“What would happen if the printed book had just been invented in a high-tech world in which people had never done their reading from anything but computer screens? The unquestionable advantages of the computer would not be threatened by this new product but the people, who so love to compare apples with pears, would be quite bowled over by this ultra-modern invention: after years spent chained to the screen they would suddenly have something they could open like a window or a door – a machine you can physically enter! For the first time knowledge would be combined with a sense of touch and gravity – this new invention allows you to experience the most incredible sensations, reading becomes a physical experience. And after experiencing knowledge only as a bundle of connections, as a system of interacting networks, suddenly here is individuality: every book is an independent personality, which cannot be taken apart or added to at will. And how relaxing these new reading appliances are, their operating systems never needs updating – the only thing that changes over the course of time is the message that they contain, which is always open to new interpretations.”
—By Juan Villoro, in an article in last month’s adn CULTURA (an Argentinian culture magazine) about the “future of books.”
[kindly pointed about by reader David Christensen, and translated via SignandSight.com].
The Premise: A Crowd Sourced Blog Posting About Photography Book Publishing
Andy Adams, the creative juice behind the online magazine Flak Photo recently contacted me about a “crowd-sourced” blog posting relating to photobooks, in conjunction with Resolve, the Livebooks blog. Was I game in posting something on my own blog? Sure. I’m always game for a discussion about photobooks.
Miki Johnson, an editor and contributor to Resolve kick started the discussion with a smattering of provocative questions: “What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?”
Language and Books
What these questions assume is a common understanding and definition about how the term “book” is being used and in my opinion, so many of the discussions around photography books are sloppy because of a lack of precise language. Language and books are intimately connected—clay, stone, leather, vellum, wood, and paper all share the distinction of being used to carry words and symbols and ideograms which refer back to a spoken vocabulary, to a spoken language.
The desire and ability to create written languages is uniquely human and whole civilizations have been built around and because of them. (cf. Steven Pinker’s books, particularly The Language Instinct). The very notion of a “written language” implies a material upon which the language is written or recorded, and a brief survey reveals all sorts of variations on a theme—tablets, stellae, scrolls, screens, accordion-folded papers, bags of inscribed bones, hinged wood panels, and of course sheets of paper bound with thread all dot the history of humankind’s desire to record and convey the written word. It was Gutenberg’s invention of movable type that moved humanity into a new era, one of ever-increasing facility with reproducing the written word.
So, shoot forward to the 21st century and we have all sorts of ways that written language is conveyed to us, beyond vellum, stone tablets and sheets of paper bound with thread—the primary advancement is that we have now added electronic media, both audio and visual. But as to the act and the effect of reading the Psalms, a sheet of vellum with calligraphy from the 12th century is essentially no different than a Kindle. They are physical objects upon which one can read the written word.
The Future of Books
Over on eyecurious, Marc Feustel, who maintains the blog from Paris, adds his two-cents to this crowd-sourced blog posting and points out that the current discussion among publishers is “that the e-book revolution is primarily going to affect non-illustrated books.” This is how he approaches the questions: “Firstly, there is the question of technology. This debate should be placed into the larger context of the debate on the future of books, period.”
I would beg to clarify this, though. Publishers are not really debating the future of “books,” if by books we mean the future of “recorded human language.” They are debating the future of the sales of printed books in the quantities they are used to. Think for a moment about this same discussion, which we’ve witnessed over the past decade, in relation to the music industry. It would be meaningless to say, “The music industry is debating the future of music.” People aren’t listening to less music nor are less people listening to music. Our global population is growing at unprecedented rates and I guarantee you they are listening to music and looking for entertainment. What publishers—big publishers—are fretting about and debating is how the digital medium has affected their sales of written language on sheets of paper bound between two covers and sold as books. Make sense?
Before we go on, I’d still like to emphasize that the future of “books” is secure. And by that I mean that the future of human language written on sheets of paper bound between two covers will exist with us for millenia into the future. I’m betting on history. With a printed book, there is no need for electricity to access it—a lap and a pool of sunlight or a single candle are all that’s required. The fleeting nature of access to electricity and utilities that huge portions of the world’s population has to deal with will necessitate printed books for centuries still, if not perpetually into the future. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In my mind, there simply is no replacement for a physical object. Think about the Torah, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Hidden Words, the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Bhagavad Gita—all of these sacred works, which have shaped societies and will continue to shape societies, are books that are used daily by 100s of millions of people. Having to rely on electricity (which we’ve only had societally for less than 200 years) seems particularly ridiculous.
