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Robin Titchener (b. 1964, England) is an avid collector of photobooks. It’s an obsession he’s pursued for almost 40 years. Since 2015 he’s also authored a truly wonderful eponymous photobook review site + insta profile. For our collector series, eve talks with him about the many ways photobooks speak to us.

RT: Well, it was a wet, miserable day in London in 1988. I'd been wandering Charing Cross Road, visiting my usual bookshops. Back then, I was collecting modern first editions, not photography. But I passed the National Portrait Gallery and saw they had a Robert Mapplethorpe show. At that time I was unfamiliar with his work, but I went in and found myself completely taken by the portraits. The light, the composition, the slightly ethereal way they looked. I went straight to their bookshop, bought the softcover catalogue for twelve quid. That was it. That was the beginning.

It being the pre-internet era, the bookshop Zwemmers was the obvious next avenue of enquiry. Claire de Rouen ran the photography shop. She was a legend—French-Egyptian, elegant, with a soft French accent and a laugh that made you feel like you were in on something. She’d sidle up and say Do you have this? I’d say no. Oh, you really should. And then she’d vanish. That was her hard sell. She introduced me to Joe’s, a folio magazine with Bruce Weber and Mondino Baptiste…

E: so we’ve jumped to the nineties here. Joe McKenna only ever (self-)published two editions, in 1992 and 1998 featuring the legends of nineties fashion photography, with many of the shoots styled by McKenna himself…

It was £40, which felt outrageous at the time. But I bought it. Now it trades for £600–£800. Claire had a way of putting things in your hands that you didn’t know you needed. I found the first volume of Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression (Peperoni Books, 2010) in Claire’s shop—one sealed copy left. I’d looked through the display copy and something told me not to open mine. I’ve only done that once or twice. It just felt special...

I didn’t know of Wolf at the time. The book had only been out a month or two, but it was already selling out. It’s a series of portraits taken through the windows of Tokyo’s packed commuter trains. Faces pressed against glass, condensation, breath, fatigue. It’s portraiture, but also social documentary. It captures how people live, how they move. It’s abstract and intimate. Stunning stuff.

"It’s portraiture, but also social documentary. It captures how people live, how they move. It’s abstract and intimate. Stunning stuff."

Later came Tokyo Compression Revisited (2011), then volumes three (2014) and four in 2017. And when the second book came out, the only reason I bought it was because I thought: there's my reading copy. The first one at this point was still sealed and that was my justification [for buying the second edition].

I now have all four, signed. One of my favourite sets. The last one was called The Final Cut. Wolf told me they’d closed that [Odakyu] train line—it no longer exists. So the series is bookended, literally. It’s rare that I buy the same book four times, but this deserved it.

such clever publishing.

Absolutely. There’s this wonderful book based around the subject of cigarettes and smoking, Until Death Do Us Part by Thomas Sauvin (Jiazazhi Press, 2015). It’s a tiny book, the size of a cigarette pack, and it comes in a cigarette box—cellophane and all. It’s a book of pictures culled by Sauvin from an archive of half a million negatives salvaged from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing.

"These are found photographs of Chinese wedding guests playing smoking games...It’s absurd, surreal + completely brilliant. "

These are found photographs of Chinese wedding guests playing smoking games. Some of them are hilarious. There’s even a baby with a cigarette in its mouth. It’s absurd, surreal and completely brilliant. The genius of it is the packaging. The book is the cigarettes. You slide it out of the box, and it’s bound like a proper book, not just a stack of cards. It’s off-the-scale bonkers, but it works. It’s art, it’s humour, it’s social commentary—all in a cigarette box. And it’s been reprinted nine or ten times now. People love it.

On another level, you’ve got the British artist Zara Carpenter. Zara’s work is something else. She has fibromyalgia, a condition which leaves her in constant pain, but she’s an artist— not originally a photographer, but she’s made photography her medium. Her books are sculptural, handmade, deeply personal. 

The latest (just released and already sold out) is called Scenes from My Bed (self-published, 2025). She took her childhood storybooks - The Wombles is the one I bought - and tipped in photographs taken from her sickbed. Her legs, the cat, her partner asleep beside her. She only made five copies. It's a piece of art. A piece of her.

She distresses the images—pours acid on them, rips Polaroids before they’re ready. It’s raw, but it’s not gimmicky. It makes sense. It’s her experience, made physical. And it’s beautiful.

you’ve said you don’t collect everything. what guides your choices? what makes a photobook stand out for you? and how big is your collection?

