WOMEN and the PHOTOBOOK

Russet Lederman, writer, editor, and photobook collector living in New York City, shares how Women and the Photobook pop-up library came about, followed by a visitor review by photographer, writer and educator Colin Pantall who came to Oxford on a day trip from Bath.

Russet Lederman introduces the project…

In October 2022, Colin Pantall invited me to give a presentation to his students at Falmouth University on What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, an anthology on women’s photobooks that I co-edited with Olga Yatskevich under our non-profit imprint 10x10 Photobooks. The lecture was followed a few weeks later by his students sharing with me their collaborative creative briefs. I was pleasantly surprised to see how What They Saw inspired them and spurred them to theoretically create a potential project on photobooks by women that would use the resources within their local communities. After the presentations, they were so excited and asked if they could put theory into practice and realize their creative brief into a full-fledged reading room exhibition. Both Colin and I were encouraging, and thus the "Women and the Photobook” pop-up reading rooms were born!

Philippa James, Emma Davies and Rolf Kraehenbuel are the masterminds behind "Women and the Photobook," which are two reading room installations that are part of Photo Oxford. The first reading room happened on Saturday, 15 April at the Bodleian Library and allowed the incredible holdings of the Bodleian to be viewed by the public in a guided tour. The second installation will run from 25 to 29 April at The Old Fire Station and will be a hands-on sharing of books by women. Both reading rooms are inspired by What They Saw but have developed into wonderful reflections of the books by women found in libraries and collections within Oxford. As a non-profit with a mission to share photobooks with the global community, "Women and the Photobook" perfectly aligns with 10x10 Photobooks' objectives. Encouraging students like Philippa, Emma and Rolf to create projects that support their local community while sharing forgotten or hard to find photobooks encapsulates the best of what we seek to accomplish!

Colin Pantall shares his experience of visiting Women and the Photobook…

Approaching the Bodleian Weston library in Oxford on sunny Saturday afternoon in April, you pass through a typical Oxford scene, masses of tourists mix with groups of Morris dancers in town for the Oxford folk festival, all long socks and jingling bells, colleges touting for the tourist pounds with their come-and-have-a-look-at -our-quad-for-a-fiver signs. 

Then you hit the library, the frenetic clash of tourism and college life subsides, and you spot a table laden with photobooks and the welcoming face of Philippa James, the organiser (with Emma Davies and Rolf Krahenbuehl) of the first UK “Women and the Photobook” pop-up reading room.

The first part of the reading room is an open access area where shelves of books, including the Photobooks by Women catalogue, were available to view and read. The range of titles counter the idea that there was one kind of photobook, or one subject area particular to women.

Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua hits the more photojournalistic end of the spectrum with her immersive and very dangerous approach to photographing the Nicaraguan Revolution and linking to key photo-texts such as Alice Seeley-Harris’ The Camera and the Congo Crime, a 1906 pamphlet that doesn’t appear in any other photobook history, but was part of the most successful photography-based campaign ever made.

In Somnyama Ngonyama ( "Hail The Dark Lioness") South African photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi manipulates traditional aesthetics to create more than 80 self-portraits addressing the politics of race and representation.

There are personal texts such as Abigail Heyman’s Growing up Female, as well as books where collage is a tool for reconfiguring the past. Justine Kurland’s Scumb Manifesto is a pointed but playful recontextualization of the canon of male photobooks, with some of the classics of photobook history cut up to make Kurland’s unique collages, the Scumb of the title standing for Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books.

Jenny Rova’s I would also like to be is another type of collage, but here Rova sticks pictures of her own face over the face of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend in a book fitting its subtitle A work on jealousy.

For the second stage of the reading room, we are led up a back stairway, through a row of corridors to a private reading room in which a selection of rare books from the library’s collection are on display. 

Curated by Philippa (whose boundless energy went a long way to ensuring these books were shown) and Phillip Roberts (the Bodleian Libraries Curator of Photography), these works further expanded the idea of what a photobook could be.

 Julia Schlosser’s cyanotype image of her recently deceased cat, Alex, is the simplest work on display, a single life-sized page folded to make a small zine. The most complex is First You Have to Prove it to Me by Veronika Schapers, a multi-layered book that looks at the variety of conspiracy theories surrounding Covid.

All the books were available to touch except for Julie Margaret Cameron’s Idyll of the Kings, a large format album of Cameron’s defining images, complete with all tipped in prints exhibiting the beautiful flaws of Cameron’s process.

Other books ranged from original editions of Diane Arbus’ Aperture Monograph, Sirkka Liisa Kontinnen’s Byker, and Margaret Bourke-White’s fascinating book on the Soviet Union in the 1920s, a book where the text begins with an insight into the visa-procurement procedure.

For the closed reading room, time was limited to 30 minutes to allow as many people as possible to view. It was not enough, but anyone who wants more time with the books can always visit the collections independently, fulfilling yet another of the Women in Photobooks’ brief. Not only was the idea of what a photobook can be expanded, new audiences both for photobooks and the library’s collection were also found in what was the first UK Women and the Photobook reading rooms.

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NEXT EVENT

You are invited to curl up with a coffee and a photobook at the next event of Women and the Photobook here:

THE OLD FIRE STATION: View event

25 - 29 APRIL 2023

10:00 – 16:00

Women and the Photobook is a non-profit organisation who aim to tour annually. If you are interested in submitting a photobook to their library please email: hello@philippajames.net

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Some featured titles are available to buy at Blackwell's Oxford, the Photo Oxford Festival official Festival bookseller.

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Russet Lederman, writer, editor, and photobook collector living in New York City. She is the Co-Founder of 10x10 Photobooks, a non-profit organisation that hosts ongoing projects highlighting photobooks. Visit the website

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer, educator, and mentor living in Bath UK

Philippa James is in her final year of MA in photography and author of 100 Women of Oxford

Emma Davies is a photographer, educator, and author. She is currently studying MA photography

Rolf Kraehenbuel is studying MA in photography at Falmouth University

This event was sponsored by A YEAR WITH MY CAMERA