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Publish Your Photography Book

Publish Your Photography Book, by Darius D. Himes & Mary Virginia Swanson
Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN 9781568988832
7 x 9 inches (17.8 x 22.9 cm), Paperback, 224 pages
25 color illustrations ; 50 b/w illustrations
Coming Soon (publication date 1/17/2011) Watch this blog for more info!
$29.95 £18.99

From the Princeton Architectural Press website:

We live in the golden age of the photography book. Since the early 1990s, the number of photography book publishers has continued to grow while technological developments have placed more tools for bookmaking directly in the hands of photographers. For the students and working artists who have chosen photography as their primary means of expression, having their own photography book is seen as a passport to the international photography scene. Yet, few have more than a tentative grasp of the component parts of a book, an understanding of what they want to express, or the know-how needed to get a book published. Publish Your Photography Book is the first book to demystify the process of producing and publishing a book of photographs. Industry insiders Darius D. Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson survey the current landscape of photography book publishing and point out the many avenues to pursue and pitfalls to avoid. This expert guide is organized in six sections covering the rich history of the photo book; an overview of the publishing industry; an intimate look at the process of making a book; a close review of how to market a photo book; a section on case studies, built around discussions and interviews with published photographers; and a final section presenting a wealth of resources and information to aid in the understanding of the publishing world. Publish Your Photography Book also includes a number of additional interviews and contributions from industry professionals, including artists, publishers, designers, packagers, editors, and other industry experts who openly share their publishing experiences.

Darius Himes was a founding editor of photo-eye Booklist and is a cofounder of Radius Books, a nonprofit company publishing books on the visual arts. Himes is also a lecturer, consultant, and writer who has contributed to numerous publications.

Mary Virginia Swanson is a consultant in the area of licensing and marketing fine-art photography. Swanson frequently lectures and conducts workshops and educational programs for photographers and students.A respected judge of competitions and awards as well as portfolio reviewer, she is widely recognized for her blog Marketing Photos, a valued resource for photographers.

Tags: Mary Virginia Swanson, Princeton Architectural Press
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Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)

Words Without Pictures, edited by Alex Klein (Aperture, 2010)
Including an essay by Darius Himes (among numerous others)
ISBN 978-1597111423
6 x 8 inches, Softbound, 510 pages

Words Without Pictures was originally conceived by curator Charlotte Cotton as a means of creating spaces for discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic or curator was invited to contribute a short unillustrated essay about an aspect of emerging photography. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on its specific topic. Over the course of its month-long “life,” each essay received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested parties. All of these essays, responses and other provocations are gathered together here. Previously issued as a print-on-demand title, we are pleased to present Words Without Pictures to the trade for the first time as part of the Aperture Ideas series. The contributors are Amy Adler, George Baker, Christopher Bedford, Walead Beshty, Sarah Charlesworth, Charlotte Cotton, John Divola, Shannon Ebner, Jason Evans, Harrell Fletcher, Paul Graham, Leslie Hewitt, Darius Himes, Soo Kim, Sze Tsung Leong, Miranda Lichtenstein, Sharon Lockhart, Allan McCollum, Kevin Moore, Carter Mull, Marisa Olson, Arthur Ou, Anthony Pearson, Michael Queenland, Allen Ruppersberg, Alex Slade, A.L. Steiner, Penelope Umbrico, James Welling, Charlie White, Mark Wyse and Amir Zaki.

Excerpt from the essay “Who Cares About Books?” by Darius Himes

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Tags: Aperture, Charlotte Cotton
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Short Track, by Jake Mendel

Short Track, by Jake Mendel (powerHouse Books, 2009)
Essay by Darius Himes
ISBN 978-1-57687-510-0
9.25 x 12.25 inches, Hardcover, 112 pages, 75 duotone illustrations

Excerpt from the essay “Dangerous Speed” by Darius Himes:

I first learned how to drive stick on the family riding lawnmower, of all things. It was an early-80s John Deere model that my father purchased with a healthy employee discount, and which came equipped with a clutch and 3-speed transmission. It wasn’t clear to me then how important knowledge of a manual transmission would be for my adult life. What was clear at the moment was that in the right patch of loose gravel in the alley separating our garage and the back 1/2 acre, you could actually make that thing peel out and leave a tiny puff of dust. The fact that it would assist in mowing the expansive lawn that my little brother and I were in charge of really only dawned on me later.

