jones assembled a selection of 157 negatives destroyed by Stryker—whose editing process involved punching holes in faces, bodies, buildings, and landscapes—and hypothesized about what motivated the bureaucrat’s choices. Day Sleeper (2020), a book by Sam Contis, distills the iconic work of Dorothea Lange to a dreamlike narrative about the waking world, her portraits of people asleep in public balanced by many previously unpublished images by her, both professional and private. Earlier this year, the exhibition Color Photographs from the New Deal (1939–1943), was presented at Carriage Trade, New York. Its shockingly vivid, rarely reproduced Kodachrome images presented pioneering artistic achievements of the FSA photographers in a new light.

In a coda to Omen, American novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives stresses how tenuous the connections are between fact and fiction when looking at documentary photographs; how our eyes can deceive us. In her view, Muñoz Santini and Panchoaga have created “something powerfully nonnarrative” with their image selections. “What I mean is that Muñoz Santini and Panchoaga make the photographs more difficult to see—and therefore more visible—because in Omen these famous photographs are no longer the photographs that we remember,” Ives writes. “They are not photographs that were taken in 1936 or in 1941. Instead, they were, in a manner of speaking, taken last week.”

Unmoored from time, the images are presented in a way that confounds their original purpose to “introduce Americans to America.” The photographs map a country of strangers and ghosts, while holding a mirror up to ourselves, daring us to open our eyes.

Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive, 1935–1944 was published by RM and Gato Negro Ediciones in 2024.

Sonya Dyakova

The Art of Papercraft (B. T. Batsford, 1971) by Hiroshi Ogawa is a comprehensive guide to the Japanese art of paper sculpture. It contains more than 110 photographs, with great attention to detail. The images are dramatic and atmospheric, as if the sculptures are suspended in space and time. The black background and soft shadows enhance the beauty of the shapes. Ogawa provides not only general instructions and suggestions but also explanatory illustrations and notes to accompany the photographs, making this book a practical resource for anyone interested in paper sculpture. It’s special to see the way humble materials and simple techniques can come together to create something so powerful.

Sonya Dyakova is the founder of Atelier Dyakova, a design studio in London.

Duncan Whyte

The Most Beautiful Swiss Books (Federal Office of Culture, Bern) is an annual publication documenting a yearly competition. The volumes are always fascinating, with a Swiss budget for epic reproduction. The two volumes with the best photographs are from 2016 and 2022: 2016 is devoted to “examination,” with spreads comparing all the nominated books through thirty or so different criteria, including spine, strength, and pagination; 2022 features a moody fashion shoot for each book.

Duncan Whyte is an independent art book designer living and working in France.

Jordan Marzuki

Aliens and Herons (Arbor Vitae, 2016) by Pavel Karous is a guidebook documenting postcommunist public art throughout the Czech Republic. The book employs its own taxonomy—class, order, family, genus, and species—to identify each artwork, along with beautifully structured typography and colorful pages. Cheeky illustrations contribute to an unconventional and hilarious narrative, in stark contrast to the serious, often dark history of the region.

Jordan Marzuki is a designer based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the founder of Jordan, jordan Édition.

Other Means

Bill Cunningham’s Facades (Penguin, 1978) features 128 photographs of his neighbor Editta Sherman posing in front of buildings in New York City, wearing period-correct outfits Bill collected over ten years. In most cases the buildings and clothing are in harmony, with the exception of the Twin Towers—Bill contrasts the clean, austere modernism of the towers with the “raunchy” blue jeans culture of the time. Our favorite photographs show Editta next to a graffiti-covered subway, illustrating the book’s core concept of the city as a collage of design spanning two hundred years. The cover, designed by Quentin Fiore, is printed in brilliant red and blue spot colors on metallic paper, evoking Midtown Manhattan’s reflective facades.

Other Means, a design studio in New York, was founded by Ryan Waller, Gary Fogelson, and Phil Lubliner.

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WORK/PLAY

For us, Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen (Artisan, 2022) is more than just a cookbook. We love how the chefs incorporate experimental recipes along with new takes on traditional recipes and the histories behind these meals. The pages are culturally immersed in who we are as Black people and are showcased through a Black cultural lens. From the Bronx to destinations all across the globe, Ghetto Gastro is bringing “food for freedom, fuel for thought.”

