The materiality of photobooks. Photobooks are an art form on the move. They travel physically, as copies are bought, traded, treasured, forgotten, and rediscovered around the world. They move conceptually, as their meanings evolve through changing use and value. Photobooks combine languages of photography, text and design into a distinct medium that breaks from the confines of galleries and libraries, entering unexpected or intimate environments, such as our homes. Encounters with Photobooks marks a shift in scholarship by showing how meaningful experiences with photobooks are shaped by the situated, material, and political circumstances of these encounters. Weaving together creative writing about photobook encounters with critical traditions in museology, phenomenology, art history, new materialism, and feminist praxis, this innovative book illuminates the photobook’s multiplicity: its unique potential for its many copies to matter differently to makers and readers in each momentary encounter. List of Figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part 1: Experiential Perceivings Encounter 1: An Absent Book Chapter 1: The Phenomenal Photobook: Sensory Perception and Time Encounter 2: Another Black Darkness, Sakiko Nomura Chapter 2: Social Sense-Making: Readers and Subjectivity Part 2: Discursive Matter Encounter 3: A Stranger in My Mother’s Kitchen, Celine Marchbank Chapter 3: Issues with Bookishness: Photobooks and Book Culture Part 3: Epistemic Environments Encounter 4: Photobook Fair Diaries Chapter 4: Sites of Photobook Production Encounter 5: From Here to Eternity, Sunil Gupta Chapter 5: Labels That Stick: Photobooks and Institutions Part 4: Expanded Encounters Encounter 6: Sent a Letter, Dayanita Singh Chapter 6: Plurality and Mutability Encounter 7: In Flagrante, Chris Killip Chapter 7: Encounters Remembered, Re-mediated, Reimagined Conclusion Appendix: List of Photobook Encounters Notes Bibliography Index