At top speed, the lawnmower could hit about 8 mph. This was a major disappointment for a 12 year old, to be sure. For years already I had been studying the various dune buggies and three wheelers available in the back of the oversize Montgomery Ward’s catalog that would arrive twice a year at our home in rural Iowa. I already knew, deep in my heart, that I wanted a motorized vehicle with potential for excessive speed. The lawnmower was definitely not it. But it was a step in the right direction.

My first conscious awakening to the thrill and allure of dangerous speed came years earlier while perched on the middle hump of the back bench seat of my father’s 1966 Ford Mustang. My dad, in truth, is no “car guy” but on open stretches of country road, where visibility is high and your foot is connected to the gas pedal of a hunk of barely-sweating-at-60-mph American steel and ingenuity, what guy (or gal) doesn’t become a “car guy”?

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Mus-Mus & @Paris

Back in the spring of this year, the good folks at Mus Mus (who prefer to remain anonymous) approached me about contributing to their new Mus-Mus project, @Paris. I gently declined due to an already overflowing plate, but they came back a month or so later and asked again, “just to make sure.” I think I again gently declined, but by the time they knocked on the door a third time, I had been thinking about what I would contribute to an online photo-project about Paris.

What I had been thinking about was the above photograph.

Since childhood, this photograph has been lodged in my memory banks. Truth be told, it’s my only connection to Paris. I’ve never been to the city, and while the romance and history of the city definitely has its hold on me, I’ve just never had occasion to get there.

But I’ve been there numerous times through the history of the life of Abdu’l-Baha and the talks he gave in that city almost exactly a century ago. I wrote back and said that if I were to contribute it would be about this photograph, and was that ok? The Mus-Mus folks were so enthusiastic and encouraging that I was glad I had decided to say Yes.

The essay is now written and the @Paris project is live and launched. And to be completely honest, of all the work I’ve been busy with this summer, this is my favorite thing. My piece is just one small touchstone of a much larger, thoughtful online “archive” of photographs by contemporary photographers, about Paris. The jurors were Stephen Shore, my good friend Denise Wolff, of Aperture, and curator/writer Ulrich Baer, who also contributed a wonderful, lengthier essay about Paris and photography. The archive is here. An excerpt from my essay is below:

In 1908, the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress revolted against the despotic Sultan Abdu’l-Hamid. This brought to an end the centuries-old Ottoman Empire and paved the way for a semi-secular government based in the ancient city of Constantinople. With that singular, revolutionary act, all political and religious prisoners throughout the Empire were freed. Abdu’l-Baha Abbas, the man in a white turban pictured in the middle of this photograph, tasted freedom for the first time since childhood. He was 65 years old.

This photograph was made in Paris in the autumn of 1911. Abdu’l-Baha stayed in the city for nearly two months, near the Trocadero Gardens adjacent to the Avenue de Camoëns. After over 50 years of exile from his native Persia, and imprisonment for espousing the universal ideals of the teachings of his father, Baha’u’llah, he had left, by steamer ship, the prison-city of Akka where he had been under house arrest since the age of 24, and embarked on a journey to the West. First London, then Paris and eventually New York City hosted his visit as he sought to create new bridges between the peoples, cultures, religions and ideals of the East and West.

In this photograph, we see Abdu’l-Baha standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, with the Champ de Mars visible in the hazy background….

To read the full essay

who is mus-mus.org?

mus-mus is a collaborative photography space that yokes ideas and images together in an experimental and playful way that seems most appropriate for an internet based salon of an increasingly post-consumer world. In keeping with this ethic we prefer a mildly anonymous position and ‘authorlessness’. Keeping mouths shut about who we are, we hope you will better know the pictures, projects and ideas.

