with Elisabeth Neudörfl, Professor of Documentary Photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen
and Andreas Langfeld, works in the field of documentary with photography and film

Andreas Langfeld and Elisabeth Neudörfl look at photo books together and talk about them. They take all aspects of the photo book seriously: the photos themselves, the sequence of images, size and materiality of the book, layout, printing, typography, title, texts, context, etc. The photo book is seen as the valid form of the respective work, if necessary in comparison to exhibition forms.

Tehran North by Shirana Shahbazi (Zurich 2016) is a radical book: it consists of a stream of black and white photographs taken at night, all in portrait format, always two images on a double page, separated by a narrow white strip in the centre. Apart from the title and a few, barely legible details on the back, there is no text.

Langfeld and Neudörfl discuss what these enigmatic images nevertheless reveal.

The reflections by Elisabeth Neudörfl and Andreas Langfeld in the EFEG format have been enriching the discourse on the appearance of the medium of photography in books for some time now. With this format, which is also accessible via its own YouTube channel, we are concluding the photobook days Photos in Books – in the knowledge and hope that this discourse will simply continue and move on to other spaces.