Talk:Bibliography of Gianni Berengo Gardin

Archival material
I've just now removed







as added much earlier by Lesser Cartographies. This is potentially valuable information but it doesn't seem to belong where it was originally placed. I'm undecided as to where it should go. -- Hoary (talk) 07:48, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

"a remarkable number"
In its current form, the introduction talks of:


 * a remarkable number of photobooks from 1960 to the present

It could be said that "remarkable" is mere opinion. But I think that the long list that follows justifies use of the term.

The next objection could well be: "Why not simply say how many there are, leaving the reader free to infer that this is remarkable?"

Simply, because they're very hard to count:


 * Are the successors to Morire di classe different editions of the same one book, or are they different books? (And ditto for other titles.)


 * Do we only count books that are exclusively by Berengo Gardin (GBG)? (If we do, then even Morire di classe is clearly out. But what about books exclusively by GBG aside from short texts by others? And how long can a "short" text be before we infer coauthorship?)


 * What if we count as separate items what Il libro dei libri (LL) counts as separate items? This would be fairly easy to do. However:
 * Already, various photobooks postdate LL.
 * LL's criteria for treating what might be termed a revised edition as a separate book seem unexplained and a bit arbitrary.
 * LL includes books with as few as one photograph by GBG where these seem particularly significant to its editor (e.g. Les Choix d'Henri Cartier-Bresson). By contrast, the WP list ignores almost all books that have fewer than ten. But of course there's nothing particularly significant about ten: a mere five photos, one per page, in one book could well be more significant than 12 photos stuffed four to a page in another book.
 * LL includes books with tiny print runs. The occasional publisher of GBG's work would even give him a special book in an edition of one; these books too are included in LL but not here. (There's no clear cut-off here; but if a book seemed primarily a collector's item, museum-piece or novelty, I skipped it.)

And so there's no number. However you care to count them, the number doesn't rival that churned out by Araki (about whose photobooks at least two books do the same job as LL), but it's a lot. All in all, "remarkable" seems justified. -- Hoary (talk) 00:57, 10 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I've changed "remarkable" to "large": the latter still gets the job done, and is less blatant. -- Hoary (talk) 23:54, 22 March 2020 (UTC)