As Hans Gremmen and a few other publishers continue to show, you can make a photobook that looks and feels contemporary even when the source material is very old. Instead, I’m concerned about the book itself and what it can do for its audience. Thus, mine isn’t a capitalist argument (dress up the same thing in new packaging, hoping to sell some more). Still, I feel that a photobook produced in, let’s say, 2022 ought not to look and feel like a photobook in 2002, simply because in those two decades a few more possibilities might have opened up. So if you have arrived at a model that works, then there’s no good (business) reason to change it. I am fully aware of the fact that publishing books is a very risky business. However, even if there now are a small number of publishers that have retained those senses (Hans Gremmen’s FW:Books is my go-to example), unfortunately since the end of the boom the world of photobook has become a bit boring again.

For me, the most exciting outcome of the boom were the widely felt senses of possibility and experimentation that the staid area of photobook publishing suddenly experienced. A huge number of emerging but also established photographers decided that they wanted to take on all aspects of making and publishing a photobook themselves. Only by reconstructing this history and uncovering its consequences can we understand the impact of colonization and give individuals the tools to come to terms with their past.īy demonstrating the power of psychoanalysis to illuminate the subjective dimension of colonial domination, this book will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the long-term consequences of colonization and its aftermath.A few years ago, we witnessed a boom in self published photobooks.

Many Algerians are traumatized by the way that the French colonial state imposed new names on people and the land, thereby severing the links with community, history, and genealogy and contributing to feelings of loss, abandonment, and injustice. Many French feel weighed down by a colonial history that they are aware of but which they have not experienced directly. Lazali found that many of her patients experienced difficulties that can only be explained as the effects of 'colonial trauma' dating from the French colonization of Algeria and the postcolonial period. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonization leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves. Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination.

Karima lazali colonial trauma