Gigi Giannuzzi

Photography books have been around a long time – but will new technology threaten their future? After all, books can be bulky and expensive to produce whereas photography on the Internet is relatively cheap to provide.

Gigi Giannuzzi is director of Trolley Books based in London, a leading photographic publishing house. He thinks photographic books will last a while longer yet.

Says Gigi: "Books, in particular, have always been the best way to present work for photographers. I think, and hope, there will be a sustained level of quality books published in future.

The inevitable decline in printed material for information and news, as we have seen in newspapers and magazines as the result of progress of online, is not mirrored so much with books. As far as photography books are concerned, the screen is so far no replacement for printed paper.

You can still better understand the context of a project, or get an idea of a picture’s reading, tone, depth or continuity in a sequence in a book.

Who knows what developments there will be in the next few years. But for me a book as an object will always remain as important, if not more so in future. I see them as precious commodities. I can’t stand the idea of wasting paper or destroying a book, they only get more valuable to me.

Saying that, in the past year or so I have come to appreciate more the use of multimedia to present photography. Not as a replacement for books but as a different entity. They can be more dramatic in some ways and provide instant high impact. But they are short-lived and temporary in essence which leaves you asking questions or wanting to see more and that is why a book remains so important.

For all of our recent books we have produced slideshows, mostly with a fitting soundtrack that helps us present the project before the book is out.

For example, with the work of Paolo Pellegrin in Lebanon in 2006, for his book ‘Double Blind’, we were given permission by Patti Smith to use her song ‘Qana’, and it’s really powerful collaboration.

The book that followed was a more permanent testimony to what happened. But slideshows definitely get people’s attention. Ours are developing a life of their own. We often present them at photo festivals under their own program.

The demand for photography books will remain. They are still uniquely important and I can’t see a replacement in the near future.

Ultimately, I do think that photography demands books rather than the other way round and that’s why they will still be around for a few more years."