Photography and Books
Photography has also existed for less than 200 years. But when it comes to the reproduction of images, the discussion revolves around the same concerns as with the written word. It’s just as easy to carve an image as it is to carve a letter (which, after all is an “image” itself, a symbol that indicates a sound which, when combined with other sounds creates a word, which in turn is a symbol for an idea or an object that exists in the world).
An “image” of a man on a tablet-sized sheet of vellum, drawn by a 10th century monk and an image of a man seen through a browser window on a tiny white “tablet” computer made by a 21st century photographer, are both more or less the same, when seen from a certain vantagepoint.
So, is a pdf a “book”? Or is a pdf a book in potentia? It is definitely a conveyor of both written language and images, whichever you like. And as an electronic artifact, it has it’s own pretense to existence. However, to me, a pdf or a website or an “ebook” are not books in the same way that a stone tablet or a scroll or a sheet of papyrus are also not examples of books. They are vehicles of recorded human language, true. But a pdf is a pdf. A website is a website. A stone tablet is a stone tablet. A set of pages with either written language or images on them (reproduced in any manner of methods), gathered and bound together in some fashion = a book. It is a thing I hold in my hands. It is material and concrete.
Back to the Questions
“What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?”
Out of the 5 questions posed by the instigators of this crowd-sourced blog posting, the first and the last, if taken from a creative standpoint, are impossible to answer. “What will new music composed for the piano sound like in 10 years?” Who knows.
But when it comes to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th questions, they all revolve around electronic technology. And I am suggesting that this is simply another query about the materiality, about the physical vehicles that will be used for disseminating language or images. Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? Yes, sure. They already are. Will they also be printed? Some will, no doubt, and some won’t. Will some of the larger traditional publishing houses incorporate more and more ebooks into their inventory? Yes. Will some small, new companies deal *only* in electronic media? Of course. Will some photographers choose to release their images only through an electronic platform, and will that platform be open-source or proprietary? Sure, probably some will, and probably some won’t. Are there still guys (and girls) that use letterpress out in their garages in Brooklyn? Yes. Are there some photographers who only shoot digitally? Yes, of course. Will technologies continue to change and advance and will humans adapt to those changes? Yes.
As I think more about these questions, it may be more useful to ask, “What will book publishing look like in 10 years?” Again, I come back to the music industry as an example. The word that pops to mind is “fracture”. 50 years ago—even just 20 years ago—there were really only a handful of large music conglomerates that controlled most of what we, the consumers, were able to access. But it has fractured so much so that no matter where you live, I guarantee you there are at least a half dozen “record labels” in your town. In Santa Fe,too, there are at least half a dozen “publishers”—one or two person operations that curate small lists of books and publish them under a company name in very small quantities.
The photography world is now filled with scores, if not hundreds, of “photography book” publishers. Shane Lavalette, with his brilliant Lay Flat photography magazine, is a “publisher.” Companies like Hassla Books, Rathole Books, Errata Editions, Radius Books, Nazraeli Press, Twin Palms, J&L Books, Fraenkel Gallery are all “publishers” and they are *all* one or two or three person collectives; hardly “traditional” publishing and hardly the ones that are making a fuss about the “future” of books. It’s the bigger houses that are lamenting the future of the only thing they’ve known—large offices in Manhattan with just as large company rosters and overhead, putting out titles that used to appeal to 10s and 100s of thousands of customers, customers who are now a little more selective and might just buy a book from those kids from Brooklyn than from the big house in the City.
Photography book “production” and photography book “publishing” may also be a useful distinction to make. Any artist or photographer that makes a book, whether using a Xerox machine or using a platen press and a litho stone is producing a book. And if they made 10 of them and sold them, can they rightly be called a publisher? Generally, no. But small art book publishers often aren’t making too many more copies of something than that. 250, 500, 1000 copies of a book can hardly be called “mass production”. However, producing someone else’s words and images in book form in any quantity and then distributing and selling that to the general public is probably the best practical definition of “book publisher” that I can come up with.
Over on Conscientious—Jorg Colberg’s photography based blog—he laments that there are not more “experimental” books being produced. He implies that it’s the big ones—the big publishers—that are not willing to take a risk. By big, I would assume he means publishers like Abrams or Rizzoli or Chronicle. But when it comes to smaller presses, there is a ton of experimentation going on—experimentation in terms of artists published, experimentation in terms of sizes and formats and bindings and materials, and experimentation in terms of engagement with the (history of the) medium.
A Word About Print-on-Demand
For the past two years, I’ve been involved with the judging of the Photography.Book.Now contest sponsored by Blurb. Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s founder and CEO, needs to be commended for so passionately pursuing this new technology and for placing it in the hands of everyday and professional photographers alike.
