Shooting Wide Open

Eugene Richards’ The Blue Room

Andrew Moore

I randomly came upon a beat up copy of a book by Andrew Moore called Inside Havana in the bookstore blow-out bin and I waffled quite a bit before buying it, because of so many shots verged on the typical commercial architecture shot. The website is a similar experience. There are many strange and wonderful things in each project, but there is also a high volume of fairly typical interiors. Nonetheless, there’s such an impressive range of objects (and messes!) that I was rapt.

Russia is probably my favorite, though it is also at this point in time that the projects are far back enough in time that the files are not quite processed as well for the web as the later photos. (I should be one to talk…) They are all still engrossing photos however, and the Cuba images in the book itself are perfectly fine. I’m going to try to get the Russia book too.

Frederick Sommer

Speaking of photobooks, Joel showed the work of Frederick Sommer, who does everything from painting on cellophane negatives to cut paper objects, and pulled out The Box, which is a little clear plastic box of unbound cards with titles printed on one side and reproductions of photos, collages and cut paper on the other. A sort of greatest hits box. I thought it was great, since you get something that’s easy to store and not easily damaged since it’s protected by the box, and if you wanted to display them, you could do it on a rotating mix and match basis. The pieces themselves are a little more hardy too, since they are heavy cards rather than flimsy prints, so it’s easy to lay them around on a table and pick some up without feeling like you’re going to ruin someone’s valuable print.

FYI, there is also a Son of the Box. Unfortunately both are hard to find or extremely pricey at this point, but I wonder what the production costs on doing something similar with contemporary work would be.

Interesting… I found this in my Amazon recommendations, one of the only times I’ve seen anything I’m actually interested in and hadn’t heard of already.

What Parisian shopping arcades were to the nineteenth century and capitalism, Dubai’s luxurious mega-malls are to the new millennium and late capitalism. The Baudelairean flaneur, who patrolled the avenues as a detached observer, today is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses a cell phone to text, call, Web-surf and snap digital images on the fly. The ubiquitous cellphone camera has already become a valid tool of civilian journalism. Celebrated photographer Joel Sternfeld visited Dubai in 2008, documenting its new malls with the consumer fetish object du jour, the iPhone.

160 pages, 70 plates. A February release according to Steidl, but Amazon says March 31.

First big-name iPhone book? (Besides Chase Jarvis?)

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #19

I have one photobook wish, and that is that they be more like McSweeney’s publications. I’m a variety hog and would love to see more goodies in a photobook – pullout posters, photo postcards, perforated or loose pages to go on the wall, CDs containing audio of the subjects, maps of locations, etc. In a nutshell, something like McSweeney’s which publishes extremely well-designed and unique books for less than the price of a mass market hardcover.

Issue 19 is incredibly fun to look through. It is a thin paperback book of short fiction placed in a cigar box with different sized documents or pamphlets – George Bush’s dental records and all sorts of ’50s and ’60s atomic age ephemera. Issue 17 is a package of mail that includes art reproduction prints and hilarious faux ads of ridiculous projects such as 3-legged pants. In fact, they just released the 33rd Quarterly, the San Francisco Panorama, which is printed Sunday-newspaper style containing reporting, arts, food, sports, comics and original photography. Issue 16 contains a deck of cards story by Robert Coover that readers can read in order or after shuffling. I could go on and on – they’ve tried everything from Z-bindings to multi-volume releases to truly collaborative issues where writers and poets riff off of each other.

McSweeney’s SF Panorama

I don’t think these types of unique books will ever cease to be coveted as physical objects. No matter how fancy digital content is, in the foreseeable future it is still limited to a 2D interface. Hopefuly the customizations like what McSweeney’s has done eventually become possible on sites like Blurb or Lulu for near-current prices.

The types of experimentation that might make photobooks interesting might be suited to a serial format. If you are making a 20 page photobook which isn’t meant as a monograph, why not consider making a magazine instead? Either way, why not put out the stages of a project in volumes as they are finished? This would work particularly well for journalistic series, in my opinion.

