Photobooks &: a critical companion to the contemporary medium

Matt Johnston's Photobooks & takes stock of the contemporary photobook at a point of real excess, asking what happens to a medium once its supply of makers, small presses, and specialist fairs has outpaced any settled way of reading it.

Across chapters on the photobook's post-digital and post-photographic condition, the purposes of self-publishing, and the practical business of encountering and reading a photobook, Johnston draws on interviews with editors, publishers, and critics across the field alongside his own decade running The Photobook Club project. Onomatopee published the 210-page softcover in 2021 as number 220 in its list, closing with a proposed framework for a more accountable reading culture around the form.

Johnston teaches photography at Coventry University's School of Media and Performing Arts, where his research has tracked the photobook's post-millennium ecology for over a decade. Photobooks & consolidates that research into an extended critical companion, aimed at makers and readers navigating a landscape it argues has grown too large to survey by instinct alone.