In the most basic terms, they are simply books made up of photographs, but of course there’s much more to the photobook than that. Typically they are carefully edited and sequenced, and the selection of the photographs, and their order, are crucial to whatever story is being told. But there’s another crucial element that’s too often ignored – the design.

Over the past few decades, photobook design has become an integral part of telling the story. Classics such as Walker Evans’ American Photographs used a very straightforward design: blank pages and picture pages alternating with very little text, if any. In contrast, contemporary photobooks have come to embrace the many different ways in which the design of a book – the graphic design as well as its actual physical properties – can help shape the message. The following books are some of the most striking examples I have come across.

Broken Manual

Alec Soth became famous with Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that followed the classic Evans model. In contrast, Broken Manual (published by Steidl, 2010) looks and feels like the “scripts” – transcripts of lectures – I used to buy at university. A soft cover [far right] that looks a bit grimy, even when brand new, it essentially feels as if it were hand-made, with the captions seemingly scribbled onto the pages after the fact. Instead of an essay there are various sections of text [top right], a manifesto of sorts on how to disappear, printed on green paper stock (which those working in offices will be familiar with). Look carefully, however, and you can see that every choice in the book is deliberate, right down to which photographs have an extra layer of gloss. Broken Manual is highly sophisticated but as its title suggests, it’s a somewhat dysfunctional, idiosyncratic manual. Its form follows its function.

Broken Manual by Alec Soth.

Broken Manual by Alec Soth.

Form following function is the essence of what contemporary photobook design is doing. Design decisions are being made to support the photography and story because, in the words of Dutch photobook designer Hans Gremmen: “Everything that makes a book, the choice of paper, the size, the way it’s bound, the quality of the printing, the scans… Everything should always be tailored to the book.” If this is done well, the reader probably won’t even notice because all the details will work as an organic whole, with no single aspect interrupting or disturbing the flow of the book.

Reheaded Perckerwood

Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson.

Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson.

Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson.

Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson.

Design decisions can be very subtle and very close to the classic models. So, if Broken Manual is located at an extreme end of photobook design, Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood (Mack, 2011) is much more conventional, but it still manages to bring the traditional model into the contemporary world. Redheaded Peckerwood photographically narrates the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, two teenage runaways who went on a Bonnie and Clyde-style killing spree in 1958. It includes various types of photograph, including reproductions of old documents, and they are in both colour and black-and-white. They are sequenced to follow the story chronologically but are presented in different sizes and positions on the page – some on the right-hand side (where we expect to find photographs in a book) leaving the left-hand side blank, others on the left-hand side with the right-hand side blank. Some are printed across the gutter, towards the left, or right; others are printed in pairs.

These seemingly mundane design decisions result in significant differences in how the images are read; they also have to be exactly correct, as otherwise the changes in image size and position could seem completely random. In fact, Redheaded Peckerwood is confusing, but it makes creative use of that confusion. We are all very familiar with how photographs in a photobook work; this book plays with our expectations, to engage us, make us look, and induce us to read the story. It’s a sophisticated publication for an audience that has seen a lot of photobooks.

Capitolio

If Redheaded Peckerwood uses a contemporary approach to the classic photobook model, Christopher Anderson’s Capitolio (RM, 2009) presents a contemporary approach to a different model. In the 1960s, books by photographers such as William Klein and Ed van der Elsken inspired a generation of Japanese photographers, including Daido Moriyama, to create a different kind of work. The main movement to emerge was called Provoke; the photographs were often grainy and contrasty, to the point of being literally just black-and-white, with no shades of grey. Capitolio could almost be a Provoke book.

Capitolio by Christopher Anderson.

Capitolio by Christopher Anderson.

Anderson’s background is in photojournalism, working both in colour and in black-and-white, but off-kilter compositions and grain have been part of the visual language of photojournalism for a while now. For Capitolio, shot in Venezuela, the photographer goes one step further by cropping the images to either create little vignettes to work off other photographs, or to have panoramas across the gutter. The images are run full bleed, extending all the way to the edges of the pages, and often come in pairs without any space between them. Occasionally part of an image is on one page, with the rest only visible when the reader turns the page to see the next spread. The result is often disconcerting, especially given the size of the book. This is an intense book from what feels like an intense country.