McSweeney’s SF Panorama

Unfortunately, companies like Magcloud require use of software like InDesign to produce the mock-up, so there’s a learning curve and an outlay for technology for production at the moment. When layouts can be created more easily through the more graphic interfaces and the interactive touch surfaces that will inevitably come on the market in the next few years, I would hope that layouts could be done through the web.

It would be nice to be able to subscribe to a photographer’s work and receive it every half year or so instead of waiting a book every two or three years. That’s not to say that everybody should produce work like this, but it would be interesting to see some collaborative periodicals that aren’t simply prints in a folder. Those are very nice, but sometimes a girl wants a bit more spice in life.

UPDATE:

I wanted to add something else about digital photobooks (could we really call them books?). Digital media like music and video have really taken off because what little in terms of tactility that CD and DVD cases or liner notes add to the experience of the music or film is ancillary anyways. Aside from lushly designed collector’s editions, in which case the draw is the interesting physical object, the main reason a person buys a CD or DVD is to get the music or film, both not inherently physical experiences. Most of the time a CD case is just a wrapper for the music itself so when a cheaper digital option is offered, there’s not a lot of incentive not to take it.

A book when it is creatively designed, however, cannot be separated from its content without some pretty radical changes in digital technology. It’s very hard for me to imagine a good digital version of that Z-binding. Perhaps a multi-directional interface where the user can navigate in many directions/dimensions? But then we’re not talking so much about a digital book as we know it as just multimedia design, a very different beast. Certainly there are a lot of creative possibilities and benefits to digital, search being one of them.

A problem if you buy a digital book is it will live in a hard drive forever barring, again, some pretty radical changes in the technology. There is no possibility of extras like pullouts or loose prints that you can pin on your wall. And so far you can’t pull every digital book off your shelf and lay them open all over the floor without buying one gigantic unmanageable device or multiple devices, both of which are expensive.

It might be interesting to sell digital photobooks (photomedia?) as DVDs or USB drives packaged with physical extras as well as physical copies packaged with digital extras. Best of both worlds? That might be an interesting avenue for multimedia artists to explore. Maybe you have an idea for a little video but you still like the idea of a representative still – you put the still in the physical book and the video in the digital book. This way, they wouldn’t simply be exact copies of each other, which is pretty pointless (like page-flip animations). The key is buyer choice – buy the physical copy only, the digital copy only, or both? Publishers could use digital freebies as promo for a physical book, or vice versa. Maybe the problem isn’t any given medium, but that we just need to diversify.

The hard drive library also opens up the possibility that with glitches, you could lose your entire library. You could lose your physical library in a fire too, but that seems a lot less likely than computer crashes. In this case, it would might sense to include a digital copy. Pirating, though, is the huge problem (or is it a problem?) that I don’t think anyone really has a solution for yet. I’m not sure what to think.

So what the digital movement has really done, and in a lot of areas beyond book publishing, is facilitate the death of the mediocre book. If you make a traditional book that’s just images on each page, your content will easily translate to the computer screen, but if you have a creative design, it is still a viable business model, I would hope.

In the end though, quality trumps medium. If you have killer photos, whether in a traditional book, a creatively designed book or digital media, people will want it. Good photos printed in crappy quality or boring books still trump crappy photos printed at high quality or inserted into a fancy digital interface for me. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking every photobook needs to be of the highest quality to be viable.

I can’t speak to the best of the year, but I just received Ashley Gilbertson’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and Paul D’Amato’s Barrio from the UChicago Press, which is having a whopping up to 85% sale on some items with the promo code on that page. (Got word from Doug Stockdale’s The Photo Book.) Best $22 worth of photo books ever!

Yao Lu

I bought a poster of his from 798 Photo. I’d see his work before on the web, but online it is not impressive to me at all. The prints he has up in the gallery are so much more striking. The key is that you get a lot of detail when you lean closer, but on the web leaning closer doesn’t really get you anything more. Without the detail, the concept looks a little heavyhanded – “yeah, yeah, traditional landscape painting style approximated by photo composites of the artifacts of very modern land development, etc…”

His book runs into the same problem as web viewing because for some reason he chose to print small despite, confusingly, a large book size.

