Book Review: The Dutch Photobook: A Thematic Selection from 1945 Onwards

Netherlands nice

I think Aperture is to be congratulated on publishing another excellent photobook to go with their Japanese and Latin American editions. Both of these are quite different from this latest title: the Japanese pages reflect a much more personal photo style and the Latin one features a lot more overtly political photobooks.

This Dutch edtion features 124 photobooks (just over half published since 1983) divided into six chapters: landscape; youth; industry; travel; city; art. To reflect the broad scope of editorial the section on industry includes several corporate titles essentially used as company promotions but still full of creative images. Perhaps the biggest difference between Dutch photobooks and the previous two is the look of the books. Holland has a tradition of creativity in design, printing and the visual arts. These clearly came together as I looked through the pages. Though it's not possible to comment on the printing of the books shown here the layout, typography and photos are of a high order.

The format is the same as Japanese and Latin editions: the cover of each book is shown followed by several spreads with a technical caption relating to size, pages, publisher, print run et cetera. Also each book has a very comprehensive and detailed analysis of the photographs, who took them and why, the designer and publisher. The book's production really can't be faulted, excellent matt paper for the 300 screen images and a nice touch is printing all the black and whites in four color. The back pages have several indices: a timeline; photographers; designers; book size; print runs. These pages look rather intriguing because they all use small thumbnails of the 124 book covers.

The Dutch photobook continues the very high editorial standard set in the two previous Aperture titles.

The Dutch Photobook: A Thematic Selection from 1945 Onwards is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Front endpapers.

Contents spread.

Typical spread.

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