Towards a Photobook Beyond Historical Documents
"Heap-O-Livin': Selections from the Lora Webb Nichols Archive 1899–1962"
"What a fresh, life-filled photograph this is.”
As soon as I opened the latest photobook of Lora Webb Nichols, published by Fw: Books, my hunch that this would be a good photobook turned into certainty, and before I knew it, I was captivated.
As neither a historian nor a researcher, I have seen few photographs from this period. Yet it was the first time I encountered images that so vividly retain the texture of their era and at the same time appear timeless—images so natural and dynamic.
Why is it that I feel so drawn to these photographs, taken in a distant land about a hundred years ago? The certainty I felt at first gradually transformed into a question.
Everyday Records Beginning in the Mining Town of Encampment
Lora Webb Nichols was born in 1883 in the mining town of Encampment, Wyoming. She began keeping a diary at thirteen, and after picking up her first camera at sixteen, she started documenting daily life on her family’s farm and in the surrounding area. As early as 1906, she was already taking on commissions for industrial records and family portraits, working as a photographer.
Even after the collapse of the copper industry, Nichols remained in Encampment. To support her family, she established "Rocky Mountain Studio", which offered photographic services and film developing. In the 1920s and 30s, she became a central figure in town life, running the local newspaper, "The Encampment Echo", as well as the soda fountain "Sugar Bowl".
After losing her mother in 1935, she moved to California and attempted a fresh start in the Central Valley. For more than twenty years, she worked in the Stockton area as a live-in housekeeper and carer, eventually securing stable employment at a children’s home in Stockton. When her husband died in 1955, she returned once again to Encampment, moving into her final residence, “Heap-O-Livin’.” Until her death at home in 1962, she continued to write and to photograph, leaving behind some 24,000 negatives and sixty-five years’ worth of diaries.
A portrait of Nichols, 1930
A Bold Decision by the Publisher and Hill
This book follows the photobook "Encampment, Wyoming: Selections From The Lora Webb Nichols Archive 1899–1948", also published by Fw: Books in 2021. I personally encountered Nichols’s photographs for the first time in this new volume, but by the time of the earlier photobook, she was already widely recognised. That book achieved major success, nominated for prominent photobook awards such as the Rencontres d’Arles and chosen as a best book of the year by many artists.
Like the previous volume, this book features a classical clothbound cover with an attached photograph. Opening it, the main body begins without any preface: intimate, enigmatic images unfold in a sequence that is both rhythmical and occasionally offbeat, avoiding monotony with remarkable skill. At the end comes a superb text by editor Nicole Jean Hill, weaving in quotations from Nichols’s letters and diaries.
This approach exemplifies the modern photobook’s resistance to the catalogue format. Yet simply adhering to these conventions often produces books that feel like exam answers—merely checking the right boxes. The editorial decision to deliberately defy conventions is what makes this book and Nichols's work so compelling. The driving forces behind this series are the publisher Fw: Books and the American artist Nicole Jean Hill, who has overseen the preservation and organisation of the Nichols Archive and edited both the previous volume and this one.
Photographs Begin to Speak with the Grammar of the Photobook
Sixteen years after Nichols’s death, in 1978, Hill was born in Toledo, Ohio. She studied photography at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, earned an MFA in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is now Chair of the Department of Art + Film at Cal Poly Humboldt. Since 2013, together with Nancy Anderson—who lived with Nichols in the 1960s while safeguarding her archive—Hill has worked on digitising the vast negatives, restoring diaries and letters, and building a permanent preservation system.
Of course, the greatest reason the first book resonated was the power of Nichols’s photographs themselves. But photography does not end with shooting. It becomes “work” only through choices about printing, exhibition or book sequencing, image size, and printing method. It was Hill’s accomplishment to bring Nichols’s unfinished photographs to fruition as finished works.
Remember: the photographs included here are only a fraction of the 24,000 Nichols left behind. That fact alone is astonishing. Browsing the publicly available archive at the American Heritage Center makes clear how profoundly the choice of selection can alter the image of the artist. Every selection requires a guiding principle, and it is this principle that distinguishes this book from a mere historical catalogue.
