There’s something funny, a little stubborn even, about the thought of a small photobook press cropping up in the midst of today’s brutal media landscape. But here it is: Errata Editions, a wonderful downtown New York publishing house dedicated to reissuing historically significant photography books that have fallen out of print. Their eloquent Books on Books series features modern reproduction of the original text, page by page, word for word. Their aim is to provide students and amateur photographers a snapshot of landmark works that have become increasingly hard to get a hold of.
Of course our first thought was: why go through the trouble of publishing a book? You can, after all, see all of the images from Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet, or any shot ever taken by Walker Evans online, for free. But for Jeffrey Ladd, the photographer and writer behind Errata’s Books on Books series, the medium is the message. “It’s not just about the work, but the total package,” he writes on his blog 5B4. “And expanding the discourse on the photobook as a mode of fine art in and of itself and reopen them for study, making these treasures of the past available again, and to a new generation.” With history, context is everything.
Ladd conceived the idea for Errata Editions’ Books on Books series in 2008 with co-founders Ed Grazda and Valerie Sonnenthal. “The idea that young photographers just learning their craft couldn’t, without great effort or expense, experience what came before them was very disturbing to me,” he writes. “It begged the question of consequence: what if the greatest literature or poetry was not available for young writers to be informed by?”
The books are beautifully bound and laid out in their original sequence. Titles include Eugene Atget’s seminal Photographe de Paris, Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring, Walker Evans’ groundbreaking American Photographs, and William Klein’s bizarre magnum opus Life is Good & Good For You in New York: Trance Witness Revels. Klein’s frenzied photos of city street life in the late 50s convey a mood that echoes our own times: hurried, paranoid, the people slightly deluded and begrudgingly in the public eye. To see the images as they were originally presented on the page adds a dimension that can’t be found by looking at the pictures on a screen. The case being made is that photobooks are a work of art in their own right, in the same way that putting on a dusty old vinyl record is different than listening to a single on your phone.
“Again, it is a compromise in treading the fine line between a reprint and a study and keeping our books affordable for most everyone,” Ladd writes. “Will our books provide the same experience as the original? Of course not. Even modern reprints, unless they are printed with the same paper and technologies, would fail to do so. But Books on Books provides a full sense of the character and history of each book we feature.” Students can breath a sigh of relief at the thought of no longer having to pay $800 for a first edition of Chris Killip’s In Flagrante. Someday maybe all of the books will be available on your iPad. Then again, that would be somewhat beside the point.
