Nigel Shafran’s Workbooks gathers a creative lifetime of collecting, imagining, sketching and recording by the British artist, spanning 1984 to 2024. Published by Loose Joints, the book presents the working volumes in which his photographs, soon after they are made, are printed, edited and pasted into bound pages that are part workbook, part diary, part aide-memoire.
The writer David Chandler contributes an essay on this practice. Books, he notes, have been the principal means through which Shafran’s photographic work has become known, and Shafran’s investment in bookmaking is integral to how he builds ideas and projects. These working documents are informal books, yet they are carefully assembled and richly embellished, each filled with drawings, notes and bits of everyday ephemera as well as photographs. Each has its own aesthetic, marked by an ease with material craft and a visual simplicity and clarity characteristic of his intuitive organising principles.
Shafran, born in 1964, is a British photographer known for a contemplative, domestic and humanistic approach, notably in book form. His previous book with Loose Joints, The Well, appeared in 2022. Earlier publications include Ruthbook (1995), Dad’s Office (1999), Edited Photographs 1992-2004 (Steidl/Photoworks, 2004), Flowers for ___ (Koenig, 2008), Ruth on the Phone (Roma, 2012), Teenage Precinct Shoppers (Dashwood, 2013), Visitor Figures (2015), Dark Rooms (MACK, 2016) and The People On The Street (self, 2018). His work has been shown in exhibitions including How we are: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain and Island stories: Fifty Years of Photography in Britain at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and is held in public collections such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The edition runs 512 pages at 170 × 230 mm, with 260 colour plates, a section-sewn softcover and design by Linda van Deursen. Published in May 2024 as LJ193 (ISBN 978-1-912719-53-2), it was nominated for the Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024 Author Book Awards.