Tags: @Paris, Abdu'l-Baha, Denise Wolff, Mus-Mus, Stephen Shore, Ulrich Baer
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Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney

Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010)
Essays by Darius Himes and Karen Irvine
ISBN 9781568988559
8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), Hardcover, 120 pages
40 color illustrations; 5 b/w illustrations

Excerpt from the essay “Following Birds” by Darius Himes:

“I remember the first bird I shot and killed. It was a starling, a noisy but elegant black bird that can be seen peppering lawns throughout the Midwest during the early morning and late afternoon hours. I was ten.

“I also remember the sick feeling in my stomach the second after I pulled the trigger, as I watched the bird fall silently to the ground, wings folded against its side. I dropped my grandfather’s Daisy BB gun, rushing to where the bird had landed, near a tree fifty yards away. The starling was utterly beautiful, a wonder of creation. But really, what bird isn’t? Layers upon layers of feathers serve as both their costume and their means of transport—a perfect marriage of beauty and utility. I’ve read that birds see movement at such a different speed than humans that to them, we look as slow as sloths.

“But this starling was no longer a flitting, quick-moving wonder. The body was limp and its head was cocked to the side, its yellow beak polished and bright against the shaded grass under our mulberry tree. I didn’t quite know what to do, as I hadn’t really thought I would hit it. My emotions were a stew—I was proud that I had actually hit my target from so far away, but sad to realize I had taken an innocent life. Grandpa announced that we would bury it where it had fallen, under the tree and along the fencerow, beyond which lay cornfields that stretched as far as my eye could see—it would be a fitting resting place for this creature. I agreed and rushed to get the hand shovel out of the shed with as much determination as I’d had when taking aim at the bird.

“That starling was also the last bird I shot. It was, however, far from the last bird I killed. …”

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Tags: Paula McCartney, Princeton Architectural Press
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Benson’s The Printed Picture reviewed in Aperture 194

The Printed Picture, by Richard Benson (MoMA, 2010)
Reviewed in Aperture 194, Spring 2009, by Darius Himes
ISBN 978-1-57687-510-0
8.25 x 11 inches, Hardcover, 338 pages, numerous illustrations

Excerpt from the review by Darius Himes:

Benson, a photographer and master printer, has a methodical mind and approaches his subject systematically; The Printed Picture is thus, at its most basic level, a textbook—though the writing is never pedantic or stuffy. Benson developed the material presented here over the course of thirty years of teaching at Yale University, and reading his words is not unlike the experience of being in a lecture hall. Each chapter presents a class of printing processes (such as “relief printing” or “non-silver processes”), and each derivative process within that chapter is limited to a double-page spread complete with illustration and detail enlargement. Entire processes are distilled to three or four paragraphs at most—digestible, succinct, and engaging.

In the first 100 pages of this 338-page book Benson takes great pains to cover all the known processes, and offers a sturdy and admirably comprehensible outline of the fundamental approaches to reproduction prior to photography. In the book’s first four chapters he discusses relief, intaglio, and planographic printing—the triumvirate of ink-on-paper printing techniques—along with early multiple-impression color processes and such elementary printing methods as stencils, rubbings, silhouettes, and the typewriter. All these early techniques, some of which have been around for centuries (in certain cases millennia), seem to have played an important role on the inexorable passage toward the invention of photography. …

The Printed Picture will speak most clearly to those readers who have spent years in the halls of art schools and love the smell of ink and turpentine, who wax poetic at the sight of fixer-stained trays, or geek out over a mammoth-plate albumen print. By the end of the book, it is clear that materiality and man’s incessant curiosity are the central themes of The Printed Picture. The love of objects and of evidence of the artist’s hand—as un-digital as that may sound—are still both relevant and worthy of celebrating. —Darius Himes.

