Five Artist-Publishers Who Are Changing the Photobook Landscape
MoMA’s annual celebration of photobooks returns...with a twist.
Mar 27, 2024
In late 2021, MoMA launched an annual celebration of the photobook. Every year, the Museum’s photography curators and colleagues from the Archives, Library, and Research Collections meet to exchange, admire, and discuss new photobooks. We’ve noticed that some of the most intriguing titles were initiated not by major publishing imprints, but by artists themselves. Some photographers had taken into their own hands the manner in which their images would appear on the page. For others it seemed that the inspiration emerged from an impulse to share others’ work, or to create something, as Jason Fulford put it, “that we wanted on our own bookshelves.” We were curious: What were the links between their roles as publishers and their own artistic practices?
For this edition of our photobooks celebration, which covers the calendar year 2023, we’re excited to feature new titles from five artist-publishers who are bringing fresh energy and perspectives to the growing field of photobook making. These books are now part of our Library collection, and are also available for purchase at the MoMA Design Store. Here, each of the five publishers shares how they got started, and how their identities as artists impact the way they make photobooks.
—Lucy Gallun, Curator, Department of Photography
Jason Fulford, J&L Books
Back in 1999 I was hitchhiking around the Southwest. When I passed through Santa Fe, I knocked on Jack Woody’s door. Lots of his beautiful Twin Palms books were on my shelves back at home. When I showed him some of my pictures, hoping he would publish them, he said, “You should publish this yourself.” It was a blessing in disguise. He introduced me to a printer in Korea, and a year later 1,000 books were delivered to my front door. My friend Leanne Shapton saw the book and said, “Let’s start a publishing company!” We began by publishing the work of our friends—books that no one else would make at the time, and that we wanted on our own bookshelves. As the books filtered out into the world, strangers started sending submissions. Now the backlist has around 50 titles, including photography, drawing, fiction, nonfiction, and video.
I remember when I first learned that pictures can speak to each other—that the meaning of a picture changes in different contexts. Suddenly making pictures and editing them became, really, two separate activities, each as creative, surprising, and important as the other. I love this thing Flannery O’Connor said: “I don’t know what I think until I read what I’ve written.” I work this way with my own pictures, and also when editing the work of another artist. You lay it all out and start to play and wait for the surprises. The meanings emerge organically, and eventually the picture relationships are fixed on a page.
My wife, Tamara Shopsin, introduced me to the screenprints of Corita Kent, aka Sister Corita, who was an artist, teacher, and nun in Los Angeles from the 1930s until the late ’60s, when she left the church and moved to Boston. Tamara had seen Corita’s prints in an exhibition that Julie Ault organized, called Macho Man Tell It To My Heart. We became huge fans of everything we could find about Corita—her intense curiosity, her methods of recontextualizing pop culture into uplifting messages and abstract art, her commitment to social issues, her aesthetics, the way she championed the amateur, her ideas for teaching exercises. All of her work carries a spirit of joy, but also has a sharp edge of intellect.
I started working Corita’s work into my teaching. Two years ago, one of my former students, Jordan Weitzman, said he’d found a mention of an archive containing 15,000 color slides that Corita had made. His research led him to Julie Ault, and the three of us asked the Corita Art Center, which owns the images, if we could look through them and make a book. Julie, Jordan, and I spent a year looking, talking, and thinking about the work, until we had a final edit of 318 pictures. We pulled quotes, in Corita’s voice, from old interviews and writings, and stitched them together through the image sequence. Olivian Cha from the Corita Art Center wrote a short essay. In the end, we hope the book works on many levels—as pure visual pleasure, inspiring philosophy, historical documentation, and an introduction to a great artist.
La luz también viaja by Genesis Báez, 2022
Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Matarile Ediciones
I started at Dashwood Books, a store specializing in art books, particularly photography. At a certain point I realized that by working there I had access to a platform, and that if I budgeted things right, I would be able to start a small publishing company. It was obvious to me that the focus for the publishing company was going to be artists who are immigrants or part of a recent diaspora. As an immigrant myself, I understood that our experiences are quite particular, and a place to gather those voices felt important.
