Photobook Conversations #5 | Daniel Boetker-Smith: “The best photobooks of the next 25 years will not come from Europe or North America”
Photobook Conversations is edited by Ana Casas Broda (Hydra + Fotografía), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and Duncan Wooldridge (Manchester Metropolitan University). Sitting alongside the earlier Writer Conversations (1000 Words, 2023), edited by Lucy Soutter and Duncan Wooldridge, and Curator Conversations (1000 Words, 2021), edited by Tim Clark, it completes the series exploring the ways our understanding and experience of photography is mediated through exhibitions, writing and publishing.
Daniel Boetker-Smith | Photobook Conversations #5 | 16 Jan 2025
Daniel Boetker-Smith is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, Australia, and a curator, educator, writer, publisher, and photographer. He is the Founder of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive and regularly speaks at festivals and symposia internationally on the subject of photobooks, photographic publishing and self-publishing in the Asia-Pacific area. Boetker-Smith has previously taught and guest lectured for nearly 20 years at universities and institutions in Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK and US.
What were the encounters which started your relationship with photobooks?
In my last year of high school, I had a photography teacher who was a bit of a loose cannon pedagogically speaking, and also fancied himself as a jazz aficionado. He had shelves stuffed full of photography books in his office – classics by Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but also obscure Japanese photobooks he’d collected on his travels. I don’t recall ever having any formal classes, but just remember looking at photobooks for hours. The teacher would smoke his pipe and play a Charles Mingus cassette tape loudly over and over again whilst I ransacked his shelves. He would shout over the music about structure, rhythm, tempo, and pattern in images and music, though I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying I trace my 30-year photobook obsession back to those days.
The second important encounter happened over a decade later, in 2001, when W.G. Sebald’s book Austerltiz was released. I was in my final year at university, and I had already read Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995) a couple of years earlier. I had been enthralled by Sebald’s weaving of interconnected stories and meandering reflections that placed me in the middle of his experiences rather than just as a “reader”. I had read Rings of Saturn when I had been travelling in Australia and had been on a personal quest to meet my father for the first time. So, for obvious reasons, I felt a strong connection to Sebald’s interspersing of photographs and text as a way of dealing with the past, memories and their fragmentary and non-linear nature. I became magnetically drawn to books that used digression as a mode of storytelling. Sebald created a space for me to embrace disjointedness as a valid way to construct and explore narrative, and to see the world. Since then I have sought out photobooks that utilise such strategies in order to present their tales. I enjoy their disruptiveness, poetic and anarchic quality, and essentially that is all I ever write about.
At this time, around 2001, I was looking at photobooks like Droit de Regards (originally published in 1985 in French, and later in English) by Belgian photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, the seminal In Flagrante by Chris Killip (1988) and Rinko Kawauchi’s two books published by Little More, titled Hanabi and Utatane (both 2001). It seems now, on reflection, that 2001 was a perfect storm in which a tsunami of elements from literature and photobooks coalesced in front of me in the very moment in which I was ready to absorb them. These photobooks all seemed to apply (in visual form) the very concepts I had found enthralling in Sebald – an ability to resist and deviate from a traditional model of storytelling; to eschew neat, teleological narratives. These publications cemented my obsession with photobooks, formed the basis of my MA thesis that I completed the following year and represented the starting point of my photobook collection/obsession.
How do you like to work with people?
I find it hard to categorise what I do, and therefore how I work with people is difficult to explain. I have published books but don’t consider myself a publisher; I have helped hundreds of people with their photographic projects and their books but don’t consider myself an editor or designer; I have curated exhibitions large and small but don’t consider myself a curator; I have taught photography and art for 20 years but don’t consider myself a teacher; and I often write about photography but don’t consider myself a writer.
I still actually think of myself as a photographer, though I rarely make photographs anymore. I think I unconsciously approach everything I do as a photographer – one who also writes, publishes, curates, and teaches. So, to dig into that and return to the question, I would suppose that this base informs how I work with people. I come at any collaboration I do with a photographer with a sense of being “one of them”, not as someone who sits in a position of power as the Dean of a College, a Gallery Director or publisher.
This background is evident when I’m working with photographers, mostly students or in workshops and masterclasses. It’s very easy for me to pick out the images that are working – to identify the photographs that are benefiting or progressing the broader narrative or theme, and the ones that aren’t good enough. It’s simply a case, for me, of getting a sense of the background, the intent and the aspirations of the photographer (and the images) and then putting myself in the position of the photographer, as if it were my own project, to make decisions about the direction I think it needs to go, and how best it could be manifested as a book or exhibition.
