The Photocaptionist is deeply about image-text intersections. 2015 has been our busiest year with many off line projects for printed magazines and exhibitions. To keep up with all the photobooks that saw the light during the year has been quite difficult to be honest. So, for 2015, instead of putting together a classic ‘best of’ photobooks list – and our perplexities about their ‘vertigo’ effect were expressed in a blog post back in 2013 – we gathered a number of what we like to call ‘image-text’ photobooks, where text is a fundamental element in the narrative (not a mere introduction or essay on the photoworks). On the same topic we run this strongly a-periodic column on our website: ‘Image-text photobooks in a nutshell’ where we ask a pool of international photobook ‘experts’ to share with us an image-text photobook they find particularly interesting, regardless of its publication date.
The books below all came out in 2015, we had the luck to experience them in the flesh and we really enjoyed them. In alphabetical order:
Thomas Boivin A Short Story – a lovely, whimsical and cinematic journey into the depths of a short yet passionate love story.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Humans and Other Animals – witty and subtly subversive.
Conflict Edited by Wojciech Nowicki and Magdalena Budzińska, Krakow Photomonth Festival – how to mix literature and visual culture for curatorial purposes.
Crude Metaphors by Todd Hido, Mayumi Hosokura, Edgar Martins, Esther Teichmann, Roger Ballen – eclectic and unusual pairings of short stories written in response to the imagery.
Sara Entwistle, Please send this book to my mother – sublime immersion into a family archive.
David Fathi Anecdotal – tragicomic forgotten little stories on the atomic era.
Karen Knorr, Belgravia – a classic on the anatomy of privilege.
Wojtek Kutyla Sentience – ambitious and immersive project of photography, poetry and music (to be listened here: http://www.wojtekkutyla.com/sentience/).
Luca Massaro Foto Grafia – clever deconstruction of the very notion of semiotics.
Christian Patterson, Bottom of the Lake – the human geography of a hometown is there to be ‘re-animated’ , enjoy!
Regine Petersen, Find a Fallen Star – meteorites, myth and mysteries at their best.
Annebella Pollen, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians – curious and eccentric as only British phenomena can be.
Gus Powell The Lonely Ones – ‘Let’s not ruin it by talking’.
Will Steacy Deadline – a necessary and brilliant publication on the newspaper industry’s decline/revolution.
Nina Strand, Dr Strand – on the importance of mums in our lives.
Word and Image: Art, Books and Design From the National Art Library – encyclopaedic journey into the sexiest of all objects: books!
The Photocaptionist is a platform that promotes the practice of concubinage between photography and literature, images and words.