I had gone to film school back in Mexico, so I came to art through film. Film language has informed my work, both as a photographer and as an editor: I understand how meaning is created with the accumulation and juxtaposition of images. It’s hard to define how much publishing and my art practice have influenced each other because they are so intertwined. I’m constantly using skills from one in the other.
Pax tecum Filomena: Una canción para ti by Muriel Hasbun, 2023
I enjoy working with other artists and am often thinking about how I would like me and my work to be treated by a publisher. I do think being an artist gives you a particular perspective on working with artists. I understand the emotional charge that one’s work carries, and I am thankful that artists share with me such a vulnerable and delicate part of themselves.
I did not know Genesis Baez or Muriel Hasbun before making their books. I approached Genesis because there was something about her work that I wanted to see in book form. Her work combines gestural portraits in which she collaborates with Puerto Rican women, pictures of shattered mirrors in various landscapes, and pictures of environments. There is often an arresting, blinding light in them. One idea that I had was having the page be black, so that the beams of light in her pictures would pop. Genesis’s work is evocative and awe-inducing, and I wanted the book to have the same effect: I wanted the viewer to be taken on a journey.
Elisabeth Sherman, who curated Muriel’s survey at the International Center for Photography, approached me to see if I might be interested in making a zine of Muriel’s work for the exhibition. The lead time was short, but I was so moved by the work that I couldn’t say no. Muriel’s work is challenging: it’s about process and trauma. After Muriel and I talked, we decided to focus on work that was not part of the exhibition but that was perfect for a zine format: the story of her cousin Janet, later known as Commandant Filomena. She joined the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), the military branch of the communist Workers’ Revolutionary Party, during the Salvadoran Civil War. Eventually she was apprehended by the government, tortured, and killed. In the zine, Muriel both tells a brief story of her relationship to her cousin, to her family, and to the country she inhabited. I often opt out of using text, but in this case it felt like the text was needed to fully get this story across.
Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell, Black Mass Publishing
Kwamé Sorrell: My relationship with publishing started during my time as an intern at powerHouse Books in DUMBO, Brooklyn, while I was in college. From there I worked at a small print shop in New Jersey for a few years, where I ran and operated a digital offset printer. After that I had turned my back on publishing until Yusuf asked me to join him in building BMP. That was in 2018–19.
Yusuf Hassan: Zines led me to the world of publishing. I was inspired by their format and unfiltered presentation; nothing stood in the way of what you wanted to say, and that was really rejuvenating for me. In 2018, the first project I published was a book project with contributions from friends and artists called Project BlackMass that included everything from poetry to photography.
KS: Yusuf and I have different working styles when it comes to how we approach the photobook. But both our practices are rooted in research. Personally, it often takes me a while to gather and edit information. I really value taking months, even years, to develop a body of work. Also, there are a good amount of publications that are solely my own photography. And being that I travel often, I document my comings and goings in my work.
5 piece composition by Yusuf Hassan, 2024
YH: The scope of what we’re interested in is really broad, and as a result we have many conversations. I am really drawn to improvisation, and this way of working allows for a freedom to explore areas I had no idea I was interested in. When I’m thinking about photos, I am also thinking about film, poetry, and even architecture. It’s a beautiful exchange of ideas.
KS: Since January 2022, I’ve been working on a series of periodicals titled _____ Journal. The fifth in the series, _____ Journal IV, January 2024, is the latest. The publication comprises mostly screenshots of Black folk in the media. I’m not entirely sure where this series will end, but I’ve been making an effort to place it in collecting libraries. And hopefully, as I continue to publish forthcoming installments, they will be able to stand beside one another to tell a story.
YH: 5 Piece Composition is a publication that deals with music and architecture. With this new project I am trying to push the form of the book and the way I want it to function. This new work consists of different objects—wood, paper, ink, metal, and cardboard. I am really interested in breaking how the book should operate.