One of the key elements of making an edit of a book is retaining a physicality to the process – printing out all the images, at all different sizes, sticking them in books or on the wall, printing and binding a dummy, and sitting with these various incarnations always leads to good decisions. The other important element is spending time with the photographer in my library of books. At the early stages of thinking about a book, there’s nothing more useful than sitting in a room of thousands of photobooks. This process starts with aimless looking, random conversations and is then followed by frenzied trains of connected thought, which leads to refinement, inspiration, clarity, and purpose for the book yet to be made.
I get the most enjoyment out of working with emerging photographers. After 20 years of teaching, I never became tired or lost the passion for looking at new work. Inevitably, most of my teaching focused around photobooks, and I always found collaborating with students on making their photobooks thoroughly enjoyable. Now, as Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), I get the chance to work in a more informal way with emerging photographers, without my teacher’s hat on. I am constantly reaching out to people to ask them to show me their work. Spending time talking through an emerging photographer’s work in-depth, and discussing how they can improve and move forward and getting excited about how it could look in book or exhibition form is a perfect day for me.
What is the public for a photobook? Who do you think of as your audience?
As most of my interactions with photobooks is as a collector, a writer and an educator, I would like to approach this question differently. I think the audience is the one with the responsibility, and here I am referring specifically to US and European audiences. Given that the focus of the photobook ecosystem in North America and Europe, it is easy for those audiences to be complacent, and only engage with the books that are placed “in front of them”. One only needs to look at the ‘Best of’ booklists in PhotoEye or LensCulture or The Guardian etc., it is essentially a closed circle. There is an urgent need to turn the attention to Asia, to Africa and to South America. Some European publishers and collectors are already doing this to a small degree, however having a small number of gatekeepers isn’t enough. The photobook world needs to recognise and reflect on its biases and inclinations. The best photobooks of the next 25 years will not come from Europe or North America, they will come from places like Indonesia, Nigeria and Brazil. And they will come from photographers who have vital and important stories to tell.
For someone publishing a book in 2025, the best way to think about photobooks is that the audience is entirely different for each book, and that you have to almost start from zero each time. An audience can’t be conceived of until the final book is done and in your hands. Make a book as best you can within your budget, and as close to what you imagined at the start – as close to the idea of the book that got you excited enough about to want to make a book in the first place. Then once the book is done, and you understand what it is you’ve made, start thinking laterally about who the audience could be. For your first photobook, trying to make something with a preconceived audience in mind is a recipe for disaster.
Part of my work here in Australia over the past 15 years has been to build a community of photobook makers and to work with others to grow the audience of those who buy photobooks. When I became the Dean at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, I made sure that photobooks were a central part of the curriculum for both BA and MA students. Now, the students that I taught 10-15 years ago are themselves teaching, so inevitably the “bug” has spread. Most colleges in Australia now have some sort of photobook course. I also ran (with Heidi Romano) the Photobook Melbourne festival in 2015, and have been involved with organising and curating major photobook events at festivals and in national art institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
I have also on many occasions ran events large and small with Justine Ellis and Dan Rule from Perimeter Books, Australia’s unofficial epicentre of photobook publishing. Perimeter produce up to 15 books per year, distribute a long list of international publishers to book shops all over Australia and New Zealand, attend fairs across the world and regularly organise photo and art book events, launches and fairs. Their passion and friendship have been a big influence for me over the last decade, and they have built up a massive community here through their commitment and energy.
In 2021, I co-curated a major exhibition here at the Museum of Australian Photography, and it featured a number of internationally recognised “photobook” names, including Mathieu Asselin, Broomberg & Chanarin, Cristina De Middel, Laura El-Tantawy, Yoshikatsu Fujii, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Zhang Kechun, Dana Lixenberg, Max Pinckers and Alec Soth, alongside Australian photographers Ashley Gilbertson, Raphaela Rosella, and James Tylor. Though this exhibition wasn’t about photobooks per se, it was, for me, an added bonus to create a platform to introduce an Australian audience to some of the most important international photobooks of the past decade or so.
How important is it for photobooks to reach other continents?
Of course, it’s vital to the future of the photobook that we push for and embrace diversity and access. I would again rephrase the question however, given that this book of conversations and responses will, I imagine, have a predominance of European readers. I would instead ask how important is it for you (the reader) to seek out books from other continents? I would say that it is your absolute responsibility.
