Halfway between a photo album and a printed book lies the photobook.
In the age of Instagram, when almost a million images are shared across social media every minute, leafing contemplatively through a photobook allows for a deeper appreciation of the interaction of image and text. Yet this is a relatively young collecting field.
Whereas early photography itself began to receive serious curatorial and collecting attention in the 1950s and ‘60s, photobooks – published in multiple identical copies with an imprint and letterpress text – had to wait until the 1980s to come under the microscope of academics such as Helmut Gernsheim, Lucien Goldschmidt and Weston J Naef.