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© Stefan Frank
The Photobook Show

A Thousand Words: On the Role of Text in Photobooks

episode 10

Wed, Sept 13, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
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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 new season of The Photobook Show, we’ll look at different methods photographers have used to pivot the perception of their images through the use of text at strategic places in their book. We’ll briefly revisit Waffenruhe by Einar Schleef and Michael Schmidt; continue on with Florian Glaubitz‘s Mutter Architektur and Giulia Parlato’s Diachronicles; and end with one of my favorite books: David Campany’s A Handful of Dust.


Watch the recording of this episode


Stefan Frank

Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.

Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more — including presenting The Photobook Show — for StrudelmediaLive.