Tropical Reading: Photobook and Self-Publishing is divided into three parts: a) artists; b) art bookstores; c) photobooks and self-publishing scenes; plus, an appendix and an index of ten cities. A bilingual publication, the English version reads from left to right; the Chinese version right to left.

The first section illustrates the photography practitioners and artist collectives from each city in Southeast Asia, examining why they chose to get into self-publishing. The second section explores the ways in which independent art bookstores came to be the social parlors of the self-publishing crowd. The third section island-hops between the photobook and self-publishing phenomena of recent years, observing how the outsider artists, archives and arts initiatives of Southeast Asia came to shape the face of photography and self-publishing in their respective cities.

As an appendix, “So, Why Photobook?” explores the changing meaning of the term “photobook” in different linguistic contexts, the myriad of links between the term and the physical object – and ultimately, why exactly we do photobooks.

The final part of the book, the index, is a compilation of our project field research, condensing the profiles of all the interviewees – from people to bookstores to organizations – to make a kind of alternative Yellow Pages for the Southeast Asian art scene.