The Drive to Archive: Conceptual Documentary Photobook Design

Abstract

The term Conceptual Documentary has been used increasingly in recent years in response to certain shifts in documentary photography. By making sense of the world via an emphasis upon documentation, selection, editing and a cool, distanced and analytical aesthetic, Conceptual Documentary photography can be understood as a symptom of the archival impulse that pervades contemporary culture. This paper will address the particular implications of Conceptual Documentary photobooks as expressions of this archival impulse. With a focus on the books of the photographers Stephen Gill, Mathieu Pernot and Matthew Sleeth, it will assess the possibilities and limits of photobooks as alternative sites for the exhibition and reception of contemporary documentary photography.

Notes

1 “The Open Book” was seen at the International Centre of Photography in New York in 2005 and the Museum of Photography, the Royal Library, Copenhagen in 2006.

2 Derrida comments (17) that he could have devoted his whole lecture to this issue of recording technologies and their role within archives, but sadly does not explore them further. David Bell also picks up on this relationship between recording technologies and archives at the end of the nineteenth century in his own analysis of Derrida's “Archive Fever”, and explores the significance of the phonograph and cinematograph in this context (148–61). See also Cadava (97–99) for more on the relationship between photography and the unconscious.

3 Foster identifies a comparable series of paradoxes in contemporary archival art. He argues that our networked world is both connected and disconnected, and that archival art can mimic that paradoxical appearance in an order that seems both incoherent and systematic (22).