24th
The Strange Case of My Local Library
So, I thought I had exhausted my local library of photobooks but a lucky mistake lead me to find that was not the case. Dropping by to borrow a copy of Gerry Johansson’s Sverige I got Johansson confused with another Swedish photographer, Lars Tunbjörk. Turns out the library had two more Tunbjörk books than I had thought, one of which I really wanted to see. The funny thing was that the Tunbjörk books were in different locations of the library and neither of them sorted into the section Johansson’s book belongs to.
Even stranger, Tunbjörk’s I Love Borås was in the geography section while his book Landet utom sig was in the biography section. The photography in both would definitely fall within the same genre and – apart from the tone of the photographs, I guess – the main difference is that Landet utom sig contains a couple of essays while I Love Borås is presented without any text. The same goes for Johansson’s Sverige but, if anything, a couple of essays along with the photos seems pretty much standard in photobooks.
Remarkably enough, however, Sverige ends up under “Pn” in the SAB system of classification. That’s photography or something like that. I’ve been running Google all over trying to find more out about this classification system and I’ve given up. (Sweden seems not to be friends with Mr. Dewey.) So, being curious – or perhaps flabbergasted is a better word – I asked the librarian manning the info desk why these books weren’t all in the same place. The conversation left me just as frustrated. One point is, though, that apparently the publishers seem to have some say in how they end up being catalogued. But also, she stated that Gerry Johansson’s work in Sverige is “technical photography” – as opposed to what I can’t remember. The fact that Tunbjörk’s work in I Love Borås is pretty much street photography, yet that book ends up in the geography section, while Johansson’s Sverige could be labelled a topographical account only makes this weirder.
I don’t know if I’m just being prejudiced as a photographer or if this really is a silly way of sorting books but I’m pretty sure this must have been the lamest subject of a rant on Tumblr for a while.
