Ocular Octopus

Livebooks is running a “distributed blog post” on the future of the photobook. Specifically, “What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?” My take:

What do I think the photobook will look like in 10 years? Probably very much like photobooks do now. “Photobook” is a broad category and if you look at other broad categories over time, they don’t change a lot. Think about movies you’ve seen that predicted what the future would be like when the future was now. Instead of radical changes to cars, television, clothing as it turns out everything in the broadest sense is very much like it was in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Cars have a driver, carry roughly a handful of people, run on wheels and drive on roads. In the same sense, 10 years from now photobooks will look and function much as they do now: a cover wrapped around a sequence of reproduced photographs in color or black and white with or without accompanying text pieces.

Specifics, of course, will change, particularly in production and economics. On-demand printing technology is going to get much, much better. Combined with advances in digital photography, we’ll see a level of self-publishing quality that is going to blow our minds. Think about what a point-and-shoot camera was in 2000 and look at how that’s advanced in 10 years. I’d expect medium-format film quality consumer level digital cameras by the end the next decade. And the physical printing quality of on-demand publishers is going to advance along side camera technology to offer a final product that would be cost prohibitive even for a dedicated publisher today.

The upshot of advancing technology will be a radical increase in the volume of works available. I don’t think, however, that will likewise translate to a corresponding increase on the consumption side. If you look at the decline and eventual disappearance of the long-form photo essay in the picture magazines such as Life, the wider public has sadly lost its patience for such work. So the general audience for photobooks will continue to be a niche one, aside from vaniety audiences looking at a specific photographers work – ie family and friends.

Paper-based photobooks have been a core photographic object since the dawn of paper negatives (Fox Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature” was a sheaf of tipped-in photographs bound together) and I don’t see that changing or going away. WIll people look at photos on a Kindle or iPhone like device? Sure. (I don’t think such devices circa 2019 will look or function much like what we see today, which are embryonic forms of something that will converge and get physically bigger.) I think its more likely that people will view art and photography on their $200 60″ hi def TV or computer screen than on a mobile device.

The open source/proprietary question misunderstands or misappropriates the concept of “open source”. Open source in software arises from the idea that computer programs are a result of logic and pure thought, that anyone gven the time and expertise could arive at a computer program just as one would the laws of physics. Therefore, they can not be owned. In the strictest way, photography is already open source in that the subject and light are, in most cases, freely available to everyone to make their own photographs. But it is the naive view that simply given the raw ingredients and proper compass headings and coordinates would reproduce a given photograph. The photographer is an author, expressing individual creativity, not a mathematician solving a formula.

Nevertheless, the sheer volume of photographs (we haven’t seen nothin’ yet) will challenge the ability of the photographer to maintain his/her rights over a particular expression. In this, the photobook may be more important than ever to establish the artistic intent of the photograph as an object and not merely an idea.

UPDATE: Many, many others have also weighed in on this question, all collected at Resolve, the liveBooks blog. Some favorites of mine, so far:

• Elizabeth Avedon with terrific photos of Richard Avedon’s “Portraits” book mock-up
• Darius Himes
• Alec Soth, which also informally announces his book publishing effort, Little Brown Mushroom
• Food For Your Eyes
• Shooting Wide Open