Q&A: David Strettell On The Market for Photo Books

PDN: David, a photography bookstore? Are you crazy?!

David Strettell: Yeah, a lot of people have said that. My store is inspired by bookstores I came across on a trip to Japan in 2004. They were very small and had an inventory of contemporary photography?mainly Japanese books, but also Dutch books, German books. It was amazing that they had titles that never make it to New York at all. I thought, even if I had to sell those books at a higher price, they were such special objects that there would be people in New York who would want to buy them.



PDN: So how's business?

DS: Really good. I've expanded the space. I couldn't imagine it doing better.



PDN: Aren't these books available online?

DS: You'd have to delve very, very deep, and you'd end up having to go directly to publishers. The cost of the shipping would be more than the cost of the book.



PDN: How do you find these obscure titles?

DS: It's like a treasure hunt. One source leads to another. A lot of my clients are my best sources. The difficulty is to find the photographers who are self-publishing interesting books. That's a trend in photography that has taken off because of technology. Stephen Gill's book Hackney Wick is a really good example. It's hard to imagine a publisher producing something in exactly that way, and it working so well.



PDN: How do you select the books you sell?

DS: I've become fetishistic about books. I respond to the scale and the touch and the feel of the object and the paper and the stock and the printing and design. Down the list is what the photographs are like. I can love a book and think, "I would never buy that print." A lot of the Japanese books are like that.



PDN: So the book itself is a work of art?

DS: Yeah. Getting back to why I opened a book shop, it was because the interest in books was bubbling up. Andrew Roth had published The Book of 101 Books (Roth Horowitz, 2001). Martin Parr's The Photobook: A History, Volume II just came out (Phaidon, 2006; see PDN's November issue). By the time Volume I came out (in 2004), there was an intense interest in photography books. I think it's really a golden age. So many interesting books are being put out right now.

The other thing is, there is a provincial aspect to photography now. When you see the books as objects, the distinctions become even more defined. Dutch books have a very quirky sensibility about them. They're a little