Last night I launched the Photobook Club’s ‘Box of Books’ at a special event with the Photobook Club Coventry. The books were all really well received and prompted some great discussions. While these meetups remain as offline, generative experiences I thought I would share a few of the discussions around particular books for other branches to pick up…
We discussed (among other things):
- Whether the books was the right medium for Paul Graham’s ‘The Present’. I argued for but many who were seeing it for the first time argued against.
- What exactly is the other language in Marten Lange’s ‘Another Language’, and does it ultimately matter or change our reading of the work?
- How the text accompanying Filipe Casaca’s ‘Blue Mud Swamp’ works with the images. Whether the beauty of the physical book is a comparison with the city in the text before we head into the apocalyptic content.
- The connection between Granddaughter and Grandmother in ‘Mrs Merryman’s Collection’, in general we wanted to know much more about the original collection and the taste of Mrs Merryman.
- Who is being trapped in Ron Jude’s ‘Lick Creek Line’?
- How the photographers presence may or may not have altered suspects and interrogators behavior in Donal Webber’s ‘Interrogations’. We hoped but doubted that the photographer may be of some comfort to the suspects!
On a personal note I found that with books I own and have already formed opinions on, it was much harder to take a step back and take on board some fantastic alternative readings from members.
You can see more images of the event on the ‘Box of Books’ Facebook page found here.
Next stop: Ireland
