“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]
The winners of the Photography.Book.Now contest have just been announced (Reuters announcement here & PDN article here)!
Out of the winning titles selected by the great team of judges, of which I served as Lead Judge, Rafal Milach’s “Black Sea of Concrete” stood out as the best overall photobook. It stands as a wonderful embodiment of all of the criteria I asked the judges to consider: strong photography, important subject matter, vigorous edit and intelligent sequencing, combined with a thoughtful attention to those elements that are specifically book-centric, including type treatment, page-layout and cover design.
At the heart of the contest was the combination of photographs and books. The contest was not just about photographs, but about photographs in book form.
Overall, Milach’s book is one that I think people will want to return to repeatedly. He enlisted the assistance of a designer and an editor, and in doing so exhibited care and attention to the book, as a whole, acknowledging his own strengths and weaknesses in the process; it was truly teamwork that led to a better end-result. As lead judge, I’m extremely proud to have been able to award the Grand Prize to a relatively young photographer and book artist and I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.
The other winners include:
Kurt Tong, who won in the Editorial Category with People’s Park (below, top) Joshua Deaner, who won in the Fine Art category with I Sell Fish (below, bottom)
And Dennis Kleiman, who won in the Commercial category with Volume One
Read the story on PDN here (with more photos). Read the Blurb blog here. To join judges and winners at various meet-ups around the country (+London), click here.
About Photography.Book.Now
Photography.Book.Now is an international juried self-published book competition, and a celebration of the most creative, most innovative, and finest photography books – and the people behind them. Now in its second year, Photography.Book.Now offers photographers of all stripes the opportunity to showcase their work to a world-renowned panel of judges, and take a shot at a $25,000 grand prize. Submissions closed on July 16, 2009. For more information on prizes, sponsors, and upcoming social events, visit www.photographybooknow.com.
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….
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.
The semester has begun, and many of my friends and colleagues are back in their classrooms and lecture halls inspiring willing, ready students of higher education.
For me, this (lost) summer was a bit of a technological explosion: I updated this, my WordPress blog (actually, the team at Bad Feather updated it!); got permanently locked out of my FB page (Yes, that’s me. No, I can’t access it. Yes, FB has been notified and NO, they haven’t responded. Yes, my Twitter feed still goes to my status updates and makes it look like I’m actually on FB a lot…but I digress…). I also figured out how to best utilize Twitter (and TweetDeck) and love writing with it; I had fun with my Flip video; I geeked out on various Apps for my iPhone (and recorded an entire “live” album on my built-in Voice Memo App).
I also watched the people (and youth) of Iran challenge their government through the same “social media” networks that many use in frivolous ways on a daily basis, and I honored the imprisoned, innocent Baha’is in Iran who have spent over one year in jail for serving their country and promoting the oneness of humanity.
In addition to the frenetic-ness of the summer, I sat in awe and wonder as various absolutely amazing programs, utilities and apps were developed and released into our Internet-world. I was introduced to Tokbox, Qik, Shazam, and Blip.fm and began using them regularly.
With bluetooth capabilities in our cars, Pandora.com playing on our iPhones, Skype on the laptops and massive file sharing through any number of online services, I began to feel rather Jetsonian. I just need to find Rosie the Robot to complete the picture.
But then I came across this passage (online, of course) by Thoreau:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” —Thoreau, Walden
These two passages instantly resonated with me and my inner dialogue felt stimulated, nourished and challenged. I both agree and disagree with Thoreau and Benjamin. Many of the “inventions” I came across this summer are not much more than “pretty toys” and fall into the entertainment category. In fact, depending on how you use them, all of these tools could reside at the level of superficial entertainment.
But that is precisely the point. It depends on how you use them. For example: the people of Iran (primarily young adults) were able to publicize on a hitherto unprecedented international level what they saw as rigged election results by the Iranian government through utilizing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Protests, beatings, police crackdowns and deaths were all placed directly in front of the eyes of the people of the world to see and bear witness to. No longer could a government simply drive over to the TV and radio stations and easily shut down the stream of information flowing to the outside world. Every single person with a cell phone or a PDA was a potential broadcaster in a worldwide sea of journalists. It was truly amazing to watch and follow (and I say that regardless of political positions).
That may beg the question, however: Why do we care what happens to people on the other side of the world? The answer (besides a much longer blog post) is that our world has shrunk to such a degree that we are all connected in ways that, as a human race, we have never been before.
Let me say that again: in the entire history of humanity, humans have never been thisin touch with each other—socially, politically, through commerce and the military, through ideas and religion and popular culture—ever before. New realities require new paradigms and new ways of existing. To many, it’s obvious that a new system of ordering society at the global and local levels to facilitate those social, political, commercial, popular culture connections is not only required but will inevitably be constructed. (And to be honest, to be alive at a time when the global body-politic of humanity is passing through such changes is about the most amazing, exciting thing I can even imagine, like witnessing a stormy teenager enter into a confident adulthood.)
Back to the point though. Benjamin’s wonderful observation, made nearly a century ago, is as much about the worth of the content published as it is about the ability to publish, held even more so now by any and all average citizens.
In the world of publishing (and photography book publishing specifically), there is a fascinating development going on in the form of print-on-demand books. As I state in my essay “Who Cares About Books” (published by LACMA in WordsWithoutPictures*), “An entirely new generation of curators, critics and photographers** see the book as a central form of expression in photography.” This appreciation of the book, coupled with the ease and accessibility of book production, thanks to companies like Blurb.com, has fueled a flood of new books, all printed out one at a time using technology that was unthinkable 15 years ago.
Anyway, the coolest tools of the age are all around us, and they only add to the great developments of the twentieth century. The ability to produce a book is only a few clicks away. The responsibility to produce worthwhile content, as Thoreau implies, is still there.
[For someone not at all related to photography but doing amazing book~literature~new media stuff, check out Barbara Hui. Her Litmap project, about Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage by W. G. Sebald will blow you away. Imagine Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History organized like this!]
* —join essayists and Charlotte Cotton in NYC September 17, 2009).
** —Markus Schaden (of Schaden.com, Europe’s best photobook store talks with Martin Parr about Parr’s newest book, Playas, published by Editorial RM)
To order the WordsWithoutPictures book (a print-on-demand title), click the image below. This is what will come in the mail (if you order two, that is):
Reading the Modern Photography Book: Changing Perceptions was an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art this past Spring. Somehow, tragically, I missed it! But the online slideshow is amazing.
