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BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
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Finding Print Books & Journals
Most photography-related material in print is shelved on the 5th floor of Mugar Library under the call letters, "TR." Oversized TRs are shelved on Mugar's 2nd floor under the call number "Folio TR." Some books will be classed as art history and shelved on Mugar's 2nd floor under the call number "N."
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Photobooks
Photobook: A History
While the history of photography is a well-established canon, much less critical attention has been directed at the phenomenon of the photobook, which for many photographers is perhaps the most significant vehicle for the display of their work and the communication of their vision to a mass audience. In the first of two volumes, both co-edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobookprovides a comprehensive overview of the development of the photobook: from its inception at the dawn of photography in the early nineteenth century through to the radical Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and 70s, by way of the Modernist and propaganda books of the 1930s and 40s. The selection of photographers compiled by Badger and Parr challenges the popular canon, and their survey of the history of the photobook reveals a secret web of influence and inter-relationships between photographers and photographic movements around the world. The book is divided into a series of thematic and broadly chronological chapters; each features a general introductory text that offers background information and highlights the dominant political and artistic influences on the photobook in the relevant period, followed by more detailed discussion of the individual photobooks. The chapter texts are followed by spreads and images from over 200 books, which provide the central means of telling the history of the photobook. Assimilated diligently by Parr and Badger, these illustrations show around 200 of the most artistically and culturally important photobooks featuring the cover or jacket and a selection of spreads.
Japanese Photobook, 1912-1980
This book illustrates the development of photography as seen in photo publications in Japan--from the time of influence by European and American pictorialism, the German Bauhaus and Imperial military propaganda, to the complete collapse and destruction of the country in 1945. Then followed a new beginning: with the unique self-determination of a young generation of photographers and visual artists highlighted by the "Provoke" style as well as protest and war documentation of the late 1950s to the early '70s, the signature Japanese photobook, as we have come to know it, was born. With detailed information and illustrations of over 500 photo publications, an introduction by Kaneko Ryuichi and essays by Fujimura Satomi, Duncan Forbes, Manfred Heiting, Mitsuda Yuri, Iizawa Kotaro, Shirayama Mari and Takeba Joe, this is the first extensive Englishlanguage survey of Japanese photobooks of this period.
The Photobook : from Talbot to Ruscha and beyond
The photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the publication of Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature heralded a new genre in the history of the book, one in which the photograph was the primary vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal, if sometimes conflicted partnership, with the written word. In this book, practicing photographers and writers across several fields of scholarship share a range of fresh approaches to reading the photobook, developing new ways of understanding how meaning is shaped by an image's interaction with its text and context, and engaging with the visual, tactile, and interactive experience of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual works, the photobook, from fetishized objet d'art to cheaply-printed booklet, is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.
