The Photobook Show
with Stefan Frank
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episode 26
The Big Book, Part II: JH Engström’s “Dimma Brume Mist”
Thu, March 26, 2026, 1pm (ET)
PLEASE NOTE that Daylight Saving Time has already started in the US — please double-check the time where you are locally as times listed here are New York City time.
How do you “read” really big photo books with page after page after page of images — front to back in one sitting? maybe flip through them to get an idea of what’s in there and then just poke around? Or do you look at some images, drop it, and come back later? Have you already forgotten the first image when you finally arrive at the last one? Is that even an issue? And then: do more images make each individual image have less meaning?
With all the many decisions that go into designing a photobook, the question of the sheer number of pages can shape many of the other choices: the kind of paper, the reliance on text, the rhythm of the book.
For this second look at “books with a lot of pages” — last month we dove into Mark Power’s 520-page book Fashion —we’ll be diving into JH Engström’s new career-spanning (and 672-page-spanning) book Dimma Brume Mist (published by Void) that crosses several decades, countries, and genres.
■ previous episodes
© Stefan Frank
episode 25
The Big Book, Part I
Thu, Feb 26, 2026 at 1pm (ET)
Fashion — a ridiculously massive book weighing in at 3 kilos — is the latest work of Magnum photographer Mark Power and collects images from 27 years of his professional practice of photographing the human-made: the unveiling of the Airbus 30, tract houses in the Nevada desert, turbine factories in China, and more.… more
© Stefan Frank
episode 24
“Provoke”: Daido Moriyama and Beyond
Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 1pm (ET)
The Japanese photo magazine Provoke lasted for only four issues, yet it changed the trajectory of Japanese photography. It’s short run launched the career of Daidō Moriyama, who joined the editors Kōji Taki and Takuma Nakahira for the second issue, and sparked a friendship between Nakahira and Moriyama that would last more than 40 years.
On the occasion… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 23
The Photography of Rune Johansen
Tue, Sept 16, 2025 at 1pm (ET)
The ubiquitous photography curator and writer David Campany is rarely at a loss for words, but in his foreword to Rune Johansen: My Last Pictures — a monograph of the Norwegian photographer — he seems to struggle with the task of describing what he is seeing. Campany reaches for comparisons with the work of… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 22
What is a Photograph, Actually?
Tue, June 3, 2025 at 1pm (ET)
What is a photograph — is it the negative? the digital file? a print hanging in an exhibition? or maybe a picture in a photobook? In this episode of The Photobook Show, we discuss the physical manifestation of the image. We’re used to a photograph being a malleable thing — it can… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 21
The Electronic Photobook: Photography in eBooks and PDFs
Tue, April 1, 2025 at 1pm (ET)
When the first iPad came out in 2010, there was excitement: a big, colorful screen that could easily fit in your hands and display audio, video, and books. Artists including Stephen Shore started using these devices to show photographs in innovative ways, and out-of-print photobooks were re-issued in the new… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 20
Formalism is Everything
Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 1pm (ET)
Jan Groover was not only an excellent photographer, but was also known to be a great teacher. To point out her interest in the formal aspects of her images, she famously told a student “Once you have the content, you don’t have to think about the content anymore, you have to… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 19
Holiday Special: A Look Back at 2024
Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
For this special holiday edition of The Photobook Show, Stefan Frank takes a very subjective look at his past year with photobooks to present a not-typical “best of” list. Stefan will bring out a pile of ten not-necessarily-new books — only some were published in 2024 — and they share a mix of… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 18
Ernst Haas: Abstract
Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
Ernst Haas was an early master of color photography, and in many ways, ahead of his time: the Kodachrome film that he used for most of his work resulted in pictures that for years could not be adequately reproduced in print. “Abstract,” Haas’s most cherished and personal project — originally conceived as… more
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episode 17
Photography and Painting: Examples of an Intricate Relationship
Wed, Sept 25, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
When photography came into being, painters feared that their trade would become obsolete; but this is not entirely what happened. Work for realistic painters definitely dropped off, but other painters felt freed from having to faithfully represent reality and so developed their art into abstraction and more. Over time, the… more
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episode 16
Trent Parke: A Monumental Photobook
Wed, May 22, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
The first edition of Australian Magnum photographer Trent Parke’s Monument sold out only seven hours after it was released. This 300-page photobook has now been published by Stanley/Barker in a lavishly produced second edition. Usually in The Photobook Show we look at a couple of books, looking for connecting themes and how… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 15
The Photographer’s Eye: Learning Photography from Books
Tue, April 16, 2024 at 2pm (ET)
What is there to learn in photography beyond how to use your camera and some basic knowledge of optics? In the world of photography education, there is a fundamental belief that the ability to “see” can be trained and educated — and is what lies behind many books designed to help you learn to… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 14
