Celebrating the art of the photo book

Estab­lished in 1923, Phaidon has risen to become one of the fore­most pub­lish­ers of the cre­ative arts. In the cen­tu­ry since it’s birth, the com­pa­ny has sold more than 50 mil­lion books across an expan­sive pro­gram of art, pho­tog­ra­phy, fash­ion, design, and lifestyle titles by lumi­nar­ies like Nan Goldin, Joel Meyerowitz, Cather­ine Opie, Dai­do Moriya­ma, and Mary Ellen Mark.

New exhi­bi­tion, 100 Years of Cre­ativ­i­ty: A Cen­tu­ry of Book­mak­ing at Phaidon, looks back at the time­less art of the print­ed page. The cen­ten­ni­al cel­e­bra­tion traces the evo­lu­tion of the inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ing house as it set forth to cre­ate a new cat­e­go­ry of art books that made high qual­i­ty pro­duc­tion acces­si­ble to a broad­er audience.

While the pub­lish­ing land­scape con­sol­i­dates, Phaidon con­tin­ues to stand at the van­guard of the form, main­tain­ing the integri­ty of edi­to­r­i­al and design stan­dards befit­ting its most famous author, Rihanna. 

“Pho­tog­ra­phy has a very spe­cial rela­tion­ship to books,” says Deb Aaron­son, Vice Pres­i­dent, Group Pub­lish­er at Phaidon. In recent years, the house has pub­lished ground­break­ing books like Roger Ballen’s 2001 mono­graph Out­land, as well as reis­su­ing sem­i­nal vol­umes like Dan­ny Lyon’s Con­ver­sa­tions With the Dead, a chill­ing por­trait of the Texas State prison sys­tem dur­ing the late 1960s.

“For a long time, pho­tog­ra­phy wasn’t con­sid­ered art. Images appeared in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers, and didn’t have a gallery life,” says Aaron­son. ​“Eugene Smith’s Mina­ma­ta, Robert Frank’s The Amer­i­cans, or Dan­ny Lyon’s Con­ver­sa­tions With the Dead — these books hap­pened because pho­tog­ra­phers need­ed a medi­um to share their work.”

As doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phers rede­fined the pho­to book dur­ing the sec­ond half of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, a new gen­er­a­tion of artists emerged, ready to charge the gates of the exclu­sion­ary art world. At the fore­front was Robert Map­plethor­pe, who set the nation aflame at the height of the AIDS cri­sis and became a focal point for Sen­a­tor Jesse Helm’s cam­paign to destroy the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts.

“Map­plethor­pe was excep­tion­al­ly tal­ent­ed at using clas­si­cal modes of rep­re­sen­ta­tion to depict star­tling con­tent with a great deal of for­mal care. It was incred­i­bly con­tro­ver­sial at the time, and peo­ple are still shocked by his imagery,” says Aaron­son, who points to his 1977 pho­to, Amer­i­can Flag, which appears in the 2020 com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey, Robert Map­plethor­pe.

“I can’t imag­ine how Robert Map­plethor­pe felt about Amer­i­ca,” Aaron­son con­tin­ues. ​“As is some­one who died from AIDS, he was part a trag­ic time in Amer­i­ca when we did a huge dis­ser­vice to large swathes of our com­mu­ni­ties by demo­niz­ing peo­ple who became sick and not work­ing fast enough to find solutions.”

Like Map­plethor­pe and Lyon, Mar­tin Parr is fine­ly attuned to the nuances and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the pho­to book that stand the test of time. ​“Mar­tin is a huge pho­to book col­lec­tor him­self, and he’s believes in the pow­er of the medi­um,” says Aaron­son, who points to Parr’s Bor­ing Post­cards.

“We get so much infor­ma­tion dig­i­tal­ly, but a pho­to book is some­thing dif­fer­ent because it lives in the world,” she says. ​“You have to pick it up and feel like I’ve nev­er seen this before, and it feels like this has been here for­ev­er at the same time.”

100 Years of Cre­ativ­i­ty: A Cen­tu­ry of Book­mak­ing at Phaidon is on view through Sep­tem­ber 18, 2023, at Christie’s Rock­e­feller Cen­ter in New York. The New York exhi­bi­tion will trav­el to Lon­don on Octo­ber 15 ‑19, 2023.

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