And the winner is…
Friday, September 2nd, 2011The Photography Book Now 2011 Winners are announced!
PBN 2011 Grand Prize Winner from Blurb Books on Vimeo.
PBN 2011 Category Winners from Blurb Books on Vimeo.
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Writing Book Reviews
Sunday, August 14th, 2011
The gent in blue is none other than Gerry Badger, one of the most influential writers in photography at this point in history. And the man behind the words in Volumes 1 & 2 of The Photobook: A History. He was in NYC this weekend for the judging of the Photography Book Now competition.
British.
Warm heart.
Keen mind.
Smiling personality.
A wonderful photographer himself.
Winner of the ICP Award for Writing in 2011.
And is currently working on the writing for the 3rd volume of the history of photobooks in his ruled notebook.
In pen.
By hand.
Kill me already! So great to see.
[Sorry this is such a lousy portrait, Gerry!]
Part 2: Thoughts on Photobooks 2011
Monday, June 13th, 2011
In my previous post, I outlined some specific thoughts related to the Photography Book Now competition as it enters it’s 4th year. There’s $25k up for grabs for the best in self-published photography books.
Beyond that, I hinted at the “extremely rich moment” we are witnessing in the history of photography and books. Unparalleled resources and tools are available for artistic expression and the possibilities for distribution, primarily of self-published books, are growing. I want to mention these a bit more in-depth.
Topping the list are the efforts of Andy Adams of Flak Photo and writer Miki Johnson, who, on Saturday, June 4, traveled to the Flash Forward Festival Boston to participate in a panel discussion that “explored the state of photobook production, consumption and distribution in the Internet Era.” They presented the results of (and furthered the conversation around) a crowd-sourced blog post on the Future of Photobooks that took place last year with bloggers and contributors from around the world participating in the flow and exchange of ideas. A fantastic video of their event is available here:
The Future of Photobooks: Flash Forward Festival Discussion
Also, Andy is compiling a list of online photobook resources on his website. I won’t repeat that full list here, but want to add some other pertinent resources and developments. (But to continue that conversation head over to Flak Photo’s Facebook page!)
I really can’t emphasize how fantastic I think this is. The brainchild of Larissa Leclair, who has singled-handedly (with an intern or two thrown in occasionally), the Indie Photobook Library is an ever-growing accessible resource and archive for self-published photobooks. Her goal is to eventually gift the collection to a major institution. In the meantime, she has been traveling the library around the continent (and is open to suggestions about fellowships and workshops for the Library).
Bruno Ceschel is to be commended for all his work in promoting the roaring river of great self-published photobooks. (There’s also Self Publish, Be Naughty, a brilliant little side show.)
ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative
The Artists’ Books Cooperative is “an international network created by and for artists who make print-on-demand books.” Simple enough. It is a membership based group of artists, in true cooperative fashion, that promotes and distributes print-on-demand books. (Membership information here.)
Foto Book Festival, Kassel and the “Dummy Award”
Each year the Foto Book Festival in Kassel awards Best Books, based on a jury of figures in the field. It also hosts a competition for photobook “dummies”, proposals for future photobooks. The jury this year for the dummy award consisted of Yoko Sawada (Tokyo), Gabriel Franziska Götz (Amsterdam), John Gossage (Washington), Jeffrey Ladd (New York), Frank Seltmann (Lüdenscheid), Andreas Müller- Pohle (Berlin) and Markus Schaden (Köln). An amazing line-up!
Supporting the overall scene
As the interest in the photographic book form has blossomed, I want to take a moment to emphasize how important it is to support the overall scene. The arts have always required patronage; traditionally it was the Church and Crown. Now, quite literally, it’s us. Just as the Internet is connecting us globally in real-time, so too must we connect with the bricks and mortar component to these resources.
That means both sending your self-published book to the Indie Photobook Library as well as purchasing books through the Self-Publish, Be Happy store. It means going to workshops and festivals and book shows. This growing, ever-morphing, loosely knit community requires our creative input and our $$$ to survive.
How? Check out these links:
Distributed Art Publishers online resource: ArtBook.com
Markus Schaden is the best bookseller in Europe: Schaden.com
Where to drool in NYC: DashwoodBooks.com
The hardworking folks in Santa Fe: photo-eye Books
If you really want to geek out for a moment on some amazing photo book spines, check out this microsite for the Robert Adams archive at the Yale University Art Gallery. Sweet!
Lastly, over the past 3 years, Mary Virginia Swanson and I have been working on a book titled, Publish Your Photography Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). It’s now available! And we like to think it has some useful information in it (along with 50+ contributors from across the industry).
—Darius Himes
San Francisco, 2011
(And remember, to continue this conversation head over to Flak Photo’s Facebook page)
What I got for Christmas
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
The catalogue to the Steidl exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris. [Thanks MVS!]
And a wicked fun book from 20×200 celebrating last year. [Thanks 20x200 team!]