WORK/PLAY is an interdisciplinary design studio cofounded by Danielle and Kevin McCoy and based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Maricris Herrera

Roberto Luna’s photographs of the architect Francisco Artigas’s houses published in Francisco Artigas (Tlaloc, 1972) are distinguished by their challenging of traditional visual conventions and their exploration of new forms of architectural expression. With remarkable boldness, Luna constructs insightful narratives for utopian scenarios, revealing his unique ability to fuse modern aesthetics with functionality. Beyond his architecture, Artigas’s distinctive style of self-presentation stands out for its innovation and, above all, its provocative character.

Maricris Herrera established the Mexico City–based design practice Estudio Herrera in 2016.

Vera Lucía Jiménez

I first learned about Puruchuco (Editorial Organización de Promociones Culturales, Lima, ca. 1981) from a beautiful piece written by the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson. Illustrated with photographs by José Casals, Puruchuco shows, with words and images, the attempt to rethink an architectural complex on the coast of Peru that belonged to the Inca Empire from the thirteenth century and served as an administrative center and house of the curaca, an elite official. Casals’s images detail the precision and sensitivity of pre-Hispanic architecture: places connected to the corporality of the inhabitant and the uses they gave to the spaces.

Vera Lucía Jiménez is a publication designer who works between Lima, Peru, and Porto, Portugal.

Adam Turnbull

I was drawn to this publication—the Blue Book of Quality Merchandise 1980 (Bennett Brothers, 1980)—because of the product imagery. I love how the photographs are art directed and the products styled: the hands wearing the gloves, the staged still lifes, the radios with the dark gradient background. The repetition of the products laid out on the page creates a beautiful rhythm. It’s an amazing relic of a piece of marketing material that was both functional and pleasing.

Adam Turnbull is the cofounder, with Elizabeth Karp-Evans, of Pacific, a creative studio in New York.

Gabrielle Guy

I happened to be living in Johannesburg at the time that UP UP: Stories of Johannesburg’s Highrises (Fourthwall, 2016) came out. I found the city fascinating—so different from Cape Town, where I’m from. The city center is big and run-down, and so much more ambitious architecturally. I remember going to the book launch, held in a cool space in Braamfontein on the outskirts of the Central Business District. I love how the book manages to incorporate old and new photographs, architectural illustrations, and archival documents. It’s difficult to deal with such a range of visual material in layout, yet UP UP, with its solid grid, strong typeface, and rigid approach to sections and binding manages to create a strong aesthetic.

Gabrielle Guy is an art book designer and artist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Akiko Wakabayashi

Kurashi no souzou, no. 7 (Sogei Shuppan, 1978) is the design magazine’s special issue on Japanese craft. For me, the most attractive element is the cover image. The still life on the front is mirrored and then layered twice on the back. One section is treated with a distortion effect. Was this a mistake, a conscious experiment with technique, or is there a hidden conceptual message? The result is puzzling, but this mysterious outcome raises a lot of questions, which I love.

Akiko Wakabayashi is an independent designer based in the Netherlands.

Alex Lin

I found The Pill Book (Bantam, 2012), which covers more than 1,800 of the most regularly prescribed drugs in the United States, to be an effective use of photography as a reference for people. It’s a really beautiful and practical book, which runs more than 1,200 pages. I think it’s also great that the pills are printed to scale.

Alex Lin established Studio Lin, a Brooklyn-based graphic design practice, in 2012.

Scott Williams

The Powers of Ten (W. H. Freeman & Co., 1998) is a flipbook depicting stills from a film of the same name, created by the office of Charles and Ray Eames in 1977. The book is a conceptual and pictorial journey that starts at the edge of the universe and hurtles down to Earth, at tenfold steps, with a photograph depicting each interval along the way. The camera descends rapidly to Earth until the lens eventually enters the hand of a man lounging at a picnic at a park on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, down into his cells, his DNA, and finally to a single proton. It’s a small book with a big idea.

Scott Williams is cofounder, with Henrik Kubel, of A2/SW/HK, a design studio in London.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 255, “The Design Issue,” in The Photobook Review.

