
The Photobook Show
The Electronic Photobook: Photography in eBooks and PDFs
episode 21
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 eBook formats — and it was assumed that the printed photobook would become obsolete. Fast-forward 15 years and the printed photobook is as strong as ever, and eBooks for photography are a niche-market at best. Even so, the PDF format is used frequently by publishers and artists for zines and artist books, and various organizations use eBooks to keep rare and out-of-print books alive. In this episode we’ll be looking at works by Stephen Shore, Chris Marker, Alan Huck, Amy Sillman and others to find out artists and publishers use this format.
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.