Tags: Aperture, MoMA, Richard Benson
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Dave Jordano: Articles of Faith

Chicago photographer Dave Jordano is someone whose work I have admired for the past several years, ever since seeing his images on the Photographer Showcase over at photo-eye. His first monograph, titled Articles of Faith, is due to be released later this Spring by The Center for American Places, which is now part of Columbia College, in Chicago.The project is about churches and houses of worship on Chicago’s south side. Dave goes further: “This documentary project investigates the concept of how a sense of belonging and place can influence the development of a small segment of a community and helps preserve long-standing traditions of cultural and religious belief.”

I was asked by the publisher to review the work ahead of publication and here were my thoughts, as sent to the publisher:

“The vast diversity of religious expression that is found on our planet stems, ultimately, from the vast diversity of humanity itself. Jordano’s photographs of Christian faithful and the houses of worship on chicago’s south Side are a telescopic view of the richness of spiritual sentiment and devotion that has flourished in one tiny corner of this vast, diverse landscape. The insightful and educative essay by Carla Williams is of particular note, perfectly complementing the tender gaze of Jordano’s images. Out of the specificity that these photographs of such particular places conveys rises a sense of binding unity. Worship of the Divine, no matter where it is found, is touched by the same set of universal human impulses and yearnings. The tension between the particular and universal is wonderfully captured in this book.”

Tags: Columbia College, Dave Jordano
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6×6 and Society of Photographers

Gallerist and art dealer Gavin Rooke is the brains and energy behind The Society of Photographers, which is comprised of “a collection of contemporary photographers based across the globe. The Society operates on a unique system of anonymity and invitation-only membership to ensure that only the best work is revealed to the general public.” (Sounds mysteriously exclusive.)

For the past two years, however, Gavin has organized an invitation-only contest which is followed by a publication and traveling exhibition. In 2007, the book/exhibition was called TEN. Photographers submitted portfolios of ten images and the ten winning entries had their work published in a handsome volume. The various comments by the judges–which consists of society members and guests, such as myself–were also published in the book.

This year, the project and exhibition was titled 6×6. Once again, by invitation-only, photographers submitted six images and the winning entries were each published in their own small book with all six gathered in one slipcase.

This years’ chosen photographers include Erika Larsen, Paula McCartney, Ian Wolstenholme, Sasha Rudensky, Dave Jordano, and Shawn Records.

The guest judges this year were more extensive than last year and included:
ROGER BALLEN More
SHEYI ANTONY BANKALE More
DANA FACONTI More
MICHAEL FOLEY More
JASON FULFORD More
CLARE GRAFIK More
MATTHIAS HARDER More
DARIUS HIMES
KRISTEN LUBBEN More
STEPHEN SHORE More

And to see a complete list of the photographers participating in the traveling exhibition (which goes beyond just the 6 selected entries) click HERE.

The 6×6 book is now shipping and available in the States. Get yours today!

Posted in Book Review, My Published Writing, Photography | 1 Comment »

The Death of Photography

The death of photography is rapidly becoming a weekly pronouncement, it seems. Earlier this Fall, I interviewed Bill Jay for PDN online magazine (to be published soon!) at his home in San Diego where he mentioned being misquoted about the “death of photography” and just last week, critic Peter Plagens published a piece for Newsweek magazine, titled “Is Photography Dead?”

Well, the answer is Yes. Or at least, this is what Stephen Bulger indicated to me when he announced his first exhibition of 2008, The Death of Photography. Stephen asked me to contribute a short essay for the catalogue which is forthcoming (and will be available for purchase directly from the gallery).

What I’m posting here is the twice-as-long text of the essay which I wrote for the catalogue. In order to read the finished piece you’ll have to buy the catalogue!

Cheers, darius

THE DEATH OF PHOTOGRAPHY
An exhibition at Stephen Bulger Gallery. An essay by Darius Himes.

I still vividly remember my first summer home from college when I discovered the family cat sitting quietly under a bush in the back yard, its face gaunt and breathing shallow. Death was hovering around her, and the care with which the vet euthanized her and placed her curled body in a box has stuck with me. But that was Iowa farm country, and death was everywhere, as was life, both preceding and following death as naturally as dawn follows the night.

