Shooting Wide Open

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.