Back in the Photo Book Piles
Looking for images that haven't been digitalized and relentlessly recycled yet
Browsing the photography aisles of a book store can be intimidating, especially when you find yourself there for the first time. Picking up a heavy hardcover and flipping through the laminated pages filled with cryptic imagery feels like reading a novel in a language you don’t speak. To someone without a visual arts background, photos, on their own, mean very little. Your eyes wonder off towards familiar formats — an artist’s memoir, a fashion history textbook, a guide on color theory — something wordier, something structured enough to fall back on as you navigate this new creative endeavour. At a certain point, you start to question whether you are even creative enough to get it or whether placing any photo in the context of a coffee table book is supposed to have a Duchamp’s Fountain effect on it.
In that sense, online visual platforms are much more approachable. Keywords, colors, and aesthetics let you skip the uncomfortable introductions and turn the daunting task of visual research into a pleasant pastime. You don’t need to know specific photographers or understand the subjects’ background to jump from one auto-populated image to another and clip them to a digital moodboard. There are only so many times you can see the same pictures from the McQueen runway and young Chloë Sevigny photoshoots until you feel like you’ve seen every image on the internet though.
“This would have gone double platinum on 2014 Tumblr” is being thrown around in relation to contemporary movie stills, fashion editorials, and celebrity pap shots. And even though Tumblr and its iconic aesthetics are still very much around, the fascination we felt with them a decade ago has worn off, making every new image, project, and platform that carries that original digital moodboard spirit feel instantly familiar and old. Our eyes are searching for something that’s yet to be digitalized and relentlessly recycled, so back to the photo book aisles, libraries, and archives we go. “There’s a resurgence of archive imagery, especially fashion and pop culture imagery,” Isabella Burley, Acne Studio’s CMO and the founder of Climax Books, told SSENSE earlier this year. “But often we see one image [from an editorial]. We see the same image again, and it’s so amazing to then pull out a book or magazine, and then you see the context in which that image sat, and you’re like, actually there’s a way fucking better image on the next page that no one has posted about.”
It’s hardly a coincidence that the biggest names in contemporary culture are investing in publishing. Earlier this year, A24 partnered with Mack to distribute their screenplay and coffee table books, Mubi launched a publishing arm to compliment its productions, and Sofia Coppola started her own imprint after a successful run of Archive. Merit made a book in partnership with The Gentlewoman to celebrate the launch of their first fragrance, Nike published one about the visual history of women’s sportswear with Phaidon, and Simone Rocha unveiled a comprehensive guide on her creative process, inspiration sources, and collections.
The vintage photo and art book market may be even hotter with respectable curators, like Bill Hall of High Valley Books and David Owen and Angela Hill of IDEA, becoming close confidants of the brightest minds in the fashion, design, and beauty industries. “It’s like this sense of discovery of images and discovering forgotten artists, or photographers and this sense of wanting to learn and understand the history of cultural movements,” Burley said in relation to the resurgence of interest in archival photo books in the same SSENSE interview. “Take for example ’90s grunge: The photographers and image-makers who come out of that scene, it gets reduced to one person. But you don’t have people working in Japan, like Hiromix, who wasn’t necessarily grunge in her imagery but her work exists in the larger context of ’90s grunge. The context in which Juergen Teller exists is connected to what’s happening in other places. There’s often a whole world of image-makers around a scene that have such influence on that style of image-making, but people are lazy, or it takes too much time to dig deeper, and so artists are forgotten. From an archive publishing point of view, I’m really interested in telling those stories.”
Getting your hands on those untold artist stories can get really expensive though. An average IDEA “superbook”, like Paris, Texas or The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs, can run you anywhere from £45 to £495 which means that only a certain kind of creative can afford to dabble in vintage print. So, how does the gap between the types of images that these creatives are able to experience and the eye candy that audiences at large engage with online impact the type of commercial design and imagery that gets created and how it’s perceived? A certain degree of unfamiliarity is mesmerizing but at a certain point, it can quickly become unappreciated or misunderstood. Just like a culinary palette, a visual palette requires constant exposure and reflection, and just like in the culinary world, there are patrons of the arts who have genuine appreciation for digging through a stack of dusty photo books, those who don’t understand them and don’t care, and those who don’t quite understand their essence but care a lot about the optics. The latter are the ones running the arts and the luxury economy but any work that’s created with that specific consumer in mind is doomed.
In a recent convo with
, I told him how excited I was about the young creatives, like Hagop Kourounian of directorfits, forgoing digital visual platforms and venturing out into physical libraries and archives in search of rare visuals to inform their work. I quickly realized how corny it must sound coming from a young person who can barely remember the world before the internet, but thankfully, Ben gracefully spun my rookie excitement in a way that no longer embarrassed me. “It’s a unique privilege of my age that I remember enough things that existed in pre-digital context that have never been digitized that I can go back to,” he told me. “The archives of Grand Royal magazine have never been digitalized in a way that is actually web friendly. So you remember little details like that and kind of go “oh right, there is that thing.” But for you, not necessarily knowing those things — the serendipity involved there has got to be amazing.”The way I would describe it is a simultaneous realization that the internet, no matter how vast it seems, is much less far-reaching than the paper trail, and that there is a whole world of characters, objects, and stories waiting for you in the archives, libraries, and books stores. Luckily, I’ve spent the last few weeks putting together a list of photo books sellers, publishers, collectors, and curators that you can use to guide your research, sift through scans, and plan your holiday outings. Enjoy!
IN THE MARGINS:
I had the pleasure of speaking to
about “The Great Exhaustion” and the ways both brands and consumers can navigate it for her debut piece in Vogue!- let me guest curate a few vintage beauty pieces for her iconic Thanks It’s From eBay newsletter that goes really well with the November beauty piece we worked on together.
And finally, I got a little earnest and shared the most valuable lesson I learned this year with
over at club reticent.
I bought a brand book a while back, a fashion fairy tale released by Chopova Lowena. I think their designs are so interesting, but I’ll probably never buy their clothing because it’s so expensive and realistically not my style. So the book was such a great way to hold a piece of that in a way that makes sense for me. I don’t do a lot of client work (we publish our own projects) but producing a book our mag for the right client (with the right budget) could be fun.
very late to say that I was very flattered to be mentioned herein, Vik - I'm glad our conversation resonated. A general sense of mine is that we'll see lots of image+interview-forward publishing projects (made in the style of magazines) in 2025, and that some of them will appear in physical form too. Case in point the Flamingo Estates book (published by Chronicles) which felt more magaziney than hardcover to me, editorially - but also works as a coffee table / bookshelf statement too.