Batniji’s images and object-based installations often depend on the presence of documents, texts, and symbols whose meanings are immediately clear. His best works, however, delve into more complicated material, where the arguments, by necessity, head into the unknown and take unexpected twists and turns. In those works, Batniji asks serious, often difficult questions (usually philosophical, ethical ones), and he leaves them wide open. Among them: Can documentary images expose events occurring in the world—namely, acts of violence, destruction, and dispossession happening in places where power is brutally contested—and call them facts? Or is it possible that abstract forms can be more effective in channeling the terrible consequences of such events, in part because they sidestep the issue of accepting images as truth and make viewers feel, or at least approximate, what it means to be suddenly thrown into confusion, disconnection, and horror? 

Batniji was born in Gaza. He left, against his family’s wishes, to study art in Europe in 1994. Those were the heady days of the Oslo Accords, when it seemed like a real peace deal between Israel and Palestine might be possible, before the assassination of Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and, soon after, the ascension of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has now held office in Israel longer than anyone and has become, in the words of New York Times columnist and pundit Thomas Friedman, “the worst leader in [Israel’s] history—maybe in all of Jewish history.” For ten years, Batniji was able to go back and forth between Gaza and France. The trip was often terrible. 

In 2003, Batniji was detained for three days at Rafah, on the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which was occupied by Israel at the time (in mid-February, Israel was poised to launch an aggressive ground invasion of Rafah despite international outcry). Due to the security and surveillance regime, Batniji was unable to document his detention in Rafah with his camera, but he replicated the listlessness and anger of being there, the intimidation and exhaustion, and the fights and desperation that broke out among men in a cinematic series of pencil drawings on paper titled Transit #2 (2003). Two years later, Israel abruptly withdrew from Gaza. A power struggle between Fatah and Hamas ensued. Hamas took over the local government, at which point Israel imposed a punishing blockade. Although Batniji harbors a dream of returning to Palestine permanently, it has been impossible for him to enter Gaza since 2006. In the intervening years, he has turned the experience of exile into a kaleidoscopic practice, venturing as far as to the Palestinian diaspora in the United States, the subject of his 2018 Aperture book and exhibition Home Away from Home, to consider the complicated relationship of racism and colonialism to national-liberation struggles.

Batniji’s most recent publication, Disruptions (2024), published by Loose Joints this winter, offers a harrowing meditation on the tensions between the impulse to document reality and the potential for abstraction to communicate something more. The book is only 128 pages long, with a short, evocative text at the back written in French by the writer and photography historian Taous R. Dahmani and translated into Arabic and English. A nervy watercolor from Batniji’s 2022 series Fading Roses appears on the front cover, laid over what appears to be a beautiful blue sky but is more likely, and effectively, an error screen on the artist’s mobile phone. 

These images cannot but appear achingly beautiful, if for no other reason than for how they capture a refusal to die.

Disruptions follows a sequence of around seventy images, divided by dates ranging from April 2015 to December 2016. All of these images are screenshots that Batniji took during WhatsApp calls to his mother and family in Gaza. The screenshots capture moments of communications breakdown. They show the glitches, frozen pictures, and dropped signals of video calls failing in their promise to connect in real time. Page after page of Batniji’s book reveals eruptions of wild pixelation, accidental grids, and intense waves of blue and green, which might have suggested verdant landscapes and dazzling seas if they weren’t so obviously the colors of broken tech. Every so often a face appears, or parts of a face, showing a sudden smile, a look of uncertainty, palpable fear, distress, or expressions of soul-sucking fatigue. As soon as one begins to recognize buildings and street scenes, it looks as though the very same buildings and street scenes are exploding on the following pages. 

The images that make up Disruptions are therefore already a consolation, with the video call as the next best thing to meeting his loved ones face to face, embracing them, and feeling their warmth. But given everything that has happened in Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal in 2006, including several major bombing campaigns by Israel and countless smaller attacks and skirmishes—and more broadly in Palestine since the eruption of wars, dislocations, and displacements that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—Batniji’s work here, in Dahmani’s words, “acts as a repository of grief.” His images visualize the compulsive violence and terror from which Gazans have been unable to escape. Blasted by bad connections, these images cannot but appear achingly beautiful, if for no other reason than for how they capture a refusal to die, a refusal to stop calling your mom, a refusal to stop loving and needing and reaching out to friends, relatives, and colleagues. 

