On Photobooks

MEG member Tim Hyde is both a fine art photographer and a collector of fine art photography. In another installment in his series on collecting, Tim explains why investing in photography books is a good way to get started.

One way to begin a photography collection is to buy photography books. "Photobooks" are less expensive than prints, easier to store, easier to “show and tell,” and allow a collector to experience a larger measure of an artist’s work. 

House Hunting by Todd Hido

They also are a great way to begin serious collecting. You can spend a few tens of dollars on an artist’s monograph and both acquire something of growing value AND get better sense of what it is like to live with a particular photographer.  Then, when you are more certain of your affection for a body of work (and perhaps when you can better afford it) you can buy one of the artist's photographic prints.

Photobooks have taken off in recent years as fine art collectibles.  Today, auction houses list them along with photographic prints, and there are many specialty booksellers—both online and bricks and mortar bookshops—that focus primarily on photobooks. As a rule, the editions are so small—in the low thousands or in many cases, hundreds—that their rarity is a given.

I bought a copy of Todd Hido’s House Hunting a few years ago when it was first published.  He was a new artist I had never heard of, but the book’s publisher was Nazraeli, a highly-regarded fine-art press.  I loved the work, so I picked it up for about a $100. Today, if you can find it, it would cost almost $1,000.

There are a couple lessons in this example.  Books published by known fine-art publishers, such as Nazraeli or Aperture or Twin Palms (and there are plenty of others), are quality productions. They are selected by keen and educated eyes and are generally published in small numbers.  Each of these is important in predicting how a photobook’s investment value might grow.

Here are a few rules about collecting books:

·      Signed books are always more valuable than unsigned, and if they are dated in the year they are published, all the better. Inscribed and signed is best of all.

·      As with all rare books, “price clipping” (cutting off the price of the book) will depress the value, as will any kind of “remaindering” marks.

·      First edition means everything (though one can pay a small fortune for second or even third edition of a few of Ed Ruscha’s early books or Robert Frank’s The Americans, so there are exceptions).

Coming soon in a new blog post – information about small presses and self-publishing.