Jose Luis Neves: On Artists’s Books and Photobooks

Moxie Studios, Pembroke Row, Lad Lane, Dublin 2
Date: 2pm Sun 14 Jul
Price: Free for all Summer Campus ticket holders

From Robert Beavers’ “Messages 1”.

Jose Luis Neves, University of Ulster – PhD Researcher will discuss the historical, critical, and taxonomic approaches that have been used to define both book forms since the 1960’s

The main objective of this presentation is to engage in a debate about the blurring of boundaries in bookwork practice after the 1960s and the need to consider investigative perspectives that go beyond the photo-historical view that currently defines the identity of the photobook.

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Ulises Carrión argues in his poetic manifesto The New Art of Making Books that “a writer, contrary to popular opinion, does not write books. A writer writes texts.”[1] He is reminding us that the book is above all a transparent medium. A form that, when unquestioned, functions merely as a vehicle for the content it disseminates. The symbiotic relationship between form and content is embedded in most books and can only be dissipated when the conventional bibliophilic experience of the codex is rendered unstable. This in turn involves the activation of material and narrative strategies that call into question the book form itself, emancipating the reader from its stagnant role and converting the book into an art form.

The emergence of the artist’s book during the early 1960s allowed for such a transformation and revealed strategies in book making that altered our perception of what constitutes a book. My presentation at Photo Ireland’s Summer Camp will examine the impact of this radical period upon photobook practice and investigate the historical, critical, and taxonomic approaches that have been used to define both book forms.

The main objective of the presentation is to engage in a debate about the blurring of boundaries in bookwork practice after the 1960s and the need to consider investigative perspectives that go beyond the photo-historical view that currently defines the identity of the photobook.

Biography

José Luís Neves is a PhD researcher in Art & Design at the University of Ulster studying under the supervision of Professor Paul Seawright, Donovan Wylie and Professor Martin Parr. Before initiating his doctoral studies in Belfast he completed the Photographic History and Practice postgraduate programme at De Montfort University, in Leicester. Between 2010 and 2012 he worked at the Wilson Centre for Photography in London. His main areas of research since 2009 include the history and historiography of the photobook, materiality and the photobook, and narrative under book form. His doctoral research is focused on the impact of the emergence of the artist’s book upon photobook making since the 1960s.