An archive of dozens of possible combinations of images with words. A toolkit for critically rethinking the history of photography. A repository of ideas under constant configuration. A mapping of contemporary artistic quests in constant interaction with local communities.
The Nomadic Library, an initiative of the MedPhoto international photography festival, is the first traveling collection of photobooks in Greece. From 2018 until today, it is granted successively to universities, cultural centers, public libraries, photography schools and groups, constituting a foundation for educational activities and for the initiation of a public dialogue on visual culture.
The study of the photobook as a work of art and its connection with photography as a framework of observation was the springboard for the formation of the collection. What arises is the dimension of the photobook as a product of collective work by creators from different fields and the shift that this marks from the individual image to the construction of meaning through broader narratives, either within each book of the Nomadic Library separately or from the correlations between the different books. Although, as David Campany observes, the photobook has been a creative practice since the days of Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron, and although during the 20th century this practice featured memorable works by August Sander, Eugene Atget, Walker Evans and Robert Frank, it is the explosion of the internet at the beginning of the 21st century that made the photobook accessible to mass audiences and sparked the need for the systematic examination of its historical routes.
These routes continue to this day’s Nomadic Library and their exploration is one of the goals for further understanding the photographic phenomenon. Passing through the formalism of Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus to the deconstruction of dominant visual codes by Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall in the context of postmodern practices, the examination of social problems sometimes through a personal prism as in the case of Nan Goldin and sometimes through an orderly political stance such as that of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the exploration of the boundaries between still and moving images in works such as Chris Marker’s, the extensive use of language in search of a critical realism by artists such as Allan Sekula, as well as the relationship of photography with the visual arts in John Baldessari, Taryn Simon or Robert Rauschenberg are just some of the aspects of this ever-growing project.
The Nomadic Library is finally an attempt to enrich the discourse around photography accompanied by translations of theoretical texts, a gesture aimed at expanding the space of the Commons and of sharing knowledge. After all, the Nomadic Library is an open invitation to approaching photography not as an aestheticized and extrahistorical object, but as a process that offers possibilities for combining cognitive elements, visual qualities and references to social reality.
