[17Feb22] There is a good essay on photobooks by Gerry Badger in his The Pleasures of Good Photographs (2010). And Badger is co-author, with Martin Parr, of probably the seminal, serial work on the subject The Photobook: A History Volumes I-III (2004-2014). In his notes to the essay, Badger alerts us to two others,
we were beaten into print by two books by Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (New York: PPP Editions, in association with Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001), and The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present (Gothenburg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center, 2004). Badger, 2010, p.233
They both sell at high prices, the first starting at £130 at Thrift Books, the second around half that (though I suppose that's not much more than the going rate for one of the Parr and Badger set). Both are in the V&A library. Has that reopened?
The first such book I bought was Taschen's Photographers A-Z (Koetzle, 2011): I didn't realise is was about photobooks when I bought it.
A recent addition to the genre is Lederman & Yatskevich's What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women (2021).
My first aim is to find out the contents of the Roth books then create list of all the photobooks books that appear in these compendiums.
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