All images are from The Eight Day by Gao Shan. — All images are from *The Eight Day* by Gao Shan.

From January to February 2020, Fotogalleriet will look more closely at the photobook as an exhibition space in Le Book Club, a show unravelling in five chapters over five weeks. In light of this, we reignite our interview series looking closely at book production. We continue this series by talking to the Chinese artist Gao Shan, this years winner of First PhotoBook in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards for his book The Eighth Day.

The last decade has seen more photobooks than the last 170 years together according to the PhotoBook Museum, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. What do you think, is the photo book in trouble?

I really have no strong opinions about that, I think that’s beyond my thinking area as a photographer.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

There are a couple books I really fond of, like the ones by Georges Bataille. I've read two books over and over again, L'expérience intérieue by Georges Bataille, and Joseph Brodsky’s On Grief and Reason.

As a photographer, how you work with the book? What is the purpose of the book for you?

Photobooks for me, that means a finish to a work, you keep doing and finally it ends, it’s a medium you show your work to this world.

And a last question, what are you working on now?

I’m working on a new project that is about human existence, around themes as labor, migration, power and more. It’s not an absolutely complete work yet, I am also including videos and sculpture. I am not using a clear narrative in my work this time, I trust the strength of every single photo instead.

A jury at Paris Photo selected this year’s winners. The jury included: Irene Attinger, curator; Osei Bonsu, curator of international art at Tate Modern; Emma Bowkett, director of photography at FT Weekend Magazine; Takashi Homma, artist; and also Nina Strand, editor and founder, Objektiv Press. This is what Aperture wrote about the winner: The Eighth Day (Imageless, Wuxi, China), winner of the First PhotoBook Award, was born out of his desire to connect with his adoptive mother, who he shares a roughly-seventy-square-meter apartment with. Shan was praised for the simple yet thoughtful and emotionally potent design and sequence. Takashi Homma observed that while the work appears on one hand to be straightforward documentary, it also employs “performative and conceptual approaches in a sophisticated way.” As Homma noted, “This is someone who seems to know their history of photography and photobooks. I would like to see his next book!”