Peter Amlutski Photo
Are you suffering from photo-weary eyes?
Does the epidemic of selfies have you just about convinced that rampant egotism is infecting the very foundations of civilization itself? Flummoxed by the gazillions of things to see on Instagram? Alarmed that the tsunami of images is sweeping away the very value of the individual picture and its ability to communicate?
Have I got a cure for you.
Well, at least some potent new medicine.
It’s to be had in the basement galleries of the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale, near the corner of York and Chapel, where the curators are showing samples form a recently acquired collection of this new/old thing called a “photobook.”
While it’s fundamentally similar to any little collection of photos one of us might put together as a keepsake, say, from our high school graduation or a wedding, these photobooks are works — many in small editions and many self-published — made by serious photographers.
They are taking their photos not to hang on the wall of a gallery, or even to publish in a digital zine, but specifically to appear within that old-fashioned technology, the book that you grasp in your hand.
Dotson.
“It’s interesting to think about the proliferation of images … and this proliferation of photos in book form, a pendulum swing back to an interest in the photobook in light of how much is digital,” said Molly Dotson, the library’s assistant curator for special collections.
The exhibition highlights the work of the Haas Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to collect this form of photo art, which springs from some of the great classics of photobooks: Think Alexander Gardner‘s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War or James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or Robert Franks’s The Americans.
The books in the exhibit, however, didn’t have a platform for publication or a way out into the broader world, and would have fallen under the radar had it not been for a 2003 Yale grad, Larissa Leclair. As a student she was intrigued with the relationship between photography and memory, so she began collecting photobooks and recently donated them to the Yale Library.
In “Noche,” from Portland, Oregon’s Vela Noche Press, “Laura Henkin and Richard Bernari collaborated on a set of four portfolios that explore “what photography can achieve in the absence of narrative. Each series of the five photographs is housed in a handmade paper folder and the four series are presented together in a custom made clamshell box.”
In Elisabeth Tonnard’s Two of Us: Encounters, from Rochester, N.Y.‘s Visual Studies Workshop in 2007, the photographer has selected from an anonymous street photographer’s archives random pairs of images — people who then face off against each other on facing pages of the book.
As if the photobook doesn’t strongly question the value of individual authorship and ownership, Tonnard then positions a single word from a poem by Baudelaire at different locations on each page. On the pages visible in the display, those locations are at the bottom corners, at a diagonal, so that when you would cover the word with your thumb when you turned the page.
Is the rendering of the French poet’s work just as random as the anonymous, randomly paired images? And to what end?
You decide. Dotson says the form of the photobook is still evolving and no one quite has the definition. There are 15 vitrines, each filled with a kind of intellectually compelling and often visually arresting aesthetic photo puzzle to solve.
Many of the newly arrived items don’t yet carry permission to be reproduced (thus none are in this story). The show runs through May 26 at the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, 180 York St. Click here for more information
