Photobooks as a Way In: Teaching and Learning through the Photobook

Schools have been, and still are, one of the main driving forces behind photographic creation. Educational centres of many kinds have played a crucial role in visual culture: from the Bauhaus to the Düsseldorf School, and closer to home, the Schools of Arts and Crafts, which have been key nodes for finding and nurturing talent. In this episode we explore the role these places have played in the history of photobooks.

Featuring: Xavier Ribas (photographer and lecturer at the University of Brighton), Fosi Vegue (photographer, editor and founder of Blank Paper Escuela) and Lúa Ribeira (photographer, member of Magnum Photos).

Photos & Books: Stories of a Scopic Drive

The first podcast on photobooks in Spain

Written and hosted by Nieves Limón and Marta Martín
Produced by Fiebre Photobook
Recorded at La República Independiente de la Radio
Actividad subvencionada por @culturagob
Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU

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Photobooks cited VISIT THE LIBRARY

Yale MFA Photography 2009: We Belong Together George Awde, Dru Donovan, David La Spina, Justin Leonard, Catharine Maloney, Caitlin Price, Colin Smith, Elaine Stocki y Ka-Man Tse

Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult is an essay that Paul Graham wrote for his students on the Yale Master’s in Photography course in 2009, which was published in the graduation exhibition catalogue. Over time, it has become a widely reproduced text on websites and blogs, and has also been published in other books.

2009 Yale School of Art

XY XX Fosi Vegue

An inner courtyard faces a row of rooms where prostitutes take their clients. Out of view at an opposite window, the photographer witnesses what should remain unseen. Issues such as prostitution or pornography only become problematic when the system, or a society at the service of that system, deem them to be so. Nor would […]

2014 Dalpine

Nitrate Xavier Ribas

Like the dancing wooden table imagined by Karl Marx in Capital, all commodities are shape shifters. They appear to metamorphose. But nitrate materially changes. Its power as a substance and value as commodity lie in its capacity to change from material to immaterial state, to transform and to be transformative. Chilean nitrate is a sodium […]

2014 Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

Subida al cielo [Ascent into Heaven] Lúa Ribeira

Subida al cielo features five bodies of work by Galician photographer Lúa Ribeira made between 2016 and 2020: Subida al cielo, Las visiones, Aristócratas, La Jungla and Los afortunados [Ascent into Heaven, The Visions, Aristocrats, The Jungle and The Fortunate Ones]. In these five series, Ribeira approaches topics with a historical relation to documentary photography […]

2023 Dalpine

Agony in the Garden Lúa Ribeira

Agony in the Garden is a photographic series created by Lúa Ribeira in the surroundings of Madrid, Malaga, Granada and Almeria. Inspired by the potential of contemporary counterculture, the artist has collaborated with young people to produce images that reflect on the alienation and uncertainty of our times, giving rise to a landscape suspended in […]

2022 Dalpine

The Pencil of Nature William Henry Fox Talbot

Issued in fascicles from June 1844 through April 1846, The Pencil of Nature contained twenty-four plates, a brief text for each, and an introduction that described the history and chemical principles of Talbot’s invention. The photographs and texts proposed, with extraordinary prescience, a wide array of applications for the medium that included reproducing rare prints […]

1844 Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans

Let Us Praise For Famous Men Walker Evans

In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans set out on assignement for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published to enourmous critical acclaim. This unspairing […]

1941 Houghton Mifflin Company

Carbon Lothar Baumgarten

A site-specific work that addressed the encounters between indigenous cultures and European-based civilizations. Organized by Alma Ruiz, the installation focused on the artist’s research of the American railroad and Indian reservations. Photo documentation was later published along with eleven short stories in an artists’ book titled Carbon. In 1989 German artist Lothar Baumgarten dedicated six […]

1992 Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

Ahnung Volker Heinze

Volker Heinze’s Ahnung (Foreboding) was about Berlin in the late 1980s, when the wall was still up. Great images, shallow focus, details that are pointless to describe: a gate, a pipe’s shadow, a girl’s fingers. But really it’s not about Berlin so much as a state of mind, a point of time in the walled-off […]

1989 Verlag Dirk Nishen

The Pond John Gossage

Considered a groundbreaking book when first published in 1985, John Gossage’s The Pond remains one of the most important photobooks of the medium. As Gerry Badger, coauthor of The Photobook: A History, Volumes I and II, asserts, “Adams, Shore, Baltz–all the New Topographics photographers made great books, but none are better than The Pond.” Consisting […]

1985 Aperture

New Europe Paul Graham

New Europe confronts the Euro-utopian dream of a united continent with the screaming, uneventful banality of today and with the shadows of its past. Paul Graham’s color photographs visualize history and show its effects in everyday life, even when it is unrecognized or contested and sometimes even trivialized until it ends up as a child’s […]

1993 Cornerhouse Publications y Fotomuseum Winterthur

Candlestick Point Lewis Baltz

The images in his 1989 series Candlestick Point show fallow Californian land, where piles of rubble and waste accumulate in the middle of the prairie. Traces of technical land development–drainage channels and water dams–are visible, becoming a typically American theme: the development of a territory in the almost infinite prairie. Baltz’s photographic record of the […]

1989 Gallery Min y Aperture

Tableaux 1978-1982 Jean-Marc Bustamante

This series marked a break with traditional documentary photography, treating the photograph as a “tableau” that calls for a contemplative approach similar to that of a painting. The images typically depict peri-urban landscapes and “non-places” that avoid an explicit narrative.