_____ Journal III, January 2023 by Kwamé Sorrell, 2023
Piémanson by Vasantha Yogananthan, 2014
Vasantha Yogananthan and Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, Chose Commune
Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi: I am completely self-taught in publishing. Before founding Chose Commune, I had worked in the photography industry with my partner Vasantha Yogananthan: in galleries, museums, agencies…almost everything but publishing! But I grew up surrounded by books, and they’ve always been a huge part of my life. In 2014 we founded Chose Commune mostly out of necessity. Vasantha was struggling to publish his first series, Piémanson, because most publishers were asking him to fund the book himself. We thought we might try and do it ourselves.
That first book was a huge success and sold out in a few weeks. It was an encouraging start. But from the beginning, I wanted to publish other photographers, and over the years our range has expanded, so we now also publish books about works on paper, ceramics, and sculpture. I choose the artists and work with them on everything from editing and sequencing to producing the book and commercializing it. It’s now been 10 years and Chose Commune has evolved, but one thing that has always stuck with us is the collaborative aspect of publishing: we work with the artist, printers, copyeditors, translators—basically anyone who’s involved—with a lot of mutual respect.
Mystery Street by Vasantha Yogananthan, 2023
Vasantha Yogananthan: I always think about the book form when I am making new work. I think it has to do with storytelling, in the broad sense of the term. To tell a story in a nonlinear fashion, I need to find a flow between pictures to keep the reader hooked. Singling out your best photographs is fairly easy for a seasoned photographer, but what is harder—and more exciting—is to decipher the potential echoes between pictures. A pulsation occurs as soon as you put two pictures together. The more pictures you combine, the more thought-provoking the sequence, making the photobook an art form in itself.
As a matter of fact, I have come to understand that the contact sheet is quite crucial in my editing process. Every time I lay my contact sheets next to each other I am looking at a constellation of pictures, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. At this stage, it does not matter that the pictures appear in the order of the film, what matters is that I am already reading them as a sequence. I think the greatest painters make us see the entire world in a single picture, whereas the greatest photographers do it through a series of pictures.
VY: The thing I like the most about my book Mystery Street is its double cover: the one printed on the dust jacket and the one printed underneath on rough, uncoated construction paper. Combined, these two pictures speak about the two realities that I have experienced in New Orleans. One that is visible as soon as you start walking around the city, and another that reveals itself only over time, through human connections.
Kris Graves, Kris Graves Projects/Monolith
In 2009, just after the financial crisis, Kris Graves Projects opened as a commercial gallery. We published our first book during this time. It was oversized and very expensive to produce, and I immediately decided that the second book would be the opposite. My first three books were of my own photographs: a way to test the market without ruining anybody else. In 2015 we launched our first three artist’s books, and have been working with photographers and writers ever since. I started Monolith Editions during the early months of the pandemic to combat the underrepresentation of artists of color. Monolith works with artists in all disciplines; KGP remains photographic. The eventual goal for Monolith is to become a nonprofit organization serving the public.
I want the books we produce to make statements about our culture while also showing off the talents and masterful skill of the artists. I am very influenced by the artists we work with, and sometimes I find myself curiously envious of what they’ve been able to create. When a project is complete, I ask to see the artists’ best work along with everything they’ve made for the project. After we both decide on the amount of imagery for the book, we start laying out a sequence. Usually we make small softcover books, which are generally inexpensive to produce, pack, ship, and purchase. The next step is working with the designer, who is connected to the presses we work with overseas. There is no line between my personal work and what I publish. When I feel I’ve completed a body of work, I aim to publish it sooner rather than later, so I can move on to other projects.
Stranger Fruit by Jon Henry, second printing, 2023
This past year we worked with Jon Henry to publish his monograph Stranger Fruit. The posed “pieta-style” photographs within are of mothers holding their Black sons. The mothers stare at the viewer from dozens of states around the United States. My designer, Caleb Cail Marcus, spoke with Jon many times, and worked on a design that incorporates historically African American colorways like purple and gold; there’s a bookmark ribbon and gold edges, like in the King James Bible. I used to produce everything myself. Caleb and I have been working together since the pandemic; having an actual designer on the team gives our publications greater reach around the globe.
Stranger Fruit by Jon Henry, second printing, 2023