Alec Soth and his Open Letter to The New York Times
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
Two months ago, in an “open letter” to The New York Times posted on his blog, the bookish and book-centric photographer Alec Soth raised some interesting points that I’d like to pick up on. His letter—an appeal, really—was in response to both the coverage, by The Times, of the recent NY Art Book Fair, (sponsored by the ever-rebellious and now-well-established non-profit organization Printed Matter) as well as a blog posting over at The News Gallery.
Soth had just participated in the NY Art Book Fair with his publishing company* Little Brown Mushroom. By all accounts over the last two months (meaning, in emails from friends, acquaintances, colleagues at other publishing companies and the many Twitter, FB and blog postings) the fair was a big success both in attendance and financially for many of the participating organizations.
The blog posting that got under Alec’s skin had reported on the event and commented on the scores of attendees who thronged PS1. But there was, essentially, a condescending tone to the piece, which then went on to quote “a real author”, Paul Auster (who kind-of has nothing to do with art books in any professional way, but is a really good author). What particularly irked Soth** was the expression, by the writer, that the NY Art Book Fair was “technically” an art book fair, but that there were titles by writers and philosophers as well. (Read it here). The writer emphasized the non-art book writers and publishers, thus skewing the impression of what the fair was about (and why the scores of people had come out to attend).
It also irked me, on several different points. One of those is a sore spot I have surrounding the media discussion on publishing in general. According to the larger cultural and journalistic media outlets (both in print and in other forms), the outlook on publishing is decidedly not rosy. “The Death of Publishing” is proclaimed regularly, and then CEOs of major publishing houses are quoted, recounting drops in sales and other horrors. The ever-present (and decidedly boring) debate on e-books vs. printed books is another regular piece of the puzzle that is chewed up and regurgitated back to the masses as an extremely important part of the dilemma and shifting landscape in “publishing” (see * below).
Fine. We get it. The big guys wish more people would buy their products. We know. And they wish they could predict the future of how “new technologies” will impact how people buy their products. Again. We know. Isn’t that pretty much the history of all commercial interactions for the last, umm, several millennia?
What would be interesting would be to report on where there actually is thriving activity.*** Which comes back to Soth’s point. There is a real-life, thriving photography-book culture that is diverse, sustainable and extremely exciting (and which rarely gets reported).****
I echo Alec’s lament that a “purveyor of culture”, such as The New York Times, rarely covers any serious art or photography books, even in their Book Review supplement (though Richard Misrach got a shout-out in a holiday Coffee Table books of 2010 list for his “Destroy This Memory”. Of the few remaining fine-art photography magazines left—Aperture, Blind Spot, PDN, American Photo, 8 Magazine, Daylight, FOAM (who am I missing?)—most, but not all, feature 2-4 pages of book reviews, but rarely is the photographer-as-author truly delved into. (It’s also not their mission, as publications, to do so.) Round-ups of Best Books lists provide interesting commentary once a year, but even then, those lists get mixed in with things like “Bestselling Books” of the year lists, which only serve to emphasize what we already know: the public still likes horses, kittens, sunsets and celebrity.
The world of art magazines follows more or less the same pattern as photography magazines when it comes to books. There is the occasional review, but no one has really picked up the thread of the artist-as-author on any regular basis. Bookforum, the sister publication to Artforum, might seem like the logical place to read about art books, but it was conceived as the “literary supplement” to their older sibling and pays minimal attention to art books*****.
As I’ve said elsewhere, there is a whole new generation of photographers (and many non-photographic artists) who see the book as their primary expression. Not just as a container for artwork, but as the final piece itself. The book is the message and the vehicle at one and the same time.
Unfortunately, there is no printed publication that details the world of printed, published (and self-published) art and photography books. (But can’t you feel the need and desire for it building??)
Perhaps I’ve simply talked myself into the proverbial corner of wanting to receive a monthly or quarterly magazine that surveys the field of art and photography book publishing… Wait, I used to edit a magazine like that! (Perhaps I’m just feeling sentimental over the holidays….)******
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* This probably warrants a small discussion about what constitutes a “publishing company”. In the world of art and photobooks, which is what the NY Art Book Fair celebrates, a publishing company is any person or organization, no matter how small, that produces books. Printed Matter itself is a bastion of the small-press activities that are sprinkled across the continent. Little Brown Mushroom, as a publishing company, is essentially Alec, who is a full-time photographer, producing the occasional title of his own or someone else’s work, helped out by his one or two studio assistants (along with one or two interns at any given time).
** Soth is a sometime contributor to the Times’ online blog, The Opinionator.
*** This is another very sore point for me. There is a pathos of complaint, criticism and negativity that permeates our media culture. Wait, actually it permeates our entire social structure. It’s really not useful. In fact, it’s downright dangerous. The words we utter are expressions of the ideas that fill our minds (and often our hearts). To effect a change at the level of culture may sound impossible. But it isn’t. To acclaim, praise and search for the positive takes a bit more energy, and if anything, it just feels different than complaining, criticizing and being negative. Yet, it has wide-ranging effects in our world and social interactions.
**** And I’ve just co-authored a book about it called Publish Your Photography Book (with Mary Virginia Swanson, Princeton Architectural Press, Spring 2011).
***** I’ve written for Bookforum about photography books, including an interview with Stephen Shore and a review of The Theatre of the Face, by Max Kozloff.
