Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda & the Everyday Bodleian Lecture

Associate Professor Donna West Brett gave a lecture on the collection of photobooks donated to the Bodleian Library in 2020 by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, 27 February 2024 as part of the Sloan Fellowship in Photography, 2024. LINK

Conveying meaning through photos alone, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics. This lecture will take a closer look at the way photobooks portray the ‘everyday’ – the familiar, the practical, the ordinary – and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda.

Supported by Sue and Graeme Sloan, Sloan Fellowship in Photography; Bodleian Libraries at The University of Oxford, and the University of Sydney.