You reckon you're frustrated, well I'm driven to the point of anguish when looking at most photo-books by not knowing what is being offered to my gaze.
Ok, I can see the page in the book bears a picture and it is probably a print made by web offset photo-lithography like much of high end printing these days. But the burning question for me remains "What does the picture in the book illustrate?"
Sometimes the picture in the book IS the final work itself. The photogravures in Alfred Stiezlitz's Camera Work periodical are artworks in their own right and that's why many have been cut out, auctioned , and framed. The same goes for pages out of Ansel Adams' Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras.
Sometimes the picture in the photo-book is an illustration of a physical photograph that exists somewhere. I'd love to know "what medium on what substrate", how big is it (in long measure not pixels!), who made it, how was it made, when was it made, does it have a signature or other annotations? I've looked at thousands of photographs over several decades and I know well the frisson that goes with being in the presence of a great photograph. I wish the photo-book would give me enough clues so I could recreate a parallel experience in my imagination.
Sometimes the picture in the photo-book is a "print-out" of an electronic file that does not have (never did have?) a descriptive relationship to something with physical existence. I'm thinking of negative scans recalculated as positives, stitches, HDR's, and all the other electronic chicanery. Do I accept the picture in the photo-book as the artwork itself, a la Camera Work, or do I dismiss it as "never existed, didn't happen, never looked like this" and move on to something with physical provenance? I do wish the photo-book would be explicit about this so I don't feel soiled by accidentally and momentarily selling my soul for a swarm of pixels.