Interestingly, Anderson was accused both of glorifying and of being too critical of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez in discussions of the book online. I don’t think he is doing either, but it’s easy to see why Capitolio has ruffled feathers – it presents uncompromising photographs of an uncompromising subject in a very uncompromising way. The problem might simply be that people think Capitolio is photojournalism, which it is clearly not.

Baghdad Calling

Photojournalism is often said to be in crisis these days, riven by uncertainties about both its business model and its photographic approach. Citizen journalism poses a particular challenge, because the ubiquity of mobile-phone cameras means many events are now recorded by people who just happen to be there (as happened recently with the capture and death of Muammar Gaddafi). With Baghdad Calling (Episode, 2008), Dutch photojournalist Geert van Kesteren embraced this conundrum to produce one of the finest examples of contemporary photojournalism.

Baghdad Calling by Geert van Kesteren.

Baghdad Calling by Geert van Kesteren.

The Iraq war forced millions of Iraqis to flee violence in their neighbourhoods, finding refuge either in other parts of the country or abroad; those neighbourhoods also became no-go zones for photojournalists because they were so dangerous. Van Kesteren put the two sides of the story together, visiting refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Turkey to photograph them and speak with them about their experiences, and asking them for photographs or videos they had taken of these areas. Baghdad Calling combines these different elements into a very smart, coherent and moving book, and shows why Dutch design has become one of the benchmarks of photobook-making.

The bulk of Baghdad Calling consists of photographs taken by refugees. We would be hard-pressed to call those images photojournalism – most of them are everyday photographs of people posing, talking, a cat, a dinner or some neighbourhood, and there is no independent confirmation of what the viewer gets to do. But occasionally there are traces of shocking violence too, and I would argue Baghdad Calling still is photojournalism because it convincingly tells a story – the story of the Iraqi refugees, and the country they had to leave.

One of the reasons the book works so well is because of the way it was put together. It handles the two types of photographs – van Kesteren’s and the refugees’ – by using two different types of paper; the mobile-phone images are reproduced on newsprint, with captions narrated by the refugees underneath. In between there are short sections with text and van Kesteren’s photographs, printed on a different, but also thin, paper stock. All the pages have the same fragile feel, but there is no confusion over who took each photograph.

It would have been tempting to separate the professional’s photographs from those of the amateurs. By bringing them together, with a smart take on how to distinguish one from the other, Baghdad Calling lends the refugees dignity. The design is almost a political act, offering those often presented as mere statistics an equal chance to share their stories.

Come Bury Me

Baghdad Calling raises a crucial issue – stories, and our ability to verify them (or not), and that’s the question at the heart of Andrej Krementschouk’s Come Bury Me (Kehrer, 2010). When you open the book, there is a photograph of five people, full bleed – no title page, no table of contents, nothing. In the following pages there are just photographs, at least for a while, showing these five people, and some more, drinking, dancing, hugging animals and so on, in a very squalid home.

Come Bury Me by Andrej Krementschouk.

Come Bury Me by Andrej Krementschouk.

Come Bury Me by Andrej Krementschouk.

To some people, this is the way that photography should work – pictures alone, no text needed. But then there is text, after the main block of photographs – an essay by the photographer himself, explaining how he met the people in the photographs and re-telling some of the stories that they had told him. One introduced herself as a “three-time world champion in gymnastics”, while another said he had been a soldier in Vietnam. Stories. At some stage, one of the women told the photographer, “Don’t believe everything people tell you.”

The book ends on a grim note as the photographer recounts going back to see his acquaintances, and finding just one of them. The house they had partied in had burnt to the ground and his friends had died – the last images of the book are photographs of the ruins. We have the photographs, the photographer’s story, and the stories he was told. How do we know what is real? How do we know the truth? When reading the essay, I found myself going back to the photographs, trying to work out who might possibly be who...

The design throws you into this world by giving you only the photographs at first. It makes the viewer look and make up her or his mind (as he or she inevitably will), then turns everything on its head, this time in words. Isn’t that what a lot of contemporary photography is about?

These five books are in no way representative of contemporary photobooks, but they all use design in a very smart and efficient way, to help carry the story, narrative or function of the book. Each one of them would be very different if the work was presented as in American Photographs and – just Evans’ classic would be a lesser book if its design was changed – these books would lose something in the process. Good design can elevate a photobook to dizzying heights – and good design often means you only notice it when you really look. Contemporary photobooks have become very sophisticated objects, aimed at a very sophisticated audience.