That was the summer of ‘89. I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest on vinyl, REM on cd, and Morrisey on cassette. I wasn’t wearing parachute pants any more, but I was growing my hair out. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Spanish author Camilo Jose Cela that year, Lee Friedlander (who hadn’t yet appeared on my radar screen) had just published Like a One-Eyed Cat, and the freshmen who entered Photo 101 classes this past Fall had just been born.

That school year, I had been studying photography with Bill Jay, William Jenkins, and Mary Anne Redding at Arizona State University. They awakened me to a life in photography, and thankfully, they are all still alive themselves.

But photography is not. It has since died. Or at least, that’s what Bill Jay told me the other day when we were working on an interview together about a new book of photographs he has just published.

“This past summer,” Bill related over a diner breakfast, “a British magazine did a profile of my photographic life in England, which ended really when I left in 1972. They quoted me as saying that “I was very disappointed not to be at the birth of photography but I am pleased that I was present at its end.” Bill chuckled at the absurdity of the thought. “I don’t remember saying that at all! But now that I’ve been quoted, I want to write a piece about why I must have said it. I think the “end of photography” has been happening over the last 30 years…”

“What do you mean by “photography”, Bill?” I asked, and he came around to the changes in the family-like aspect of the community. “It is the end of the medium as an international fraternity of like-minded people who appreciate the unique characteristics of photography. That has almost disappeared. There is a sense that there are no masters, no standards by which to judge the merit of a photograph. I am not disparaging that, but I think it is interesting. People running the galleries and museums are not practitioners, like they once were. And I am saying that photography as a unique enterprise is over.”

***

The history of technology from the mid-19th century forward is, as we all know, a litany of birth and death. It is rumored that the US patent office infamously toyed with closing in the early 1840s, stating that “everything that was going to be invented already had.”

Shortly thereafter, photography was born to a handful of scientists and intellectuals”a group of “men of letters” that indubitably included women as well. By the time William Henry Fox Talbot (b. 1800) and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (b. 1787)—the two best known of the founders—had passed away, it was the 1880s, and over a hundred distinct photographic techniques had already come into existence. Photographers were producing calotypes, collotypes, woodburytypes and, of course, daguerreotypes, along with brown, blue, purple, and gold-toned prints. Egg whites, gun cotton, piss, glass, paper and metals of all sorts found their way into the pantheon of materials that made up the photographic arsenal. Into the 20th century, that list only continued to swell. As the number of photographer’s studios and expeditionary surveys to remote locations of the world flourished—and the public’s appetite for views of themselves and their surroundings grew—so did the businesses catering to and providing photographic equipment and materials.

And as with any business enterprise, it was inevitable that, one by one, some would begin to die off.

***

Over the last decade, Alison Rossiter has been collecting unprocessed samples of photographic material—including both films and papers—from each decade of the 20th century. She processes (or has others process) these materials as they were intended, but she does so without exposing them to either an image or light of any kind.

This would have been an inconceivable artistic task in the late 1980s. What would have been the point when Azo, Kodabromide, and graded gelatin silver papers of every variety were still widely available and the norm? But at this point in our history, as news of the folding of company after company arrives in my inbox on a weekly basis, the sheer subtlety and variety of photographic surfaces and materials is lovely to behold. It both honors the material support of the medium and makes one aware of what has passed before, and now, sadly, has passed away.

A certain type of photography has definitely died.

Michel Campeau’s elegant, color photographs of darkrooms are a memento mori to the physical spaces in which these extinct photographic materials were used. The thoughtfulness that photographers put into their darkrooms—and which comes across in Campeau’s photographs—reminds me of the One Picture Press book by Bill Jay about Bill Brandt, the great British photographer. When visiting Brandt in his home, Jay asked to visit his darkroom, to which Brandt “sternly refused.” “What is it?” Jay asked, “The holy of holies?” Brandt simply answered, “Yes.”