European photobooks, though publishers will admit times are tough, at least have a readymade market on their doorstep, with a glut of festivals, galleries and fairs, and geographic accessibility. The issue for photobook makers and publishers from the Asia-Pacific region (and the same is true for South America and Africa) is getting their books in front of a European or American audience, where most of the buying happens, where most of the “hype” is, via competitions, awards and prizes. A small European bookshop, for example, will not survive through charitable gestures supporting smaller publishers located in Manila or Taipei or Auckland. A healthy and profitable bookshop needs to stock books by photographers people already know; as a result most of the bookshops in Europe sell the same or similar titles. Therefore, it is the audience that needs to educate themselves about photographers, photobooks and publishers from other regions.
The opportunity to address this is threefold. At fairs and festivals, prior to their visit, audiences should research which publishers are present from other continents and support them if they can by buying a book. The cost of freighting books across the globe means the margins for these publishers are tiny. The more they can offload and not cart back home, the better. Another way for photobook buyers and collectors to assist is to use the internet smarter, follow smaller independent publishers, festivals and fairs in other countries, and be aware of newly released books that way. The final way is, when traveling, to find and approach the local photobook shops, events and networks, and see who is doing what. Often, if you seek people out and meet with them, they will point you in the right direction to get a sense of what’s happening in photography in that country. These three things mean more exposure for lesser-known publishers and photographers, and eventually this can lead to a more sustainable market internationally for those from Asia-Pacific, South America and Africa.
I try to do my part through my writing, in that whenever I am asked to feature or review new photobooks by a European or American magazine or website, I will only ever write about photographers and photobooks from the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing attention to these photobooks on an international platform might not translate directly to sales, but the hope is that a reader takes note and is made aware of other things happening elsewhere in the world, and uses this information to start to explore further.
How do you attempt to address sustainability in publishing?
I am not sure the sector can talk about sustainability in a cohesive way, as it’s so different in each country. In our little corner of the world, we do what we can, but, in the broader scheme, we are at the whim of larger, cut-throat industries and costs controlling import, export, paper, printing, freight and taxes that are all connected to the larger global economy and currencies. Most publishers print overseas (in Asia and Europe), making it pretty difficult to claim any sort of “green” practices.
Paper is no longer made in Australia at all (the last mill closed in 2023) so we have a huge logging industry that produces material that gets sent overseas, and then all the paper for book printing needs to be imported back into the country. This convoluted process is incredibly expensive, making it practically impossible to produce offset printed photobooks here at any reasonable price. The reality is that printing books in conservative edition sizes, ensuring that there is a market for each book, and working in collaboration with other publishers and distributors is the best that can be done currently.
What is the place of language and writing in a book of photographs?
I am firm believer that photobooks and literature are interconnected. As I mentioned, in response to the first question, my obsession with photobooks came from a kind-of literary realisation. Over years of teaching, I have often tried to make it clear to students that literature can be a source of inspiration and ideas for photographers, and that the best writers can provide road signs for how to think differently about how we deal with visual narratives.
Because of this, I often see and look for literary influences in photobooks, not just in their subject matter, but in the way they are constructed or use storytelling devices. I think photographers can learn so much from literature, not just classics by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust or Sebald, but more recently Rachel Cusk, Maria Stepanova and Karl Ove Knausgård, as well as others who tell stories in a way that connect with images, and can perhaps inspire photographers to take risks with their storytelling.
I would recommend all photographers be playful and experiment with text and writing. It doesn’t necessarily need to end up in their photobook, and maybe no one else ever sees it, but the routine and the frustration and the pain of writing down what you are thinking is an immensely valuable one. I have learnt so much about photography from writing. It’s the only way I am able to clarify my responses to images.
Who have been the models or templates for your own activities?
My activities regarding photobooks have developed organically and simply out of a love and passion for the medium. My starting point for a more professional and community-oriented engagement with photobooks was when I established the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive in 2013. I had been back in Australia for three years and was decidedly frustrated at the focus on European and American photography and photobooks that I found here. I was so much more interested to see what was happening in this region. Having visited a few photography festivals in Asia, I had seen first-hand the energy and talent evident in the work being presented. From this came the desire to grow and push the awareness of the photographic community in this part of the world, and to nurture young talent. I wanted to play my part.
