MACK

London, United Kingdom Founded 2010 Independent Photobook publishing significance: Tier A 263 photobooks Website

MACK is among the few publishers that have shaped the contemporary photobook as a distinct editorial form rather than a by-product of exhibition making. Founded in London in 2010 by Michael Mack, who had previously run the SteidlMACK imprint with Gerhard Steidl, the house carried that experience into an independent programme organised around long-term collaboration between publisher and artist. Within little more than a decade it has become a reference point for how photographic sequences are edited, designed and manufactured, and its list functions as a benchmark for institutions, critics and collectors working in the field.

The identity of the list rests on sustained relationships rather than one-off projects. Alec Soth’s Songbook (2015) and I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019), Paul Graham’s The Present (2012) and Mother (2019), and Rinko Kawauchi’s Ametsuchi (2013) and Halo (2017) are representative: each treats the book as the primary site of the work, with sequence, pacing and physical structure doing as much as the photographs themselves. Production is central to that approach — varied trim sizes, exposed and Japanese bindings, unbound or loose plates, gatefolds and boxed sets — and Michael Mack’s editing, together with the studio’s close work with designers and printers, is regularly cited as the reason these books read differently from conventional monographs.

For collectors, imprint history matters. Titles carrying the SteidlMACK name belong to the 2006-2010 partnership and precede the independent MACK imprint, so superficially similar editions can originate from different publishing houses. MACK also reissues earlier classics: Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, first published elsewhere, has appeared in a MACK edition, which means cover, imprint line and copyright page are the reliable ways to identify an edition rather than format alone. Several of the most in-demand titles have been reprinted repeatedly, so printings rather than titles should be verified before treating any copy as a first edition.

263Photobooks

146Photographers represented

2010–2026Publication years represented