Bigging up photomagazines...

Author:

Diane Smyth

Birkbeck College, University of London, held an extremely interesting academic conference on The Photobook on 03 and 04 April, featuring presentations by Liz Wells, David Campany and BJP contributor Gerry Badger among others.

Most relevant to working photographers was Campany's paper, which considered a spread Walker Evans put together for Fortune magazine in May 1946, entitled Homes of Americans. Interestingly Evans didn't shoot the piece, though seven of his images were included in it - edited and designed it. Comparing and contrasting 37 images of American houses, but run almost entirely without text (the captions were printed separately) it was, argued Campany, a sophisticated investigation of the power of the image.

And as such, he added, it was also a severe disruption of the usual distribution hierarchy, in which images shown in galleries have most kudos, and those shown in the press rather less. Evans' work on Fortune, he argued, was just as interesting and valid as his better-known photographic endeavours of the 1930s.

The conference was intended as a work-in-progress discussion - a book is planned for early next Spring.

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