1994 Kunsthalle Bern, FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon y Musee Departemental de Rochechouart

Affinités des sols ~ Soil Affinities Uriel Orlow

Affinités Des Sols | Soil Affinities explores the connections of (post) colonial history and the movement of plants for agriculture, from Aubervilliers, a northern suburb of Paris, to formerly French West Africa (Mali and Senegal). This publication and Uriel Orlow’s artistic project of the same name retrace the lines and networks of earthly connections between […]

2019 Shelter Press y Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers

Serpent River Book Carolina Caycedo

Serpent River Book is a purposely meandering collage. The book combines archival images of many different rivers with maps, poems, lyrics, satellite views, and Carolina Caycedo’s own photographs and texts on the richness of riverside life. The undulating publication can be opened, pleated, and read in many directions, and it has at times been borne […]

2017 Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Tea Coffee Cappuccino Boris Mikhailov

For the acclaimed photographer Boris Mikhailov (born 1938), a society’s most significant paradigm shifts are often most clearly perceived in the smallest of everyday transactions. For example, in a café or restaurant in the Soviet-era Ukraine, a waiter would have offered you tea or coffee?. Today, two decades after the fall of the Soviet bloc […]

2011 Walther König

Diane Arbus Diane Arbus

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-even something of a legend-among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972-along with the posthumous retrospective at […]

1972 Aperture

Ein-heit Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt is one of Germany’s most famous post-war photographers. In his out-of-print artist’s book “Ein-heit”, he traces the universal iconography of political systems and the images of humankind they project. Addressing the complex relationship between the individual and the state, he asks how we can resist the loss of individuality inherent in systems of […]

1996 Walther König

Goya. Dibujos. Solo la voluntad me sobra Francisco de Goya

In this book, readers will find an overview of Francisco de Goya’s work as a draftsman, featuring more than two hundred drawings created throughout his artistic career, ranging from those included in the Italian Sketchbook to those produced in Bordeaux, the city where he died in 1828. The authors, José Manuel Matilla and Manuela B. […]

2019 Museo Nacional del Prado

Suzi et Cetera Boris Mikhailov

In the early 1980s, before Glasnost and Perestroika, Boris Mikhailov made this series of photographs in his home town of Charkow, in the Ukraine. Mikhailov is best known for his ruthlessly honest documentation of the problems of Soviet and Russian daily life; this work, which has never been published before, is sometimes gentler.

2007 Walther König

What’s Ours Myriam Boulos

A searing, diaristic portrayal of a city and society in revolution by Magnum nominee Myriam Boulos. In her debut monograph, Myriam Boulos casts an unflinching eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. She […]

2023 Aperture

More episodes

EPISODE 0

The First Page With Cristina De Middel

EPISODE 1

What Is a Photobook? With Gonzalo Golpe and Juanjo Justicia

EPISODE 2

Histories of the Photobook and the Contemporary Photobook in Spain With Javier Ortiz-Echagüe and Celia Vega

EPISODE 3

From Image to Book With Cristóbal Hara and Ricardo Cases

EPISODE 4

Visual Research and Narrative Modes With David Jiménez, Laia Abril and Joan Fontcuberta

EPISODE 5

Telling Stories with Photographs: Editing and Sequencing With Antonio M. Xoubanova, Alex Llovet and Montse Puig

EPISODE 6

The Militancy of Publishers With Juan Valbuena and Frédérique Bangerter

EPISODE 7

Collectivity in Photography With Julián Barón, Elisa Miralles and Paco Gómez

EPISODE 8

Preserving Our Heritage: Libraries, Archives and Collections With Javier Pérez Iglesias, Ane Abalde and Carmen Dalmau

EPISODE 9

Creating Experiences through Design and Print With Alberto Salván, Jaime Narváez and José Luis Martín Montesinos

Screenwriters and presenters

Nieves Limón

Nieves Limón is Associate Professor of Foundations of Photography and Audiovisual Formats at the Faculty of Communication of the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Her teaching and research have focused on the theory and analysis of the photographic image for more than a decade. She also cultivates a continued interest in documentary audiovisual practices. She was awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize for her PhD thesis, “Photographic Self-Representation Strategies. The Case of Frida Kahlo” (2014), and has published extensively in the field of photography. Her publications, which stem from her work and research stays in various national and international institutions (including the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, Sorbonne Université in Paris, Glasgow Caledonian University, Università degli Studi Roma Tre and Charles University in Prague), can be consulted via her ORCID profile. She has also sought to build bridges between academic knowledge and its transfer to broader social contexts, taking part in projects such as “Género y figura. Reivindicando a las mujeres fotógrafas”, contributing to photobook outreach (“Mirar de cerca. El fotolibro”, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) and working on archive research or exhibition curating (Casa Azul–Frida Kahlo Museum, Sala Ricardo Ortega). She is Co-PI of the research group ComPublic (Public Communication: Power, Law and Message) at UCLM.

Marta Martín Núñez

Marta Martín Núñez is Associate Professor of Photography and Narrative at the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, where she has developed a teaching and research career focused on contemporary Spanish photography, memory and visual narratives through the critical analysis of audiovisual discourse—topics on which she has published widely. She has been a resident at Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol and has undertaken research stays at the Hasselblad Foundation (Gothenburg), Roehampton University (London), the National Library of Spain and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía through Universidad Complutense de Madrid, as well as at New York University. She has been principal investigator on several competitive research projects funded through public calls and has led the creation of the Photographic Memory Archive of the Spanish Civil War, a project that recovers, analyses and preserves photographic production published in contemporary photobooks of memory and postmemory. This work has also taken the form of the exhibition Ecos de la memoria. Fotolibros del presente at the Museu de Belles Arts de Castelló in 2023, which travelled to Barcelona in 2024 and to Montpellier in 2025, funded by the Spanish Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with Parliament and Democratic Memory. She is co-editor-in-chief of L’Atalante. Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos and director of LabCom at UJI.