Books on Books by Errata Editions
Because some photographers believe that photography is made to be seen in books, and because most photography prints are priced too high for mere mortals, an increasing number of photography fans are turning to books.
These limited-edition books, beautifully laid out on high-quality paper, and sometimes signed by the artist, are becoming art objects as much as the prints themselves. A few of them acquire an almost magical status. Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844) seems like a kind of grimoire containing spells granting its reader a new way to view and capture the world. But all this has a price: on sites like Photo-Eye and eBay, and in auction houses, the prices of rare photography books are soaring.
Noticing this trend, and the fact that re-editions of books tend to quickly become collector’s items, Valérie Sonnenthal, Jeffrey Ladd and Ed Grazda founded the publishing house, Errata, and the Books on Books project, a collection of illustrated studies of photography books, somewhere between a facsimile and a reissue, enhanced with commentaries.
For $40, in a 25 x 17cm format, there are classics like Eugène Atget’s Photographe de Paris and Walker Evans’ American Photographs, but also rarities like Zdenek Tmej’s Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness, a work of photojournalism taken inside Nazi labor camps in Poland; Nobuyoshi Araki’s The Banquet, in which the photographer documents, in color close-ups, the meals he shared with his wife in the month leading up to her death; Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet; and Sophie Ristelhueber’s Fait
Antoine Soubrier