Li Lin

Li Lin’s Disappearing Landscape is one of the 798 Photo books I picked up. The book is divided into two parts – Wetland, frames of disappearing natural wetlands, and Artificial Landscape, frames of what will conceivably replace them. The more conventional landscapes of Wetland are interesting, but I really like the strangeness of the Artificial Landscapes, which was shot in Dongying city in Shandong province at what looks to be one of those cheesy amusement parks so characteristic of China.

The introduction by Liu Shuyong is also printed in an English version. The translation is a little awkward sometimes, but my Chinese is not so great, so it will have to do:

Artificial Landscape is a sarcastic photographic series that criticizes the artificial garden scenes installed in modern cities. The reinforced concrete structures imitating traditional gardens are mixed with [nationalist] dreams of political power blocs, and the dependence of commercial capital to the will to power. The crude, childish artificial landscape reflects people’s shallow understanding of Chinese characteristics.

I would say that despite the nationalism and the cheese, while more jaded folks are critical, there is a bit of naive enthusiasm and hopefulness in the reception some people give to these places. He goes to a bit of an extreme – the essay is titled “The Spawning of ‘Flowers of Evil,’ ” which, I have to admit, is an arresting turn of phrase.

If you are ever in Beijing you should pick up some of 798 Photo’s books. I think there are some slight tone and color problems with some of the prints but the shorter ones go for around 100 RMB, which is $13-15, so I can’t complain.

Graeme Nicol

Trade Winds, by newly minted photojournalist Graeme Nicol, is a great little self-published online-only (as far as I can tell) book about the Nigerian community in Guang Zhou, otherwise known as Canton. It’s a glance rather than an in-depth analysis, with some portraits as well as his characteristic street photos. Maybe it’s the China angle, but the project draws me in, aesthetics of photojournalism or not. Not to mention I’ve been shooting a lot of still medium format and it’s a breath of fresh air to see a bit of movement.

You can see the entire book on his website. It is just awesome that people can do these things and put them online. I’m still fairly optimistic about the future of journalism.

Leonard Freed

For all the talk by tech gurus of how the internet will be so awesome in the future that we may as well graft our brain directly into it, I haven’t heard a convincing answer to one simple question: how in the world are we going to deal with the health effects of huge portions of the population staring at a computer screen for long periods of time, especially if it’s a habit picked up in youth? The prospect of staring at it for a lifetime doesn’t bode well in a profession where sight is your main asset.

For the past week I’ve been taking a break from the computer because I’ve begun to get a queasy headache every time I worked on the computer for more than 15 minutes. I’m going to try to do the best I can to minimize computer time, but the cost of printing and not being in a gallery heavy city leave the computer as the most practical option. (I’m looking forward to writing blog posts in the park though!) I knew that the actual shooting would be only the tip of the iceberg of making a photograph, but I’m overwhelmed nonetheless. I’m hoping computer interfaces become more intuitive and involve larger ranges of motion. So much communication takes place online now that I’m ready to learn the Dvorak or Colemak keyboard layout instead of continuing with QWERTY as it is.

In the vein of getting away from the computer, prints from Leonard Freed’s Black in White America are being shown at the Silverstein Gallery in NYC until June 13th, and I wish I could see it in person. If you are in NYC between now and then, you’d better go! I discovered Freed’s work about a year ago via Magnum and managed to find a cheap secondhand copy of the book in pretty good condition. Beats me why anyone would want to get rid of this book. It’s a book that makes me want to drink in prints til “my belly erupts like a volcano” (in words I overheard today), to grab a camera and go, even if it happens to be 1am in the morning – a sure sign in any instance that there’s something worth learning on those pages.

Actually, I can see why someone would want to get rid of this book. It is not for the sharpness or bokeh or grainless creaminess fetishists. Many of the prints are dark, grainy, blurry, but there’s a liveliness here that makes all those technical details irrelevent. I had trouble choosing photos that represented this liveliness – he doesn’t make iconic images like Winogrand or Frank, but the total effect of the book feels very personal and memorable.

I suppose that black and white street style has been learned by thousands and copied ad nauseum by now, but there’s just so much life in the photos that I can’t resist them anyway.