{"id":558205,"date":"2026-08-04T00:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T00:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/558205\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T00:02:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T00:02:13","slug":"by-way-of-illustration-how-photobooks-became-a-phenomenon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/558205\/","title":{"rendered":"By way of illustration: How photobooks became a phenomenon"},"content":{"rendered":"

An image from the photobook Jellicoe & Bledisloe, David Cook\u2019s document of Hamilton\u2019s Hayes Paddock state house community, where he lived in the 1990s. Photo \/ David Cook<\/p>\n

As photobook creators and followers gather for a festival at Te Papa, Mark Amery takes a look at the medium\u2019s international growth, its local practitioners, and the publishers behind them. <\/p>\n

\n Wellington photographer Mary Macpherson doesn\u2019t remember her mother taking photographs on holidays in the 1950s and 60s, when
\n Mary was a child. Despite how beautifully composed Evelyn Macpherson\u2019s images are, Mary doesn\u2019t 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.\n <\/p>\n

Memory is slippery, and in Macpherson\u2019s newly published photobook one foot on the bottom (Rim Books, $80), she intersperses her mother\u2019s photographs with her own, meditating on the distance between past and present. <\/p>\n

The opening image is Evelyn\u2019s. Featuring a stilt walker, it\u2019s at the 1963 Naseby centennial. Yet the performer\u2019s 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\u2019s, which the daughter\u2019s. Such is the clarity of Evelyn\u2019s images, and the visual echoes Mary Macpherson makes in the present. <\/p>\n

\"MaryMary 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.<\/p>\n

Macpherson is one of a group of established photobook artists who organise New Zealand\u2019s biennial Photobook\/NZ festival \u2013 the fifth such event is at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from August 6-9.<\/p>\n

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 \u201can intensely imagined world\u201d. <\/p>\n

On the cover of one foot on the bottom is Evelyn\u2019s 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\u2019s a reply from Mary \u2013 a blue painted pool ladder entering an empty blue pool, where taupata grows out of a crack in the corner. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s personal exploration of the resonances between things, giving readers space to make connections. <\/p>\n

\u201cI remind myself all photographs from the world are fictional,\u201d Macpherson writes in an endnote to one foot on the bottom. \u201cThey become unstable and richer (sometimes) through the meaning that people bring to them.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Melbourne-basedMelbourne-based New Zealand artist Erin Lee’s photobook The Crimson Thread features in Photobook\/NZ 2026, Te Papa. Photos \/ Erin Lee<\/p>\n

Rise of the photobook<\/p>\n

The term photobook has only recently come into use as high-quality printing for low-run numbers of books gets more accessible. Photographers aren\u2019t waiting to exhibit; with a book they get more control of their work\u2019s presentation. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s controversial 1964 Washday at the Pa was a school classroom resource, and there were other 1960s classics: Les Cleveland\u2019s portrayal of the West Coast, The Silent Land and Gary Baigent\u2019s The Unseen City, about Auckland. In the 70s, photographers started to get paired with writers \u2013 text and image only tangentially linked by theme \u2013 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). <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Two other favourites on my bookshelf come from Rim and are by leading photobook exponents. Jellicoe & Bledisloe is David Cook\u2019s document of Hamilton\u2019s Hayes Paddock state house community, where he lived in the 1990s (then character-filled working class, now more sedate) while Ann Shelton\u2019s 1997 Redeye captures the transgressions of the avant-garde Auckland art party scene around her.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

There are collisions in colour and cultural codes in hair dyes, tattoos and piercings in Imogen Wilson\u2019s hypnotic 2023 photobook Dreams. This was published by Wellington-based Bad News Books, whose catalogue is building strong links with the bigger Australian scene. <\/p>\n

Jack Rossie\u2019s 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\u2019s then flatmate-collaborator, artist Kat Lang writes in the book of how in the digital age, we more clearly see the inherent \u201cfalseness\u201d of the photograph. <\/p>\n

\u201cA photograph was always a lie, to some degree,\u201d Lang writes. \u201cPerhaps 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"TeTe Papa’s Photobook\/NZ 2026 is one of a number of similar festivals now held around the world. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n

Photobook festivals<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Objectspace, celebrating the book as design object. <\/p>\n

This year\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

The festival opens with the Peter Turner Memorial Lecture in photography. This year\u2019s, 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 \u2013 Aperture Photobook Award, also makes an appearance. Small Death is Sandoval\u2019s bold visual diary of a decade in New York after emigrating from Mexico City, shaped around images of her contact sheets and film reels. <\/p>\n

Melbourne-based New Zealand artist Erin Lee will also features with The Crimson Thread. Considering the problems of Australia\u2019s British heritage through Queen Elizabeth II\u2019s 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\u2019s gowns on the tour. It\u2019s art as a body of images that the viewer\/reader can hold, with a bit of sensory material buzz. <\/p>\n

Instagram cannot compete. <\/p>\n

Photobook\/NZ 2026, Te Papa, August 6-9. Free entry (workshops ticketed)<\/p>\n

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