Print-on-demand is a powerful new tool in the toolbox of photographers, but because it is so new, many photographers are still using it straight “out-of-the-box” so to speak. Not a single photographer that submitted to the contest took the print-on-demand book and altered it from the way it comes from Blurb, which, when dealing with a creative community, was surprising to say the least.
Here are some ideas for “experimentation” with print-on-demand: have the book block created using print-on-demand technology and then take that block and have it bound in a cloth of your choosing at a local bindery; produce a hard cover print-on-demand book and produce a letterpress dustjacket on paper of your choice; design the book for a different trim size, print it in the larger size from Blurb and then have it professionally trimmed to your designed size—you’ll be sidestepping the limits on possible trim sizes; print two slim volumes—one print-on-demand and one using some other method—and have a slipcase or box produced to house the set; use the paper or trim sizes intended for non-photo print-on-demand books and make a photography book. These are just a few general ideas, but I genuinely hope to see more creative innovation with the book form in this next set of contest submissions for 2010 (the contest will launch sometime in the early Spring of 2010, so stay tuned).
With all of the interest in photography books and the history of photography as seen through publishing, there can only be more and more innovation ahead, which is truly exciting. I’m looking forward to seeing the fruits of these discussions over the months ahead…
[Feel free to post comments. I'll keep 'em flowing through here...]
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.
[Photograph from The New York Times Magazine of Wall in his studio.]
We are currently reading through Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph As Contemporary Art as the primary textbook for my History of Photography III at The College of Santa Fe. Chapter 2 (to be read for our Friday, March 6 class) is called Once Upon A Time and “considers the use of storytelling in contemporary art photography.” Charlotte goes on to say that “Some of the photographs shown here make obvious references to fables, fairy tales, apocryphal events and modern myths that are already part of our collective consciousness.” Some of the photographers that immediately come to mind are Yale professor Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sam Taylor-Wood, Justine Kurland, Anna Gaskell, Gregory Crewdson (another Yale faculty member), and of course Jeff Wall. We are going to focus on Wall’s work in class.
Traditional chemical photography is an extraordinarily flexible field, which, even as it disappears, has hardly been touched.
—Richard Benson
The Spring 2009 issue of Aperture (194) arrived today with a review by yours truly of Richard Benson’s recently published book, The Printed Picture. The book, which stands on its own, also accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, and which, thankfully, is still open for viewing (through July 13, 2009). For ANYONE interested in the history of image-making, reproduction techniques, and the history of photography and photographic practices, this show (and book) is an abolute MUST.
Here’s an excerpt from my review of the book:
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 processesâ€), 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.
Mary Ellen Mark has selected the winner of this years’ Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The “first book” aspect is in support of photographers for whom this is their first published book of work. Jennette Williams’s black-and-white photographs of women bathers was selected as the fourth title to be published through the Prize, which is awarded biennially. Previous winners include Larry Schwarm’s Prairie Fire work in 2003, Steven B. Smith’s series titled Constructed Landscapes of the American West, in 2005 and Danny Wilcox Frazier’s absolutely stunning photo-essay on rural Iowa.
On the depictive level, the work is straightforward and thoughtfully speaks to the physical realities of aging bodies. But coupled with her unassuming approach is an elegance and quietude that is half location—Eastern European and Turkish baths—and half observer. Avoiding obvious pitfalls—photographing nude women has many pitfalls—Williams offers the viewer a chance to reflect on the presence a physical body has in the world.
PRESS RELEASE:
Jennette Williams, a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been selected to receive the fourth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her stunning platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses.
Celebrated photographer Mary Ellen Mark judged the competition and chose Williams for the prize because of her “original and beautifully rendered” photographs. “Jennette is both an excellent documentary photographer and a superb portraitist — a rare combination.” Mark also commented on the difficult decision she had to make, given the quality of the submissions. “It was a long and challenging process — especially knowing how much passion and work the photographers put into their projects.”
“What makes for beauty in women? How do we as a society perceive women as they age?” Williams writes of the bathers she portrays in these sublime and sensuous photographs. “I began with what were simple intentions. I wanted to photograph without sentiment or objectification women daring enough to stand, without embarrassment or excuse, before my camera and I wanted my photographs to be beautiful. . . . I drew upon classical gestures and poses from Titian, Ingres, and Pre-Raphaelites (to name a few) and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness, as if the older or ‘normal’ woman has always been a subject of the arts.”