And this is to say nothing, yet, of the unconscionable damage that Israel has done to Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israeli military sites and kibbutzim, killing, among others, some of the most ardent peace activists in Israel. Disruptions begins with a shattering dedication to his family. Batniji lost his mother in 2017. Then, during Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza (funded like all of Israel’s military campaigns by massive amounts of US aid), fifty-two members of Batniji’s family were killed in the month of November alone. His sister was killed, and a few days after that, his brother died for lack of medical care. That Batniji could produce a book under such circumstances is remarkable. That his publisher could direct all of the proceeds from Disruptions to Medical Aid for Palestinians is heartening. That his images could create a language for addressing the cataclysmic violence that we are witnessing from near and far, a language both abstract and evidentiary, is an audacious sign that life persists.

Disruptions was published by Loose Joints in February 2024.

In a far more exuberant exchange, Virginia Oldoini, better known as the Countess of Castiglione, orchestrated more than seven hundred self-portraits down to the last detail: the dress, the shawls, the hairdo. In 1863, she commissioned a representative tableau vivant titled Scherzo di Follia from the French court photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. The masterpiece reveals the countess wearing a tasseled robe, with her salt-and pepper hair swept away from her forehead like spindrift floating up from the ocean. In her bejeweled hand, she presses a surreal monocle made of cardstock up to her eye. “I equal the highest-born ladies with my birth, I surpass them with my beauty, and I judge them with my mind,” she once bragged, in a testament to her amour propre.

One woman was exploited; the other was affirmed. What links Thompson and the countess? In a new book, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler show us that the women were both photography collaborators—and that the term itself is due a reconsideration. “Collaboration is the condition of photography in the most basic sense,” the authors explain in their introduction. Yet too often participation is “disregarded or unnoticed.” Collaboration offers the stories of Thompson and Castiglione along with 113 other examples from the history of photography (each accompanied by short essays written by art-world luminaries) that should be understood as products of community action—not as rarities birthed from solitary genius. In cases like Thompson’s, collaboration issues from a photographer’s usurpation, which jostles against the photographed person’s manifestations of discomfort or protest; in cases like the countess’, it can be a joyous co-creation made possible by resources and willpower. Regardless, photography is often a group undertaking shaped by power, race, and wealth.

Some of the most important revelations in Collaboration reinterpret important photographs as imperialist-subaltern composites. One example is Nick Ut’s “shooting” of Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the child in Napalm Girl (1972). A ubiquitous figure in Nixon-era reporting on the Vietnam War, and a shorthand for US barbarity, Phúc flees a bombing while nude, screaming, and flayed alive by napalm. How did she “collaborate”? First by suffering, and then by dissenting. “I didn’t like that picture at all. I feel like why he took my picture when I was in agony, naked,” Phúc subsequently asserted. Another case is Marc Garanger’s images of Algerian women, whom he snapped in the 1960s at the orders of a military commander who had stripped them of their veils. Collaboration reproduces three of these images, which show the incensed faces of the captives. In the aftermath, Garanger admitted that “the women had no choice in the matter. Their only way of protesting was through their look.”

Beyond these instances of forced entanglement, Collaboration’s authors also assess that photographic co-action can be generative, such as when community members work together to unearth new narratives. Such hopeful forms of participatory photography are exemplified by Wendy Ewald, who in the 1970s asked her students in rural Kentucky to “photograph themselves, their families, their animals and their community.” Radiant results are found in Denise Dixon’s Self-Portrait Reaching for the Red Star Sky (1976­–82), which reveals a young girl jubilantly raising her arms to the empyrean with her eyes closed, and Janet Stallard’s I Took a Picture with the Statue in My Backyard (1980), showing Stallard’s awestruck face as she gazes into her own lens.

