Matt Dunne and Callum Beany – Site Specific: Photography Exhibitions from Around the World

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Looking at photobooks from well-established publishers can be disappointing. You often see safe editorial choices – large formats, cloth covers, premium printing, bankable names, portfolios laid out one picture to a spread and surrounded by expanses of white paper, and not much in the way of innovative form or content.

Look at smaller presses and you can see more risk-taking in terms of subjects and layouts. You can see creativity, freedom, enthusiasm, idealism, and pushing of boundaries.

Tall Poppy Press’ Site Specific is a good example of the latter in terms of its subject, photography exhibitions from around the world. The authors’ aim was to research and answer the question, “what can an installation or exhibition of photography be if you want to do something other than paper in frame in a white cube?” The answer is the collection of examples that make up the book, and if it was literature we would characterize it as non-fiction rather than fiction.

The 58 shows in 22 countries included in Site Specific by no means represent an exhaustive inventory of all possible ways to present physical photographs. But it offers a thought-provoking catalogue of a range of possibilities, many that existed in situ for only a brief time and that, thanks to the book, can continue to connect with viewers.

The book includes documentation of installations exploring, among other things, temporality, physicality, context, proximity, and spatial relationships, with examples of:

Photos in large free-standing see-through frames,

Photos framed by a variety of smaller framed photos,

Photo-grids, photofields, photo bulletin boards, and photo mosaics on walls,

Elements of three-dimensionality, with photos as hanging draperies or film negatives, in installations of objects, projected on walls and in slide shows, and framed in furniture and in boxes as dioramas,

Photos displayed on walls of buildings in the street, in abandoned industrial spaces, in outdoor gravel pits, in artists’ homes, and on floors and tables.

You have to admire a book that was not published to advance a career but rather to fulfill a vital need, that of communicating and preserving examples of photographic forms. An inspirational, noble project, especially worthwhile to someone who does not live near a major center of photographic activity and who will appreciate the informative images and texts that Callum and Beany have provided. And if you are already familiar with this sort of work, you probably have not visited all 58 exhibitions documented in the book, in which case you will see things you did not know about.

Site Specific, Photography Exhibitions from Around the World: a reference for anyone curious about what photographs can do and how they can be shown.

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Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Matt Dunne & Callum Beany, curators – Site Specific: Photography Exhibitions from Around the World.

Language: English

Design: Rebecca McCauley

Printing: Regal Print, HK

Softbound with dust cover jacket; 141 color photographs; open spine lay flat, perfect bound; ISBN 978-0-6452746-3-9; 170 pages; 19 x 26 cm

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.