As soon as photography became viable for mass reproduction in the 1850s, the medium was embraced by book publishers to illustrate printed texts. This section focuses on books in the collections in which photography played an innovative or leading role since the first decades of its invention.
The Getty Library holds approximately 800 books illustrated with original photographs, beginning with sources for the study of art history such as photo-reproductions of Rembrandt’s paintings, or the architecture of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. About 80 books in Special Collections are part of the Photography incunabula collection, a virtual collection of early photographically illustrated books (ca. 1850s-1870s) in which salt paper or albumen prints were manually pasted in to illustrate the text. Viewed as accurate and objective visual records, photographs contributed to a cultural shift in the dissemination of knowledge. Books such as Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard’s Album photographique de l’artiste et de l’amateur and Plans and photographs of Stonehenge and of Turusachan in the Island of Lewis were released to showcase the potential of photography to document and study art and archaeology or to provide global surveys of historic monuments. Scientific discoveries could be documented with photographs taken through a microscope, such as Photo-micrographs of the Mosquitoes, and hard-to-capture details, such as the anatomy of facial expressions in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
At the turn of the 20th century, improved photomechanical processes allowed for the full integration of images and text on the pages during printing, leading to new printed media genres which are still thriving today: the illustrated magazine, the photobook, and the photo-based artist’s book.
Illustrated magazines, where photography took precedence over text on the page emerged internationally in popular series during the 1930s. Important examples of this genre include the German AIZ (Arbeiter-illustrierte Zeitung), the French Vu, and the Soviet USSR in construction (in Russian and English). Additionally, there are many post-WWII avant-garde magazines which focus on photography as an art form or as an aid for conceptual, performance or land art, such as the Japanese Provoke, the Los-Angeles based Semina, and the rare (East) German underground magazine Schaden, which used photography in a highly creative intermedia context.
A selection of about 500 photobooks ranges from the late 1800s to the present. International in scope, this collection covers photobooks about art and society in several languages (including Dutch, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish) with its focus currently expanding from Europe and North America to Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Photo-based artists’ books present a broad variety of formats, styles, and languages, from the minimalist books made by Ed Ruscha in the 1960s to elaborate three-dimensional or highly interactive works. Recent highlights from the collection include Thomas Sauvin’s Xian, in which repurposed family shots from discarded Chinese albums, are rearranged in elaborate paper receptacles, thus acquiring new meaning; and Dayanita Singh’s interactive Pothi Box, holding black-and-white photographs of stacks of paper files and archival records found in Indian storage rooms, creating an engaging and meditative look at memory and history.
Image: Joseph Janvier Woodward (American, 1833-1884). Mosquito from Photo-micrographs of the Mosquito, &C. [Washington, D.C.]: Army Medical Museum [1872]. Albumen print. Getty Research Institute, 84-B25678.