Now? Probably a couple of thousand. [My partner] Roy said to me yesterday, you haven't bought another one, have you? I thought, yeah, it's only a little one. And he looked at our friend and said: we're never going to declutter…

This is the trouble. It's not clutter. You know it's not clutter. I know it's not clutter. And deep down he knows it's not clutter. But it also doesn't alter the fact that we live in a limited space and I can't stop, you know? And it's not like I buy everything. I go into a bookshop and there's gazillions of titles there. Sometimes I will just look around. I think, no, nothing today. And then occasionally something still catches me. I don't know why.

I get most of these books as they come out. In other words, it’s an instinctual thing. It's something that I do because I see the work, even if I don't know the photographer. It's the work that speaks to me first. There are many great artists that I have never gone anywhere near. I don’t own a single book by [Josef] Koudelka or Robert Adams. Not because they’re not great—just never grabbed me. But I’ll champion the ones I believe in. For example, there’s a Japanese artist, Yoshiichi Hara, who’s incredibly undervalued. Landscapes, portraits, sex pictures—they all sit side by side. Beautiful work. Important work. I discovered him just before he died. I’m banging the drum now.

Yoshiichi Hara's Strippers (self-published, 1982)

Also? Sincerity. You can see soul in a photograph. Whether it’s blurred, out of focus, twisted—I don’t care. If it’s honest, it’s art. I don’t need a silk binding or Mohawk paper. I’ve bought books that were Xeroxed and stapled together. If the work speaks, that’s enough.

"You can see soul in a photograph. Whether it’s blurred, out of focus, twisted—I don’t care. If it’s honest, it’s art."

and the artists?

Many of my favourite books in recent years are by women. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Rinko Kawauchi. There’s a sensitivity in their work. Take the Japanese photographer Sakiko Nomura, who often shoots male nudes. They’re all shot in semi darkness, about as far away from the conventional nude as you could ever see. There was nothing ever explicit in any of her pictures. Her first book was of guys in changing rooms - Hadaka no Heya - Naked Room (Aat Room, 1994), her first official release (below). There’s a very informal, natural feel to her photography. Maybe that’s what draws me to the work.

You know, it's a bit like a few years ago when international attention was drawn to the Black Lives Matter movement. All of a sudden there was a lot of work by Black photographers that seemed to find its way to the surface. It's not that it hadn't been there, it just hadn't been allowed its voice.

If somebody is interesting, it makes you think. I think about people like Zara now more than I probably would have done. There's another book here in my collection which came out some years ago by Laia Abril called Epilogue, published in 2014 by a British publisher, Dewi Lewis.

"This is the story of the Robinson family—and the aftermath suffered in losing their 26-year-old daughter to bulimia. Working closely with the family, Laia Abril reconstructs Cammy’s life telling her story through memories and flashbacks shared during the family’s grieving process."

To me, this book (above) came out of nowhere. It was a massive success.

what are the differences you see in photography between now and when you started collecting?

I think the work is a lot freer now. I think [younger photographers] probably look at work by Herb Ritts or Avedon and think it's very straitjacketed, very formal. All about getting the lighting right and having everything absolutely just so. Whereas there are kids out there now that are photographing their mates in skate parks and things like that or they're in the club scene or the festival scene and it's very much more of an instant kind of edit. 

"I think the work is a lot freer now...they probably look at work by Herb Ritts or Avedon + think it's very straitjacketed, very formal."

I agree it's a democratisation. So much is shot on phone cameras. I mean, this is where Daido Moriyama was probably years ahead of his time. He's walking around, blurring the photographs, getting the angles wrong, basically doing everything wrong in Farewell Photography (Shashin yo Sayonara) (Shashin Hyoronsha, 1972).

it’s a fascinating + diverse collection that you’re building. and your reviews are so insightful. what fuels this quest?

Curiosity. I mean, there's 40 years’ worth of love and passion here. And the fact that every now and then, someone comes up with something I haven’t seen before. It’s not a gimmick — it makes perfect sense.

I don’t know where it’s all going. What seems to make the photobook in some ways safer [from the march of digital technology] than some other mediums is that it's a very tactile thing. Looking at art online is not the same as seeing it in a gallery and so many artists do not have access to gallery space anyway, so the book is the perfect medium to connect the chain.

Anyway, I'm on this train and despite my other half screaming from the platform, I’m not getting off any time soon.

Find + subscribe to Robin’s photobook reviews at robintitchener.com + on Instagram @robins_photobook_collection. Browse eve’s range of photobooks here.