Homework One ART 333: Photo Book Stephanie Scott
Last Friday, we traveled up to Washington, D.C. to visit two exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery that were both based on photo books by Ivan Sigal and Taryn Simon. Before our trip, we examined one of the first photo books published by Robert Frank along with the two photo books that were the basis for the exhibits. Though the books are similar in the artistic medium they present, they each vary in their layouts, the captions, and the overall amount of text within the covers.
Robert Frank Robert Frank’s “The Americans” appears to be a very ‘generic’ photo book, something that every person who picks up a photography book expects to see when they open the cover. The right page contains an image that does not take up the entire page, while the adjacent page remains blank, except for the title of the image and/or where it was taken (Figure 1). The overall sense of the book is simply images of
Figure 1
American life from 1955 to 1956. The images range between subject of young couples in courtship and diners, to empty streets and cars. As one of the first photo books, it acts as a basis to compare the other two books that follow.
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Ivan Sigal Sigal’s book, on the other hand, has a noticeable difference when compared to “The Americans.” Like Frank’s, Sigal’s book “The White Road” presents images on the right page and the images retain the border between the edge of the image and the page. However, some of the images overlap from the left page onto the right (Figure 2 and 3) or vice versa. Text is essentially non-existent throughout the book.
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While we were at Sigal’s exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery, Sigal described how he formatted the images for the book. He stated that as we read a book, though we believe that we are supposed to turn the page and read the left page before the right, we actually look at the right page before we turn our eyes to the right. For this reason, Sigal chose to organize the sequence of images for sections of his book with the first image on the right page, then the second image on the next right page and then the third image on the left page. 2
Taryn Simon Finally, Taryn Simon’s book “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters,” is incredibly extensive, and is thus is noticeably different from the first two photo books, simply in the layout, text and captions. Each page of the book varies widely in what it contains. There are pages that contain several images laid out in a grid (Figure 4), sometimes with duplicates of the same image within the array of photographs. On some pages, images will only consist of one or two beige rectangles with a number by the bottom-right hand corner, where subjects have declined participation in the project. On similar pages, only one of the two images will have a subject; sometimes it is a person, other times, a folded outfit sent by the participant. On other pages, they are a combination of person and clothing. In a few of the images, the person has been pixelated to hide their identity. Figure 4
The text for this book is also greatly different in both its introductory text and the captions that accompany the images. Both range in the amount of text and the space they occupy on the page. For the captions, some simply dictate that a person declined participation in the project, while others contain a small paragraph of information about the image or what it depicts. Sometimes captions are the only items on a page (Figure 5). On some of the text pages, such as those presenting new chapters, the text is neatly centered on the page.
Figure 5
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