The Photograph Collector

This unique reference provides invaluable information on identifying, cataloging, and valuing cased images. Features updated prices for hundreds of photographs, and the latest preservation trends.

This book is a visual and written exploration of the constructed photograph as created in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. It documents a collection built by Frazier King, that was exhibited by FotoFest International in the Collector's Eye II Exhibition. An essay by Mr. King's essay reflects on 76 images of a variety of constructed photographs included in the collection. The narrative explores how Mr. King's own work with this type of image has resulted in a collection of constructed photographs and explains the varied nature of this category of image. The reader gets a personal and inside glimpse of the dynamics of photographic reviews such as FotoFest Meeting Place and how artists, collectors and curators interact in this venue and the relationships they form. In addition to an essay by Mr. King this volume includes an essay by Wendy Watriss, co-founder and Senior Artistic Advisor of FotoFest, on the significance of collecting and the role of the collector. The third essay is by Madeline Yale Preston, an independent curator based in London, who addresses the role of the collector as curator and the historical evolution and importance of the constructed photograph.

This publication reissues a beloved photobook classic--acknowledged as such by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in the third volume of The Photobook: A History--that has been out of print since the hardcover edition was published in 2010. As photographer Jason Fulford (born 1973) recently learned firsthand, mushrooms have a way of growing and spreading wherever they touch ground. It all started when a friend of Fulford's gave him a box, found at a flea market, full of photos of mushrooms--unassuming pictures taken by an unknown but almost certainly amateur photographer, apparently as notes for some mycological studies. Fulford's art photographs (aside from his well-known book Dancing Pictures, which depicted people getting down to their favorite songs) are usually of staid, quasi-mute objects: a smashed Dorito chip overrun with ants, two bronzed doorknobs spooning, the blank back of a street sign. Yet these mushroom images got stuck in Fulford's mind, like a bad song sometimes does, and they started to grow in his own work. The Mushroom Collector combines some of the original flea-market mushroom pictures with his own images and text by the artist about the project.