Jennette Williams is from New York City, and in 1994 she began making photographs of women attending exercise classes at the “once elegant, now dilapidated, indoor pool” on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she took her children for swimming lessons. Eventually, she expanded the scope of her project “to include new sites and their bathing rites and rituals, to broaden the age range of the subjects, and to photograph the aging body usually (safely) covered from view.”
The Bathers will be published in Fall 2009 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
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.”
Founded in 1874 by a group of visionary Jewish leaders, the 92nd Street Y has grown into a wide-ranging cultural, educational and community center serving people of all ages, races, faiths and backgrounds. The 92nd Street Y’s mission is to enrich the lives of the over 300,000 people who visit each year — both in person and through the Y’s satellite, television, radio and Internet broadcasts. The organization offers comprehensive performing arts, film and spoken word events; courses in the humanities, the arts, personal development and Jewish culture; activities and workshops for children, teenagers and parents; and health and fitness programs for people of every age.
Jeff begins by thinking through Friedlander’s physical approach to photographing, the sense of walking and wandering and peering over and through the urban and wilderness landscape that he encounters. He then muses on a certain sense of dissatisfaction with the work. I really appreciate the line of questioning that Jeff raises, culminating in “One of the most damning questions to ask of a book” which is “Is this necessary?”
In my opinion, this question is as crucial to the experience of creating and editing a book as it is in reading and viewing it from the perspective of the audience. Jeff goes on to state the following: “When I look over Lee’s accomplishments in 33 books and counting I find it difficutl to say yes to this one. It is not because this book is without merit, I think so simply because these bases have been well covered in a few other books now. Almost every photograph here is accounted for in similar versions elsewhere.”
In many senses, I agree with Jeff. I remember one of our first conversations with Mr. Friedlander, where he bluntly told us that “This is not an important body of work, so I don’t want a big pretentious monograph.” Since the project had initially been conceived as an accompaniment to an exhibition, we felt this allowed us the chance to be more playful and creative with our approach to the design, materials and binding of the book, as Jeff points out.
The question of what is important and what isn’t is a broad one, and ultimately a very rich one. In a world where triviality bombards us on all sides and which more often than not keeps us numb to the larger, more systemic problems facing humanity, the last thing I want to do is produce more of it. In thinking through Friedlander’s comment then, that this slim group of photographs of New Mexico was not an “important” body of work, I took it in the sense that this work is not ground-breaking. He’s not pushing the envelope, he’s not looking to re-forge a photographic identity, he’s not looking to make his name with these photographs, nor, in the end, with this book.
Friedlander has been making books since he was a young man. His first book, which was ground-breaking and did forge a photographic identity for him, and which made his name, was also, at its heart, a similar study to what the New Mexico book aspires to: a study of what things look liked photographed and what role the photographer plays in that looking.
At 74 years old, Friedlander does not seem about to change his visual vocabulary (though I wouldn’t rule it out) and in that sense, there is no new ground being broken in terms of his own personal, visual language. He likes driving in plain-jane rental cars and he likes casually wandering down sidewalks across America. He likes his super-wide Hasselblad and he likes photographing 4-5 days a week. To me, the experience of the New Mexico book is one that resonates on a level of, not only attentiveness to one’s surroundings as experienced on foot, but also to the steady, contented workings of a man in the autumn of his life who has found his voice and is happy “speaking” about almost any subject.
I like to think of each of Friedlander’s books as though they are each a poem in an anthology. And while Lee Friedlander: New Mexico doesn’t carry the same weight as his 1970 Self-Portrait or The American Monument, or even his collaborations with Jim Dine, I’m still happy for the quirkiness of The Little Screens or the visual chaos of The Desert Seen and even the sweet quietude of Stems. Were they all necessary, as books? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I’m glad he’s still steadily making work no matter where he goes, and I’m still glad he’s engaged with the book form.
[Big thanks to Jeff for all his thoughts on photobooks and for bringing his thoughts to this book!]
Photographer Richard Renaldi has just announced the launch of both a new book—Fall River Boys—and a new publishing company—Charles Lane Press. He intends to self-distribute the new book, which can be purchased (come February 2009) through the website or in a handful of art and design bookstores around the country.
Richard says, “This book is the culmination of over 8 years of photographing primarily young men and cityscapes in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts.
Fall River Boys is what I consider to be a complete vision. All of our decisions have been made with quality in mind, and we feel that we have not compromised in any way with this book. It is the mission of Charles Lane Press to maintain the highest levels of quality—from the papers we select, and the craftsmanship of the German printers we work with, to the quality of our bindings and design.”
His 2006 Aperture monograph, entitled Figure and Ground, deftly combined portraiture and landscape in a quiet and lyrical manner. I’m looking forward to seeing the new work.