The Photo Essay: Putting Photos into Words
Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
Some of Stefan’s favorite photography books contain hardly any images: in Ghost Image, Hervé Guibert fantasizes about an unexposed photograph of his mother. Moyra Davey writes her diverse thoughts on such things as photographs, a line of poetry, a ball of thread, and the life of 18th-century women onto index cards, and… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 13
Jungjin Lee: A Captivating Stillness
Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
Let’s begin 2024 in a meditative way by looking at three photobooks by Jungjin Lee — the visual pace of her work can provide a needed respite in these times. Drawing on her South Korean heritage, the photographer has developed a highly unique pictorial language, and to “see” her images, you need to slow down… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 12
Fotografiks
Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
Most photobooks follow a very simple, straightforward formula: one picture on a page, plenty of white space to make it stand out, evenly spaced. It is an elegant and unobtrusive way to give images room to breath and calm the viewer down. It worked for Robert Frank’s The Americans and is… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 11
New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape
Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
Let’s look at an influential exhibition and how its trajectory helped shape photography from the 1970s through to today: “New Topographics: Pictures of Man-Altered Landscapes,” shown in 1975 in the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. We’ll follow the course of the show’s lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to landscape… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 10
A Thousand Words: On the Role of Text in Photobooks
Wed, Sept 13, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
Many photographers struggle with using words to go with their pictures — we often think an image should speak for itself. And yet, using text in the right place in a photobook can help your audience find the best perspective with which to look at your work. To kick off this… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 9
Can Photography Be Funny?
Thu, May 4, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
In this month’s show we ask Can Photography Be Funny? Photography can be a serious business, with imagery of conflicts, crisis, and chaos; very often, there is nothing to laugh about. This begs the question: what’s the place for humor in photography? In this episode, we’ll look at books that dabble with a most… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 8
The World is Not Flat
Wed, March 22, 2023 at 2pm (ET)
A picture is flat, while the world it depicts is not — and it took painting and photography quite a while to become aware of this fact.The art critic Clement Greenberg places this realization — that a picture is flat — at the very beginning of modernism: “Modernism used art to call… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 7
“Trance” and Altered States of Mind
Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
Are photographs living beings? Can looking at photographic images induce altered states of mind? Why would a book of landscape pictures be titled “Trance”? We will be asking these kinds of weird questions and will look at books that take a stab at addressing them with equally weird answers. Diana Michener’s… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 6
Moonlighting II: When Writers Photograph
Fri, Jan 13, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
In our last episode (“Moonlighting I”) we looked at painters who photograph; this time we will focus on writers: how they approach photography, what we can learn from theater about staging a photograph, and what the commonalities and differences between writing and photography are. We’ll focus on the German writer Einar Schleef — a… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 5
Moonlighting I: When Painters and Writers Take Pictures
Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 1pm (ET)
What are painters looking for when they use photography in their practice? When writers pick up a camera, what do they see? Let’s take a look together at what this view from outside of photography reveals about photography itself and what we can learn from different crafts for our practice.
We’ll be looking at… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 4
Robert Adams
Fri, Sept 30, 2022 at 2pm (ET)
Why do people take photographs? Robert Adams tried to find an answer in his 1994 book of collected essays, aptly named Why People Photograph. In this episode of the Photobook Show, we’ll try something different: instead of looking at books from different photographers grouped around a topic, we’ll look at one… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 3
Silence and Image
Tue, July 5, 2022 at 2pm (ET)
Let’s step out of our fast-paced lives for a brief moment and look at photobooks that deal with the topic of silence — which at first glance might seem counter-intuitive: how can you photograph sound, or even more, the absence of sound? In this episode we’ll look at examples of how… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 2
Family Albums
Thu, May 12, 2022 at 2pm (ET)
Of all the photobooks you may encounter in your life, the family album is the first and by far the most intimate. One might say that the impulse to hold on to these memories and search through lost time is a driving factor behind many photobooks. In this episode, we’ll look… more
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© Stefan Frank
episode 1
The Moon
Tue, April 5, 2022 at 1pm (ET)
These days, the photobook has become a crazy popular (and important) form of photographic expression bursting with creative energy. In this new series, StrudelmediaLive teacher Stefan Frank will be looking at recent (and not-so-recent) photobooks that you might not know about — and how they advance this unique medium.
In this first… more
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