Once, while traveling with a photographer from Rochester, NY, a fellow artist we encountered from one of the former Soviet satellites joked that my friend was from Kodakistan. Kodak, established in 1892, has, of course, been synonymous with photography for over 100 years, one of the true empires of the modern age. The large-format color work of Robert Burley centers on the dissolution and dismantling of a part of this last photographic empire: the 100 year old Kodak plant in Toronto.

***

In the common vernacular, we allude to death and killing in innumerable ways and shades, with the casually proclaimed “I’m gonna kill you” being one of the most exaggerated and blatantly misused prefatory phrases in English. He’ll just die when he hears this,” being another outstanding example.

Both physically and metaphorically, every- and anything can and will die. Batteries, engines, careers, romances and dairy products all expire on a regular basis. The French refer to orgasms as “little deaths.” And for every feeder goldfish and pair of gerbils sold, there are just as many children across the continent that learn about little deaths far before they know about the French variety.

Death, it would seem, is all around us. Only one of the bands that I listed above is still performing together, and the fashions I was wearing then are thrift store fodder now. Cela passed away in 2002 and Friedlander’s book is long out-of-print—all these major and minor deaths.

But to look at things this way is to stray into the realm of nostalgia about “the way things were.” To a very real extent, we have photography itself to blame for this. Were it not for the existence of photographs, we wouldn’t know what it looked like “back in the day.” The “Kodak moment” has fueled the modern affliction of extreme sentimentality for things past. Perhaps the urbanization of North America also has played its role, to the extent that the life cycle of house plants and pets is the extent that most people are in real contact with births and deaths.

Saying that death is all around us is as much a truism as saying that life is all around us. They go hand in hand.

There is precariousness to the revolutionary qualities of this medium. As photographers, we rely on a worldwide industry for the tools of our trade—no one among us can whip up a batch of Ektachromes at home, or call down to the corner store for a batch of Polaroids, or forge a f/5.6, 150mm lens in our workshop. We are at the mercy of the industry.

And that industry is in rapid flux. Unlike many other trades, a working commercial photographer cannot simply buy some equipment, develop his skills, and pursue a career for 30 years. Now, on the average of every 3-4 years, the equipment and software that one has recently mastered must be completely replaced and relearned. You cannot just own a camera, but you must have all of the attendant hardware and software to run the camera and process and store its images.

Artists in other disciplines have the luxury of mastering a skill in tandem with a particular instrument and then using that instrument for the remainder of their career. Imagine the uproar that musicians, of all sorts, would feel if they were forced to sell they’re Steinways and Stratocasters every four years and to then be forced to learn the nuances of a completely new instrument that used the musical principles of the previous instrument only in a cursory manner. On top of that, throw in the destruction and reprinting in a different language of all sheet music every decade. Something along those lines has been happening in photography.

***

The control of photographic materials and their availability is something that is completely out of our hands, making nostalgia over commercial products risky business. Steam trains were a glorious, revolutionizing invention, yet, how many of us pine for such travel? The Edsel, the Packard, International Harvester, and Concord were also cool at one time.

Preservation and knowledge are another point entirely. On a surface level, knowledge once gained is never lost, especially in our present age of recording. Yet, as Robert Burley points out, there is a sinister irony in the current situation. Trade secrets within the photography industry have left the community with a void of accessible information on how to reproduce the very methods of reproduction that humanity has come to rely on.

The current surge of interest in “alternative photographic processes” is possible in large part precisely because the chemical formulas are simple, handmade, and above all, written down. You or I or our great grandchildren will be able to make platinum prints just like the founders. The same is not true, or has yet to be seen, for the sheer number of copyrighted, company-specific products that are rapidly disappearing from the shelves of camera stores worldwide.

Perhaps the photography we have known will return to its beginnings: a rare, magical craft clung to by a cluster of devoted men and women who hover in that middle gray (was it Zone V or VI?) between the arts and sciences.

Tags: Alison Rossiter, Michel Campeau, Robert Burley
Posted in Book Review, My Published Writing, Photography | 2 Comments »