Alec Soth, one of America's most prominent photographers, praised the previous book upon its publication. Soth described Hill’s editing as an “act of courage”. When handling material of historical significance, one inevitably bears responsibility, and as a result, photography from this period is usually treated with heavy emphasis on its historical dimension, resulting in catalogues of record. Instead of acknowledging the documentary weight, Hill chose to create a book that reflects the style of contemporary photobooks, which was produced by Fw: Books.
The sequencing of photographs, the rhythm of motifs, the placement of text, and the book design—the strategies employed here and in the previous volume are precisely those of the contemporary photobook. This is why photographs from the past come alive as if they belonged to the present. Rather than suppressing authorship under historical context, the editorial approach has brought forward Nichols’s individual voice. The result: photographs a hundred years old resonate as though they were a new book by a contemporary artist.
An Alternative Mode of Storytelling: Neither Archive Nor Found
A comparable recent success that comes to mind is "Let’s Sit Down Before We Go", Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen’s book edited by British photographer Stephen Gill. Gill is a specialist in photobook-making, a figure who led the photobook movement from the late 2000s. Hill, by contrast, was not necessarily trained in editing photobooks, nor is her own work in that mould. Yet this book is “perfectly” realised as a contemporary photobook, from selection through layout. With it, Fw: Books has revealed not only the appeal of Nichols as an artist but also Hill’s talent as an editor.
The previous book was both a “greatest hit” of Nichols’s archive and a collection centred on “iconic” portraits of the American West through a female lens. By contrast, Hill explains in her afterword that this book was edited from a perspective as if she were Nichols’s granddaughter—in other words, with an approach akin to a family album. In this sense, the book has even greater purity as a photobook. At the same time, Hill’s stance of “accompanying Lora’s life as if I were her granddaughter” carries a risk: in editing “discovered” photographs or an artist’s body of work, the editor sometimes becomes the unacknowledged subject, ventriloquising the artist to tell their own story.
Exquisite stilllife and subtle layout.
So why do Nichols’s photographs appear so free, so full of life? One can sense the difference intuitively, though it is hard to verbalise. What can be said is that Hill has succeeded in editing without effacing Nichols’s proper name. Once photographs are treated as historical records, they risk being subsumed into the massive archive of history, reduced to just one among countless documents. Or, as noted above, once labelled “found”, their authorship too is unconsciously diminished.
Hill, however, did not subsume Nichols’s photographs into history but rather accompanied them as a presence that “encouraged” the photographs to speak for themselves. In Heap-O-Livin’, the images are arranged largely in chronological order, yet sometimes shifted back and forth. Even this editing choice reflects Hill’s attentiveness. Any edit inevitably involves subjectivity; one way to ensure objectivity is to foreground documentary function, but then the name is diluted and the photographs remain mere records. What Hill achieved here is a third possibility: not archive, not found, but a new way of storytelling made possible by standing beside Nichols’s photographs as those of a woman who lived in that era.
Nichols’s Voice Resonating Today
I have spoken so much of the editorial stance, but needless to say, the heart of this book is its marvellous photographs—fresh, enigmatic, and compelling. The book traces the arc of Nichols’s life, from an idealistic girl to a pragmatic and capable woman, following the trajectory of the homes she inhabited. Readers experience Nichols’s life itself through portraits of her family, friends, children, self-portraits, and members of her knitting circle. By the end, one finds oneself thoroughly enchanted.
Thanks to Nichols’s vision and the editorial mastery of Fw: Books, black-and-white photographs from a century ago have gained a freshness and contemporary resonance that surpasses even colourization. A photobook that reveals the wonder of the world and of life within the everyday—like its predecessor, this volume will surely be embraced immediately as a masterpiece, securing its place in the history of the photobook. For admirers of snapshot and portrait photography, and for anyone interested in contemporary photobook-making, it offers profound discoveries.
"Heap-O-Livin’”, Nichols’s final home (photographed 1940)
Article by Yukihito Kono (24 September, 2025)
Title: Heap-O-Livin'
Artist: Lora Webb Nichols
Editor: Nicole Jean Hill
Publisher: Fw: Books, 2025
Format: Softcover
Size: 215 × 280 mm
Pages: 192
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 9789083451091
Price: ¥9,900
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