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A PHOTOBOOK FAIR: BIFB Photobook Weekend

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BIFB Book Fair Website image

BIFB Book Fair Website image


BIFB World Photobook Weekend – Photobook Fair

Sunday October 13, 10am – 5pm

Art Gallery Ballarat, 40 Lydiard Street North

 

The BIFB celebrated World Photobook Day with other photography enthusiasts awith their second Foto Book Fair.

Participants of the Fair included:

  • Australian and New Zealand Photo Book Awards
  • Ballarat International Foto Biennale bookshop
  • Bookhouse
  • Studio Yeah
  • Colin Abbott
  • Fems
  • Melbourne Photobook Collective
  • Particle Books
  • Photography Studies College
  • Sainsburys Books
  • State Library Victoria
  • The Fridge Door Project
  • Tess Maunder and Vault

 

 

Significant and rare books from the State Library of Victoria were presented including:

 

Des Cowley+Cartier-Bresson’s Book

Henri Cartier-Bresson Les Européens

Paris, Editions Verve, 1955

Henri Cartier-Bresson iconic photobook Les Européens comprises 114 photographs, taken between 1950 and 1955, documenting a vanishing way of life in post-war Europe. His lens captured the moods of Greece, Spain, Germany, England, Ireland, Italy, USSR, France. The book, which comprises some of Cartier-Bresson’s best known and finest images, features a striking colour lithographic design by Catalan artist Joan Miró.

 

Street Life in London

John Thomson, and Adolphe Smith Street life in London: with permanent photographic illustrations taken from life expressly for this publication

London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1877

First released in twelve monthly installments beginning in February 1877, Street Life in London is the among the first published collections of social documentary photographs. The book consists of thirty-six photographs by John Thomson, each accompanied by a brief essay by the writer and activist Adolphe Smith. Like the photographs, the essays are sharply drawn vignettes of “local characters” – cab drivers, flower sellers, sign painters, locksmiths, fishmongers, chimney sweeps, beggars, and street musicians – whose individual stories are meant to encapsulate the conditions of an entire class of worker or street dweller.

 

Charles Nettleton Melbourne illustrated by photographs

Melbourne, Charles Nettleton, 1868

A set of photographs of Melbourne by the commercial photographic studio of Nettleton and Arnest. The collection features significant Melbourne buildings and streets including Parliament House, the Treasury Buildings, St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Royal Exhibition Building and Melbourne University Colleges. Few people feature in the photographs, which are predominantly focused upon architecture. The collection is significant as it provides a visual record of Melbourne’s early development, and also reveals the work of an important local photography studio.

 

Duncan J Peirce Giant Trees of Victoria

J Duncan Peirce Giant Trees of Victoria

Melbourne, Victorian Department of Lands and Survey, c.1888

A volume containing a series of eight of J Duncan Peirce’s photolithographs of giant trees of Victoria, with descriptions of the species, height, girth and locality of the trees illustrated. All trees illustrated are Eucalyptus amygdalina regnans, commonly known as mountain ash. Enlargements of these photographs were displayed at the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition of 1888 and later at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.

 

Julia Margaret Cameron Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his friends: a series of 25 portraits and frontispiece/ in photogravure from the negatives of Julia Margaret Cameron and H.H.H. Cameron

London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1893

Published in 1893, the year after Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s death, this book features a selection of Julia Margaret Cameron’s iconic photographic portraits of the poet and his circle of friends. A friend and neighbour of Tennyson’s, Cameron took photographs of the poet several times across a decade.

 

Peter Lyssiotis What the Moon Lets Me See

Melbourne, Masterthief, 2017

Peter Lyssiotis’s deluxe large-scale publication What the Moon Lets Me See comprises an extended text by the artist, accompanied by numerous photographic images. The work sees a return by Lyssiotis to the dream-like coloured photomontages of earlier books such as The Harmed Circle (1992) and From the Secret Life of Statues (1994). The images represent a collaboration with Australian photographers Doug Spowart and Victoria Cooper, who adapted Peter’s photomontages using a pin hole camera.  The book was produced in an edition of 10 copies, printed by Memento Pro, in Sydney. Boldly typographic and beautifully designed, it can be considered a high-point amongst Peter Lyssiotis’s books.

 

Return to the BIFB Photobook Weekend Blog Homepage.

 

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