Tag: Mary Virginia Swanson

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

Bill Jay (1940—2009)

In 1988, I was an 18 year-old BFA Photography major at Arizona State University, in Tempe, AZ. Bill Jay and Bill Jenkins had both thrown lit matches into the straw of my Iowa farm-boy mind that year. My childhood understandings of images and the potency of pictures were simply burned up in a semester or two under their impassioned tutelage.

In bi-weekly photo history lectures, Bill Jay, the archetypal story-telling scholar, was excitedly describing for us how early practitioners of photography were either falling off cliffs atop their glass-plate-laden mules, or accidentally poisoning themselves with gun cotton and ether under the ferocious heat and humidity of canvas tents which served as their field darkrooms.

20 years after I first met him, Bill Jay has passed away. In September of 2007, I spent half a day with Bill at his condo in MIssion Beach, CA (just outside San Diego) interviewing and photographing him for PDN magazine (which can be read here). I also had great fun going with him to the Infinity Awards in May of 2008 (which I blogged about here) where, true to self, he delivered a rather cranky but poignant assessment of the “state of photography.”

The night before the awards, Mary Virginia Swanson (who has just posted a wonderful entry on her blog here), Denise Wolff and I sat with him at Good Burgers in mid-town Manhattan, listening to him describe his recently purchased plots of land in Costa Rica, where he was going to happily live out his days, mere yards from “the most beautiful strip of beach” you can imagine. Maria, at the local cantina had promised to teach him Spanish, and his daughters would periodically visit, he told us. It appears that he has done just that, passing in his sleep this past Tuesday.

During that New York trip, and before, during my time with him in Mission Beach, Bill emphatically stated, “I’m done. I have no more to say.” Photography, as he knew it, was dead. But it was the community around him that had changed, and had truly “passed on”, in a very real sense. When Bill received the Infinity Award, it had been 50 years exactly since his first published piece. He felt a sense of completeness—or at least he stated as much—having reached that marker. It seemed like a good time to sell everything and move to a hut on a beach. He seems to have been exactly where he wanted to be, and that’s not a bad thing.

Visit Bill Jay on Photography for dozens of his articles and photographs of photographers.

Tags: Bill Jay, ICP, Mary Virginia Swanson
Posted in Events & News | 2 Comments »