Some of the discoveries belong to history and politics as much as to photography. The book is divided into nine chapters with titles that include “Documents of Anger and Sadness,” “Killing Fields,” “Momenti Mori,” and “Cannibalizing Photography,” though none of these titles represents a watertight category.

There’s a fair amount of sex and drugs in the new volume, (though the authors don’t seem to be great fans of rock 'n' roll, at least not its photography) especially in a chapter titled, with various layers of irony, “The Kids Are Alright.” That’s also the title of a book by Ryan McGinley (which originally came in an edition of 100 handmade copies — good luck acquiring that one), which is included here alongside work by fellow “bad boys” Dash Snow and Leigh Ledare. There’s Merry Alpern’s Hitchcockian Dirty Windows (1995), photographs taken surreptitiously, peering in through the rear window of a sex club near Wall Street, and Jessica Dimmock’s The Ninth Floor (2007), which documents life in a New York crack house. As Parr and Badger say of another book in the section,
Self-publish, Be Naughty edited by Bruno Ceschel, there’s a conscious effort to blur the “boundaries between documentary and fantasy, between commerce and art.”

I’d say there’s also a blurring, or perhaps just a symbiosis between exhibition and voyeurism, though it’s a form of the latter that’s on display in a book titled Private Moments in Public Places, photographs by Stephanie Saia, text by Phyllis Prinz, published in 1979. It’s essentially images of the feet and legs of people while they’re using public toilets. I used to know this book very well when I was a bookseller in London in the 1980s. We stocked it, and it was the talk of the store. It satisfied a niche and (let’s face it) somewhat furtive market, and I admit I didn’t buy a copy at the time. It certainly seemed to make no great claims for itself as a work of photographic art.

And this, of course, is part of the Parr/Badger enterprise, not to hold some banal discussion about what is and isn’t art, but rather to reevaluate what is and isn’t worthy of attention, whether it’s art or not. The authors have benefited from a growing appreciation of (and demand for) photobooks, something for which they themselves are to a considerable extent responsible. Good for them, I say. Also, as magazine work has dried up for many freelance photographers, and as digital technology has turned us all into photographers, the publishing (often self-publishing) of quirky, limited-edition books has become a way for photographers to give their work status, and make it stand out from the virtual mush.

Parr and Badger make us aware of some of the amazing stuff that’s currently out there, and some of it’s even affordable, such as Found Photos in Detroit (2012) by Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese, a book of vernacular photographs and a few texts that the pair discovered while exploring the ruined streets of Detroit. The photographs are in poor shape, as are the people in them, and many of the images are from an abandoned police archive. The book came in an edition of 1,000, from Cesura, a (and I know these terms are far from straightforward) “real” publisher.

Far less conventional is a series of 96 books attributed to Joachim Schmid titled Other People’s Photographs. Each book contains 32 thematically related images harvested from online photo-sharing sites. Titles include: Cash,Cheques, Cleavage, Feet, Maps, Hotel Rooms, Objects in Mirror, Sex, Shadows. These books are print on demand and come via the online publisher Blurb, which not only makes everybody a photographer, but also can make every photographer the author of a photobook.

There’s clearly some serious intervention on Schmid’s part. He’s the one who selected, organized, and to a limited extent designed the book (using Blurb templates), although I suspect that not everybody who finds their work appearing in these books will be placated by the website’s disclaimer: “Copyright notice: All of the photographs used in this work as documentary material are merely integrating parts of a larger artwork. They do not constitute reprints or duplications in breach of the fee provisions of copyright law.” I think we might have a discussion about that, don’t you Joachim?

The current volume contains a wonderful oddity titled The Catalogue of Meat Products, Conserves and Lard (1973), photographs by Jiøí Putta made for a Czech government department. It shows a series of deadpan yet somehow surrealist arrangements of sausages and meat products. It’s great, but I wonder what we’d have made of this book prior to the Parr and Badger history. Many would surely have dismissed it out of hand. And this is perhaps the authors’ greatest achievement. Photographic high art could always take care of itself. It was the eccentric and the ephemeral that most needed to be preserved, cherished, and celebrated.

For my own part, last month I bought a volume called Inside Chocolate: The Chocolate Lover’s Guide to Boxed Chocolates, by Hal and Ellen Greenberg, 1985, bound in gold foil. It’s a book for people who, unlike Forrest Gump, want to know what they’re going to get in their box of chocolates. So it’s a series of still lifes of open boxes of chocolates, with a guide to what each individual chocolate contains. It’s kind of magnificent, kind of comical, kind of stupid, and I’m sure I’d never have appreciated it, much less bought it, if it hadn’t been for the curiosities I’d seen in the Parr and Badger books. Rare and valuable it most definitely is not, but I have a suspicion that this may be one of the very few photobooks I own that Martin Parr doesn’t.

Images are taken from The Photobook: A History Volume III, by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, Phaidon Press, $100.

¤