Worlds Within: Photobooks of Aotearoa New Zealand
Worlds Within: Photobooks of Aotearoa New Zealand
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, level 5
19 August – 18 October 2022
Launching 19 August at Photobook/NZ
The term ‘photobook’ first appeared in the early 2000s. There had always been books with photographs in them but the photobook is more than just a compilation of individual images in a book format. It is a creative work in itself; an integrated whole that greater than the sum of its parts.
Digital technologies are behind the boom in photobooks over the last 20 years, enabling photographers to design, publish and distribute their own books. With photographers rather than publishers in control, an entire new field of both photographic expression and book publishing has emerged.
This exhibition lifts the lid on the photobook phenomenon. It shows examples of books that the publishing industry would once have termed illustrated books but which we can now understand as works of personal expression, as photobooks (even though the term didn’t exist when they were made). These include John Pascoe’s 1950 classic, The Mountains, the Bush & the Sea and Les Cleveland’s 1966 photo/text essay, The Silent Land.
It also represents contemporary self-published photobooks like Bruce Connew’s tiny I Saw You, of surveillance-like images, and Saynab Muse’s 2019 Imaanshaha on her Somalian refugee family living in Auckland.
The above group of twenty-one books will be under glass and shown either as covers or opened page spreads. The other half of the exhibition will contain up to ten contemporary photobooks for the public to handle, enabling visitors to browse the sort of recent productions they won’t find in bookstores.
Athol McCredie, Curator of Photography, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Tia Ranginui, The intellectual DEATH of a savage mind, 2015, Pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth 305gsm. 841mm x 1188mm
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