Participatory photography can also take on more expressly activist incarnations. In the 2000s, LaToya Ruby Frazier recorded the effects of environmental racism on her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Since the late 1800s, many Black Americans have worked at a local steel mill once owned by Andrew Carnegie, and now by US Steel. The mill has polluted the environment with soot, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide to the extent that, in 2022, US Steel had to pay the government a $1.5-million-dollar penalty for “longstanding” air-pollution violations. Frazier and her mother suffered the effects of the toxins and have “battled cancer and autoimmune disorders like lupus,” the artist said. To document these ills, Frazier took pictures of her mom, who then took pictures of her. “It’s irritating when you put that camera in my face,” her mother told her. But the results are striking: Momme (2008) shows Frazier facing the camera and fronted by her mother. Both women’s facial expressions convey the weight of their love and the health problems they carry.

Another photographic collaboration driven by similar environmental and ethical concerns comes from the DIY, opensource nonprofit Public Lab. Since 2019, Public Lab has partnered with communities across the Gulf South to track the health effects of petrochemical plants on nearby Black communities. Public Lab provides local “grassroots mappers” with helium balloons, kites, and digital cameras, which they send skyward to take images that are later stitched together into atlases used to pursue interventions. In an adjoining essay, the artist-activist Imani Jacqueline Brown observes that the endeavor allows locals to “surveil the corporate-state and reclaim both their sense of place and their place in the struggle.”

As Collaboration reveals, photography is a wide-ranging practice of joint creation. This discipline ranges from the felicitous exchanges between the Countess of Castiglione and Pierre-Louis Pierson to the dominance and opposition that activates Migrant Mother, Napalm Girl, and Marc Garanger’s arrogations; to the communal imaginings of Ewald, Dixon, Stallard, the Fraziers, Public Lab, and Southern Gulf community members—and also to the viewers and writers who insist on cocreating photographs with their perceptions and critique.

In an age when conflict and disaster photography transfixes audiences with scenes of individuals’ experiences of violence, grief, abandonment, famine, and terror (consider, for example, the current coverage of the crisis in Gaza and the 2023 Libyan floods), we would do well to practice Collaboration’s brand of consciousness-raising. By viewing these images as collaborations, we can pivot from easy narratives about solo photographers who “capture” their “subjects” toward an understanding that the pictures we consume are community-created artifacts whose most important participants often lack full voice and choice.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography was published by Thames & Hudson in 2024.

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Russet Lederman: The Watson Library has a rich assortment of artists’ books. How was the collection formed?

Jared Ash: The Watson Library is as comprehensive as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, maybe even more so, because it’s a lot easier to acquire a book than it is a work of art—and storage is a lot less expensive! For a long time, individual departments, like Drawings and Prints, selectively collected artists’ books, but twentieth-century and contemporary examples weren’t well represented. About eight years ago, a defined collection of artists’ books was formalized to fill this gap.

Lederman: You often share books on your Instagram feed, @MetLibrary. Can you discuss some of the treasures you have highlighted?

Ash: Instagram is an exceptional calling card for us. Our account features unusual materials, especially photobooks and artists’ books that don’t fall squarely within a specific curatorial department’s range, such as object-like books that have inventive formats or include atypical elements made from textiles or glass. By the Piece (2016), by the artist, typographer, and researcher Tabea Nixdorff, is a good example. Printed in a limited edition of twenty copies, it evolved from her research at the Chicago Historical Society and is centered on Agnes Nestor, an early twentieth-century glove-maker and suffragette, who was also a labor rights activist.

Spread from Clarissa Sligh, What’s Happening with Momma? (Women’s Studio Workshop, 1988)

Slipcase for Thomas Sauvin, Until Death Do Us Part (Jiazazhi, 2015)

Lederman: How does a book like Nixdorff ’s come into the collection?

Ash: We acquire works through different means: about a third are gifts and two-thirds are purchases. Nixdorff and her fellow students were in the city for Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair, and we invited them to visit the Watson Library. We shared some books from our collection, and they showed us some of the works they were exhibiting at the fair. When objects stand out, like Nixdorff ’s book, we see an opportunity.

Lederman: What are some other acquisitions that cross boundaries?

Ash: Sandra C. Davis’s Queen Anne’s Lace (2006) is a small-scale book composed of cyanotypes on handmade Japanese paper, overlaid with hand stitching. A play on words, it tells the history of the wildflower, embellished with lace thread and a real bloom. Clarissa Sligh’s What’s Happening with Momma? (1988), published by the Women’s Studio Workshop, is cut in the shape of a house and illustrated with screenprinted photographic images from a family album. Sligh is an exceptional artist whose biography includes work at NASA and Goldman Sachs alongside her social- justice-focused art practice. In this volume, she explores notions of domesticity and class, elucidating childhood memories through texts printed on folded sheets of paper that drop down like sets of stairs.

