Develop at The Photographers Gallery and the Joy of Photobooks
I’ve come to realize that when I talk about photobooks with emerging photographers, I’m rarely just talking about books. I’m talking about intention. About commitment. About how a body of work begins to hold together rather than drift.
This month I was invited to deliver a session for the Develop programme at The Photographers Gallery, a three year initiative supporting photographers aged 18 to 24 as they work towards a publication and public exhibition. This year’s cohort are producing a collective book, which felt like the perfect moment to slow things down and really look at what a photobook can be.
Early on in our practices, it’s easy to think of a book as somewhere to “put the pictures” once they’re finished. A container. A tidy outcome. But the longer I’ve spent with photobooks, the more I’ve understood that they are not neutral. They are experiences. They are structures. They are arguments.
Just as we choose how to frame the world with our camera, we choose how someone moves through a body of work through pages. A page turn can create anticipation. A blank spread can act like a breath. Scale changes intimacy. Sequence creates meaning. A book is choreography.
We began the session by looking at handmade books from John Blakemore’s collection. John was uncompromising about craft and attention. For him, the physical form of a book was inseparable from the photographs inside it. The weight of paper, the pacing, the restraint — these were not decorative decisions but ethical ones. Spending time with those books still steadies me. They remind me that photography doesn’t need to shout to be powerful.
From there we moved to published works including Imperial Courts by Dana Lixenberg, Sketchbook Volume Two by Aria Shahrokhshahi and The Pond by John Gossage. Each of them proposes a different way of building a project.
Lixenberg’s long term engagement with a single community is a lesson in patience and depth. Gossage shows how atmosphere can be built quietly, image by image, without over explaining. Shahrokhshahi’s sketchbook format gives permission for process and expresses its motifs through ephemera and sculpture as well as traditional photography. It also comes in the form of a newspaper which offers a more tactile experience to the viewer.
We also looked at Bread And A Dog by Natsuko Kuwahara. It’s a small, modest book pairing images of domestic life with recipes printed at the back. On the surface it’s simple, a dog (and sometimes a cat) opportunistically waiting under the table whilst a meal is eaten. The cherry on the cake (forgive the pun) is the the recipes for the meals are listed in the back. But the clarity of the idea and the consistency of tone make it deeply affecting. It’s a reminder that projects don’t need scale to matter. They need belief and a willingness to play.
What I always notice in these sessions is a shift. At the start, people often talk about individual images, which ones are “strong”, which ones “work”. By the end, the conversation has changed. We’re talking about relationships. About rhythm. About what happens between pictures. That shift, for me, is the real work.
Running sessions like this also keeps me honest. They reconnect me to the conversations I was fortunate enough to have with John, and they remind me why I care about photography in the first place. Not as content, but as practice. Not as output, but as enquiry.
I spend a lot of time talking about process, materials and access to our subject. But underpinning all of it is this idea of building work with intention. The photobook just happens to be one of the clearest ways to see that thinking made visible.
The book is never just an outcome. It’s a way of understanding what you’re trying to say.
If you would like to develop your practice and learn more, we run workshops and courses at Take It Easy Lab, check out our events page HERE.
