By way of illustration: How photobooks became a phenomenon

An image from the photobook Jellicoe & Bledisloe, David Cook’s document of Hamilton’s Hayes Paddock state house community, where he lived in the 1990s. Photo / David Cook

As photobook creators and followers gather for a festival at Te Papa, Mark Amery takes a look at the medium’s international growth, its local practitioners, and the publishers behind them.

Wellington photographer Mary Macpherson doesn’t remember her mother taking photographs on holidays in the 1950s and 60s, when
Mary was a child. Despite how beautifully composed Evelyn Macpherson’s images are, Mary doesn’t recall being asked to pose. She only discovered these images after her mother died. A carefully ordered and catalogued Kodachrome slide box provided the realisation her mother too was a photographer.

Memory is slippery, and in Macpherson’s newly published photobook one foot on the bottom (Rim Books, $80), she intersperses her mother’s photographs with her own, meditating on the distance between past and present.

The opening image is Evelyn’s. Featuring a stilt walker, it’s at the 1963 Naseby centennial. Yet the performer’s head is out of frame. The camera is more interested in the crowd, in which two other women quietly hold cameras. Sometimes it takes a moment to determine which photos are the mother’s, which the daughter’s. Such is the clarity of Evelyn’s images, and the visual echoes Mary Macpherson makes in the present.

Mary Macpherson’s newly published photobook One foot on the bottom intersperses her mother’s photographs with her own, meditating on the distance between past and present.

Macpherson is one of a group of established photobook artists who organise New Zealand’s biennial Photobook/NZ festival – the fifth such event is at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from August 6-9.

Photobooks are artist books. Images are carefully arranged and ordered to explore a theme or sketch a story. Their fineness can extend to experimentation in design, paper stock and binding, all creating what Macpherson describes as “an intensely imagined world”.

On the cover of one foot on the bottom is Evelyn’s image of an adolescent Mary and her brother at the edge of a swimming pool at the Russley Hotel, Christchurch, with Mary tentatively dipping a toe in. Further into the book, there’s a reply from Mary – a blue painted pool ladder entering an empty blue pool, where taupata grows out of a crack in the corner.

Macpherson sees the photobook as a form lying between novels and films. Rarely are there big arching narratives in a photobook. More often, they are an artist’s personal exploration of the resonances between things, giving readers space to make connections.

“I remind myself all photographs from the world are fictional,” Macpherson writes in an endnote to one foot on the bottom. “They become unstable and richer (sometimes) through the meaning that people bring to them.”

Melbourne-based New Zealand artist Erin Lee’s photobook The Crimson Thread features in Photobook/NZ 2026, Te Papa. Photos / Erin Lee

Rise of the photobook

The term photobook has only recently come into use as high-quality printing for low-run numbers of books gets more accessible. Photographers aren’t waiting to exhibit; with a book they get more control of their work’s presentation.

However, the photobook was popular back in the heyday of magazine photojournalism, with some taking a critical look at who we were as New Zealanders. Ans Westra’s controversial 1964 Washday at the Pa was a school classroom resource, and there were other 1960s classics: Les Cleveland’s portrayal of the West Coast, The Silent Land and Gary Baigent’s The Unseen City, about Auckland. In the 70s, photographers started to get paired with writers – text and image only tangentially linked by theme – Westra with James K Baxter and Tim Shadbolt in Notes from the Country I Live In; Marti Friedlander with James McNeish in Larks in a Paradise. This has intermittently continued. Macpherson, the creator of eight photobooks, is the partner of Peter Black, who has published well-regarded photography books with writers Ian Wedde (I loved you the moment I saw you) and Steve Braunias (The Shops).

While major publisher interest has waxed and waned, New Zealand group PhotoForum has been a consistent publisher and supporter during its 52 years. But the new independent rise in the photobook might be tracked to 1996, when photographer Haru Sameshina established Auckland-based Rim Books.

Two other favourites on my bookshelf come from Rim and are by leading photobook exponents. Jellicoe & Bledisloe is David Cook’s document of Hamilton’s Hayes Paddock state house community, where he lived in the 1990s (then character-filled working class, now more sedate) while Ann Shelton’s 1997 Redeye captures the transgressions of the avant-garde Auckland art party scene around her.

Redeye is a clear forerunner to the way many recent photographers take an intimate, collaborative approach to documenting subcultural scenes of flats and scrappy urban spaces around them. No one seems to be pointing cameras at strangers anymore.

There are collisions in colour and cultural codes in hair dyes, tattoos and piercings in Imogen Wilson’s hypnotic 2023 photobook Dreams. This was published by Wellington-based Bad News Books, whose catalogue is building strong links with the bigger Australian scene.

Jack Rossie’s stunning self-published handbound Mooning the Sun from 2021 (which is already in the Te Papa collection) celebrates friendship in a young Queer flat through experimentation with performance and the body on 35mm film. Rossie’s then flatmate-collaborator, artist Kat Lang writes in the book of how in the digital age, we more clearly see the inherent “falseness” of the photograph.

“A photograph was always a lie, to some degree,” Lang writes. “Perhaps not a lie, but a post-truth. Our wishes and image making demands are forms of truth. Our truths. We enter a period of post-truth.”

Te Papa’s Photobook/NZ 2026 is one of a number of similar festivals now held around the world. Photo / Supplied

Photobook festivals

Photobooks are now celebrated in festivals and competitions worldwide. In Berlin, you can go to a photobook store (Bildband), and in London The Photobook Cafe. In 2022, Te Papa started collecting photobooks in earnest. A current major exhibition, Slow Burn: Women and Photography (until January 2027), features 18 of them. In June, photobooks featured prominently in the second Object Book Fair at Auckland’s Objectspace, celebrating the book as design object.

This year’s Photobook/NZ festival includes launches, talks, performances, workshops and, at its centre, a book fair on August 8. Some 34 artists or small presses are taking part.

The festival opens with the Peter Turner Memorial Lecture in photography. This year’s, by celebrated Australian photographic artist Tracey Moffat, sold out within days. Mexican Martha Naranjo Sandoval, whose powerful Small Death was a finalist at the 2025 Paris Photo – Aperture Photobook Award, also makes an appearance. Small Death is Sandoval’s bold visual diary of a decade in New York after emigrating from Mexico City, shaped around images of her contact sheets and film reels.

Melbourne-based New Zealand artist Erin Lee will also features with The Crimson Thread. Considering the problems of Australia’s British heritage through Queen Elizabeth II’s 1954 Australian 1954, Lee mixes her own images with crops from archival footage. Sewn into the book are handwritten diary pages from a fictional seamstress working on the Queen’s gowns on the tour. It’s art as a body of images that the viewer/reader can hold, with a bit of sensory material buzz.

Instagram cannot compete.

Photobook/NZ 2026, Te Papa, August 6-9. Free entry (workshops ticketed)

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