****** First, let me say that I realize I’m complaining about a culture of complaining. But regular readers will also realize this is a rare semi-rant. I’m not even that mad! I should also make the point that the magazines listed above do spend time and devote pages to interviews with artists and photographers, for some of whom the book is key to their practice. I’m definitely not being critical of them. And secondly, can someone please show me a better way to use footnotes in a blog entry!?
Publishing in Your Hands
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
PUBLISHING IN YOUR HANDS
Over on Fraction Magazine’s blog, there is a new roundtable discussion with Andy Adams (FlakPhoto.com), David Bram (Fraction Magazine), Melanie McWhorter (photo-eye Books) and myself discussing self-publishing.
Here’s a bit of an introduction:
At the end of last year (2009) Miki Johnson and Andy Adams coordinated a “cross-blog” discussion about the future of photography books. Over forty bloggers participated with a range of amateur and professional voices piping in and adding their thoughts to the mix.
The interest in the subject of photobooks* has continued unabated and various fairs devoted to the Photobook are popping up around the world.** With the 3rd annual Photography Book Now contest deadline fast approaching (sponsored by Blurb and featuring a whopping $25,000 grand prize), a few of us that love photobooks thought we would initiate another online discussion about self-publishing—where we’ve come in the last few years in terms of perception, creativity and technology.
Please feel free to add your comments here or post in-depth thoughts on your own blog and send us the link.
—Darius Himes, Santa Fe, June 30, 2010
*I recently tried to order the Chinese edition of Robert Frank’s The Americans only to be told it’s not available in the U.S. Who knew (besides Martin Parr and the elves at Steidl) it would even be published in China?!
**The first annual Fotobuch Tage in Hamburg, Germany was well-attended and had, as part of the programming, a photobook dummy exhibition during which the public got to vote for their favorite not-yet-published photography book.
PBN09 Awards Ceremony @NYC
Thursday, September 24th, 2009“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”—Alan Kay
Last night, on a beautiful, balmy, breezy September eve in New York City at Tribeca Rooftop, Blurb.inc hosted the awards ceremony for the 2009 Photography.Book.Now contest. As lead judge not only did I MC the evening event, but I got to give a very deserving photographer by the name of Rafal Milach from Warsaw, Poland $$$TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND-U.S.-DOLLARS. Not only did it make him happy but it made me very, very happy.
In many ways, Blurb is inventing a part of the future, and their support of books and photography is phenomenal. So, one more “Thank You” to Eileen and the Blurb crew (Robin, Lori, Brenna, Mike and the rest of the team + Wendy and the NYC collaborators for putting on an amazing evening).
Below is the text of my prepared statement for the evening:
There has been a lot of news of DEATH, DYING and KILLING in recent times and I don’t just mean the dozens of wars and armed conflicts worldwide. When we listen to the media we hear that newspapers are dying and photography is dead. They say that digital killed analog, bloggers killed print-journalism and any number of magazines are listed on deathwatch websites.
If you believe it there is carnage and unprecedented global upheaval from which we’ll supposedly never recover.
Personally I think all of that is a load of bull.
I’d like to suggest that this “is what real revolutions are like,” to borrow the words of Clay Shirky, a brilliant social commentator. They involve slippery and exciting change that cannot be controlled by the usual methods.
I fully agree.
“The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”
And so it is with us assembled tonight. We are here not because one technology has killed another, or because some set of industries are in danger of dying, real as that may feel. We are here to celebrate newness, innovation and the glorious creativity of the human spirit. And yes, CHANGE. Whether we know it or not, we are living through revolutionary times.
When someone demands to know whether print-on-demand will kill publishing and whether newspapers and magazines will die “they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution.” As Shirky says: “They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be lied to.”
I cannot tell a lie.
But I can say that books are ancient vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and resonate with us as objects even today. Photography, by contrast, is no more developed than a toddler in the scope of human history. It is a gift of modernity and it is changing rapidly before our eyes … and all of that is as exciting as anything I can think of.
To be attached to old ways and outdated systems in this new day is foolhardy and naive, for who can any longer believe that technologies won’t change radically every six months or more. And who cares!? Change is inevitable. Has anyone mentioned we are living in the 21st century? I don’t know how all of these changes will affect the larger industries many of us work in; no one really does. But I do know that we are the future—we are the architects and the builders and there are more and more powerful tools at our disposal every time we blink our eyes.
So let me remind everyone to please take out your cell phones … and make sure they are on. Please Tweet, Blip, Facebook, Blog and Qik video anything and everything you want. We are witnessing changes the likes of which previous generations could never dream.
The Photography.Book.Now contest was not just another “photography” contest. This was a photography-book contest—and specifically, one that celebrates print-on-demand technology. Many thanks and shout-outs to all the photographers who submitted, attended the party and decided to participate in something fresh and exciting, without really knowing where we’re all headed.
[Posting this entry from 34,000 ft & the future. Here is the full text of Clay Shirky's talk on the state of newspaper publishing. Follow me on Twitter @dariushimes]
Photography: A Very Short Introduction
Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney