Published by Owens Art Gallery, 1991. Texts by Gemey Kelly and Michael Parke-Taylor; 12 pages, 25.4 × 20.3 cm (10 × 8 inches), saddle-stitched softcover, letterpress and offset. Design by Robert Tombs.

“Tombs constructs his parallel History of Photography to question the uncritical assumption that photography is a neutral, objective, and ‘truthful’ record of a person or event. His series of photographs, which he refers to as “an alternate history that ‘depicts’ history,” stimulates enquiry into the authoritative power of photographic images. Tombs’s work draws attention to the dogmatic acceptance of the photograph at face value without considering the intent of the photographer. His self-conscious recreations are overtly artificial, but are no less real for that. Often a distinction is not made between a posed photograph such as a studio portrait of Freud, and a documentary photograph such as the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. By staging impromptu-like photographs, Tombs makes us question how ‘unstaged’ the originals might have been, and thus points out that it is impossible to accurately determine the origin of an image based on the visual result. Tombs’s work deals with degrees of artificiality and reality and the distinction between the two.”

> Michael Parke-Taylor, “Double Identity and the History of Photography,” Robert Tombs: The History of Photography, 1991

SELECTED, 50 BOOKS/50 COVERS, AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF GRAPHIC ARTS, 1991