The idea for the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive came out of seeing the brilliant work that Larissa Leclair was doing in the US (Indie Photobook Library) and Bruno Ceschel was doing in UK (Self Publish, Be Happy), and wanting to take it one step further, not just by collecting books but actively and physically sharing them with new audiences. Different to the Indie Photobook Library or Self Publish, Be Happy, the Archive was never intended to be static. The goal from the outset was to get the books seen by audiences in different locations, so I was very clear in our manifesto that any books submitted to the Archive would travel to festivals around Asia and the world. With this promise, in 2013 I started attending more festivals and events, taking submissions and buying books. I would take a suitcase or two of books from the Archive, and set up a space provided by the festival to show these books. It was a condition from the start that we didn’t sell books, as the Archive was never set up as a “business”. Often photographers at these festivals (in India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and more) were not in a position to donate a copy of their book to the Archive, so I would buy it instead. The Archive is probably 60% donated books and 40% books purchased by me.
At the start in 2013, there were very few photography festivals and absolutely no photobook related events in the Asia Pacific region. Chobi Mela and Angkor were the only two main festivals, and didn’t have a photobook element at this stage. But this soon began to change, and now there are photography festivals in most countries in Asia, and most have a photobook fair included. Alongside this, there are many collectives and spaces for photography communities to come together to share and support each other across the Asia-Pacific region. As I said, Isabella Capezio (who runs the Archive with me) and I attended festivals all over Asia between 2013-18, we would curate a display of books that were simply for browsing, and we provided photographer contact information for people to then go buy the books directly from the artists. We attended events in different places in Asia, and early on we were also invited to manage the photobook activities of a few festivals in the region, running reviews, book-making workshops, talks and so on.
As the reputation of the Archive grew we started doing pop-up events of Asia-Pacific photobooks even more broadly, in the UK (at The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop), and at photography festivals in Europe (Latvia, Dublin and Landskrona), and all over the US. The books that people submitted certainly clocked up a lot of miles.
As time passed a lot more festivals had emerged across the Asia-Pacific region, and a lot of these events started running their own photobook fairs and developing their own collections and libraries, so the need for the Archive to actively travel became reduced, and the number of submissions we were getting also dropped off. Just before Covid-19, I stopped needing to collaborate with festivals and fairs as most of them now had their own photobook events and spaces to house their own collections. The Archive served its purpose at the time, and I am happy that we played a small part in the early days of turning the focus on to photobooks in this part of the world.
From the beginning we had a physical space for the Archive in Melbourne that was open to the public and managed by volunteers. This was a very important part of the jigsaw in the early days. Not only were the books travelling all over the world, they also were on display here in Melbourne. The Archive still has a public-facing space, is still open and we still have photographers, student groups and international visitors accessing the Archive, doing research and looking for inspiration. It’s still a free and accessible resource.
What would make a better photobook ecosystem?
I would like to think that in the coming decade the attention of the photobook and photography world will move away from North America and Europe and will recentre itself in other places – in Asia, South America and Africa. As I previously started to discuss, the photobook network in the Asia-Pacific region has developed over the last 15 years, and today there are dozens of events of all sizes across a range of countries. It has become a positive space, though not without challenges and limitations. With the rise in art fairs, photobook fairs and photography festivals in the Asia-Pacific region, European publishers are becoming more aware of the wealth of talent here. There are, each year, more and more books being published featuring non-European and non-American photographers. The difficulty and challenges for the ecosystem is at the ground level and is simple economics; this is where people like Jessica Lim (Angkor Photo Festival), Shahidul Alam (Chobi Mela), Gwen Lee (Singapore International Photography Festival), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and other even smaller organisations and collectives in other countries come in and are doing amazing work. These sort of initiatives and organisations need the support of the broader international photobook world. This is true also for South America and Africa. There are smaller groups, collectives and organisations that need the support of their European and North American counterparts.
With what is happening politically, it’s pretty clear the world global economy is going to struggle in the coming years, so I do fear for book sales, especially for smaller publishers who work with tight margins, and with emerging artists without an established following. I firmly believe North American and European audiences need to keep pushing themselves to look outside of the photographers and publishers in their own countries. There are such rich and amazing stories being told in all parts of the world, and they need to be sought out beyond the shelves of their local book shop or book fair.
I find it a conundrum that the connectivity of the art world and the photobook community seems to keep expanding and improving, while at the same time, our political leaders and the majority of our voting populations become more insular and xenophobic. It feels like photography and photobooks, and the diversity of stories they tell, will become even more vital in coming years.♦
Further interviews in the Photobook Conversations series can be read here
Images:
1-Daniel Boetker-Smith © Mia Mala McDonald
2>3-Cover and spread from Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits (Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, 2024)
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