Lederman: More recently you acquired the Beijing-based photographer Thomas Sauvin’s Until Death Do Us Part (2015), which is distinctive for its slipcase that looks like a cigarette pack.

Ash: Yes, I believe you could buy this book either individually or by the carton! Inside is a board book of found photographs, sourced from the Beijing Silvermine archive of salvaged negatives from a Chinese recycling plant, celebrating a Chinese wedding tradition where the bride lights a cigarette for each male guest and the couple plays smoking games that include stuffing as many cigarettes in one’s mouth as possible and then lighting them all at once. We value books that challenge people’s perceptions of what a book is.

We value books that challenge people’s perceptions of what a book is.

Lederman: Some of the books in your collection did not start as fine-art objects, such as a trade catalog of cast-glass samples that is nearly one hundred years old.

Ash: As part of the twenty-one departmental libraries that are centralized through the Watson Library, we have a substantial collection of trade catalogs. They show how art movements like Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and Constructivism found their way into everyday life, whether on wallpaper patterns or baby carriage designs. This notion of art into life and life into art is important for us.

The Album des principaux modeles de verres: produits spéciaux en verre coulé (1913), a.k.a. “The Glass Book,” is a trade catalog from a French firm, Manufactures des glaces & produits chimiques de Saint-Gobain, Chauny & Cirey, that has made glass for centuries, including for the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. From the outside, the book doesn’t look like much, but inside are pages filled with more than a hundred samples of multicolored decorative glass panes, including the glass that Hector Guimard used for the Paris Métro. It’s a good example of how ordinary materials can be beautiful and inspire wonder. I also really like the backstory of how this book came to us. It was delivered to the library on New Year’s Eve by a book dealer who transported it on his bicycle!

Irina Popova, If You Have a Secret (Dostoevsky Publishing, 2017)

Spread from Tadanori Yokoo and Renzaburo Shibata, Ezoshi Urotsuki Yata (Yata, the Vagabond; Shueisha, 1975)
All photographs by Elizabeth Legere. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Lederman: More contemporary yet equally inspiring is Irina Popova’s If You Have a Secret (2017). What is its design and concept?

Ash: This book’s inventive design requires activation to discover its message. In this second printing of If You Have a Secret, Popova, a Russian photographer now living in the Netherlands, interweaves personal and public images taken in her former homeland with poems and vignettes printed on semitranslucent, half-cut sheets to reflect on her past life. Most of the text appears on the front of each page, but in several instances, words or lines of type are printed on the reverse side of the sheet— forcing the viewer to hold the book up to the light to read the full text and understand its deeper meaning.

Lederman: Radically different, but just as inventive, is Ezoshi Urotsuki Yata (Yata, the Vagabond; 1975), a collaboration between the designer Tadanori Yokoo and the novelist Renzaburo Shibata.

Ash: I think our Yokoo holdings are a good example of how the Watson Library is a study collection. In this case, we’ve collected an artist in-depth, providing a comprehensive collection for research. During the New York Art Book Fair, a dealer from Japan had nearly an entire booth filled with books by Yokoo, which made us realize our lack. We wound up buying about fifteen books from the dealer, Ezoshi Urotsuki Yata among them. Even without knowing its fablelike narrative, the work can be appreciated for its experimental visual elements and dynamism alone. It never fails to wow people.

Lederman: With so many to choose from, I imagine it is hard to have a favorite book, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?

Ash: The collection that I feel closest to is a series of zines that evolved from Teens Take The Met!, a free, museum-wide public program that we co-organize every year with community partners. For several of these events, the Watson Library partnered with Endless Editions, who brought a Risograph machine that the teens used to make zines. We had a group of Russian teens from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, this past May, right before Mother’s Day, and one of them made a zine about piroshki that is a tribute to his babushka. Every year, program participants include kids from all over the city, many speaking different languages. These are our future visitors, and this event lets them know that this space exists for everyone.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire,” in The PhotoBook Review.