• - Author's Bio
  
  DARIUS HIMES was the founding editor of photo-eye Booklist, a quarterly magazine devoted to photography books, from 2002-2007. He is a founding member of Radius Books, a non-profit, Santa Fe-based organization created in 2007 that publishes books on the visual arts, where he works as an editor. He is also a lecturer, consultant, educator and writer, having contributed to Blind Spot, Bookforum, BOMB, PDN, and American Photo. Himes is an occasional adjunct professor of photographic arts at the College of Santa Fe. He earned his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University and a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts from St. John's College and actively pursues his own photographic image-making.
  
• - Notes
  
  1. Who doesn’t have snapshots and pressed petals and notes from former lovers scattered throughout their own personal collection of books?
  
  2. Barbara W. Tuchman, “The Book,” p. 13, transcript of a lecture given at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC in 1979
  
  3. In a conversation with Bill Jay, the photo-historian, author and recipient of the 2008 Infinity Award in Writing, he told me that up until the early 1990s it was easy to purchase every photography book because there were only a handful that were published in any given year.
  
  4. For a brilliant description of the revolutionary impact of both increased speed and stop-action photography on how humanity physically perceived the world around us, see The River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2003).
  
  5. The Book of 101 Books, p. 3, 2001
  
  6. There are multiple reasons as to why, at this moment in history, there is a sudden interest in photography books, and if anything, it is a culmination of this multitude of reasons. The flourishing of Internet-based commerce coupled with a thrift-store-scouring mentality on the part of nascent collectors is no small driving force. It has only been since the late 1990s that serious e-commerce has been available. The stock of out-of-the-way used bookstores around the country suddenly became as accessible to an international audience as the Strand’s own wares. Editors and authors also took the end of the millennium as an opportunity to publish “Best Of” lists. This was not limited to photography books; I saw books on the best albums, novels, book cover designs, concerts, etc. all hitting the shelves in 2000 through 2002.
  
  7. Fotografia Publica, Museo Nacional de Arte, Spain, 1998
  
  8. The Book of 101 Books, p. 1, 2001
  
  9. Email correspondence from April 19, 2008: “Best from Martin in Beijing where today I bought 20 kilo of books.”
  
  10. In the few years since the Roth and Parr/Badger books were released, various subject-specific and collection-based volumes have been published, including Books of Nudes, The Open Book, and 802 photobooks from the M. + M. Auer collection.
  
  11. “These filmic haikus avoid the forceful summation we usually find in photography, shunning any tidy packaging of the world into perfect images.” From the Steidl website.
  
  12. Peter Galassi, 1996, in an interview with Charlie Rose.
  
  13. In personal communication with the author.
  
  14. Blurb.com and Apple’s iPhoto books are the two most prevalent, with several dozen such companies targeting different audiences (think high-end wedding and family albums and vacation memoirs)
  
  15. The print-on-demand book has quickly entered into contemporary art discourse with the mere fact that Stephen Shore’s Apple-made iPhoto books are now being collected by major institutions. For a synopsis of Shore’s use of print-on-demand technology and his thoughts on its best use, visit http://paulturounetblog.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/the-photo-book-self-publishing-with-on-demand-printing/