Karambolage by Arnold Odermatt, — *Karambolage* by Arnold Odermatt,

From January to February 2020, Fotogalleriet will look more closely at the photobook as an exhibition space in Le Book Club, a show unravelling in five chapters over five weeks. In light of this, we reignite our interview series looking closely at book production. We begin the new year by talking to the London-based Norwegian cultural theorist Marie Alix Isdahl Voisin about her relationship with the photobook.

The last decade has seen more photobooks than the last 170 years together according to the PhotoBook Museum, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. What do you think, is the photo book in trouble?

That's a lot of books for the photobook to be in trouble! Whenever a medium is declared to be in a ‘crisis’, my impression is that it often comes from a place of wanting to identify its significance. And as long as that intention is there, I guess everything is exactly as it should be. If the publishing industry is booming, the market for photobooks might become saturated, which is more of a problem for the individual publishers trying to keep a business going, rather than for the reader or viewer. To me, it seems like the interest in publishing might be related to another crisis: the crisis of photography post-Instagram. IG has proved that there are many great amateur photographers out there who challenge the professional image-maker to push beyond a body of work that simply looks like a juicy instagram account. Not to forget memes, and the excess of surreal, poetic human imagination. This is good. It means that we’ve become used to consuming photography en masse, as something that's ever-present, with porous edges leaking all over the place. The photobook is placing the photographic image back into some sort of canon. It’s pure (although hopefully the images might not be). A book also requires time from you. I do love a great photobook, but I’m equally into scrolling my unpure feed. I did come to photography through my smartphone, and not through a photobook, I have to admit.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

When I’ve been doing practice-led research in photography – and to me, photographic practice is a way of theorising, and theory a way of practising – there have been certain contributions to photographic theory that I've come back to, such as Joanna Zylinska’s book on ‘nonhuman’ photography. The foregrounding of photography’s nonhuman qualities has been important for me to find ways to overcome the modernist split between the image and its material support and make sense of how the human and the nonhuman are entangled in photography. This is to reckon with the history of optical metaphors and imaging practices that make worlds where the human is in control of, yet separate from, nature.

But I'm still interested in the optical image. I think there are other ways to depart from the Cartesian distancing and pinning down of a subject than to deal with the materiality of an image. Simply emphasising the material aspect of photography appears to me at times an inversion of the problem: the optical is problematic, so let’s focus on the material. You’re still dealing with the same dichotomy, just in reverse. What I want to see is the pluralist coming together of the two and then add some myths and fiction and hopefully arrive at something unknowable and new – a ‘purification of a hybrid’, as Latour has put it, or a hybrid that wants to reveal the nature of hybridity. When I look at an image with my human eyes, the optical is always there. And to me, this is exciting because I don’t find that many strictly non-representational photographic practices interesting. So this is where the photobooks come in.

I’d like to see a photobook by artist Diane Severin Nguyen. I don't think she’s made one yet. And a handful of Instagram accounts. I'm not mentioning names, but at times I enjoy the IG stories of certain artists more than their actual art practices. There are images in books I come back to: the black and white double exposures by Torbjørn Rødland in Vanilla Partner; a few classics: Karambolage by Arnold Odermatt, Masahisa Fukase’s Solitude of Ravens and Andre Kertesz’ From my window, for the repetition and differences within the same theme, whether window, raven, or crashed car. Basically, images that question what the image can do, and photobooks questioning what a photobook can do, are the kinds of images I come back to.

As a curator, how would you work with the book? What is the purpose of the book for you?

I'm not technically a curator, although I have been involved in curating. And magazine publishing. But not at the same time. There’s a flexibility to the book or printed work that’s different from an exhibition. You can put it out there in the world and it travels. There is, of course, a difference between major publishing houses and artists and photographers putting out their own books and zines. I guess self-publishing can be a way to avoid the restrictions, logistics and market dynamics of contemporary arts culture. I'd like to see more fast low-fi digital books and photo zines. It's surprising that although the internet gives us unlimited freedom for zine-making or any other image-related output, you don't see that many initiatives. Flatness.eu is the latest one I came across, which is sort of a combined research project and exhibition space engaging with screen-based image culture.

Masahisa Fukase’s Solitude of Ravens . — Masahisa Fukase’s *Solitude of Ravens* .

Le Book Club is curated by Antonio Cataldo (Artistic Director, Fotogalleriet), Nina Strand (artist end Objektiv’s editor in chief) and Anna Planas and Pierre Hourquet (founders, Temple).