Firstly, I will confess to being an image junkie. I take photos for my own pleasure, I enjoy looking at the work of others. And for me I have the perfect job. I design and make books. “Real’ ones. They end up in bookshops. They’re mainly on the photography, art, and design shelves… But they can be about anything where the images tell as much (if not more) of the story as the words do.
I’ve been making books for twenty years and I’m keeping fingers crossed they’ll be around at least for the rest of my lifetime…
However the honest answer is that I don’t know what their future is…
Their future depends really how many of you will still want something physical you can take home? How many of you still want to have something you can feel and hold where the ink on the page reveals something to you, gives you an understanding of what you’re looking at or makes you feel something?
And of course it depends how many of you have enough spare cash to pay for that luxury.
I’m not a technophobe - these days I spend most of my working hours in front of a computer screen, making the initial edit, sequencing and resequencing, trying different layouts until we have a design concept everyone’s happy with.
Personally I miss too what Elizabeth Avedon mentions while putting books together - and still after 20 years and countless books there’s not much in the world more exciting to see the first proofs for a new book come in, ink on paper… And when you get the first final bound copy hot from the press, well, it’s time to celebrate even if it’s the 50th book that year…
http://elizabethavedon.blogspot.com/2009/12/future-of-photo-books-lost-dummy-years.html
I still get sent book proposals as handmade dummies put together with prints and paste and tape, they’re getting fewer, but when I get them they are a joy. I can see the hours of work and thought that went into them… Somehow a low res PDF just isn’t the same. It doesn’t command the same respect and I am more likely to flick through it at a fast rate making conclusions too quickly…
Somewhat late to the game, around 2002/3, I *really* discovered the web. (I guess when it became feasible to look at pictures over our feeble internet connection) I started following some early photoblogs, and inspired by the freedom my first crappy point and shoot digital camera gave me I started uploading my own pictures to a small photosharing website that had about 1000 users mostly in New York (now it’s over-run with South American teenagers) and I fell in love with the images and people I found there… Pictures put there just because someone wanted to share them. uncensored, not there because they were ‘art’ not there because they were journalism and a news editor wanted to illustrate a point - and not there to sell something.
I became entranced by the idea that everyone could become their own publisher. Entranced by the idea that everyone could become their own curator and editor by what they chose to see, which pictures or blogs they chose to “click on”. No cautious and commercially minded middlemen getting in the way.
Kind of like the rush of energy and creativity there was in the late ’70s with the underground self-published punk fanzines, my teenage self devoured and also put together with friends. Hawking them round Camden Lock and Portobello markets in London. We sent copies for friends in Manchester and Glasgow and Dublin to sell too. While we kept it small it worked, every issue sold out. We recouped our costs. They were cheap to make, cheap to print, and cheap to sell. But as soon as we got too ambitious, encouraged by the feedback from our peers, went to a “proper” commercial printer for better reproduction quality, the numbers didn’t add up. To keep the retail costs down per single copy, we were forced to print too many… I still have some of those copies sitting in my basement.
I’m hoping through the likes of Blurb and Lulu we’ll be seeing some of that energetic creative rush again…
In the world of books you have to remember the middlemen are the ones who make the large financial investments of hiring editors, designers and production staff to get the books ready for print. They pay for the paper and printing, they pay for the shipping and distribution for the books to get into the shops (even if it’s Amazon the books have to get to their warehouses somehow), and after that they pay for the marketing and publicity so that people know the books are out there and have been published. I can tell you it’s an expensive game.
Six or is it seven years later I feel less enthused by what I find on the net, because I’ve seen too much too quickly - I’ve seen some absolute treasures amongst the rubbish but also spent a lot of time spent finding the treasures… And my eyes feel dulled - kind of the feeling I imagine one gets after too much fast-food.
What I like about a good book is that it has a beginning a middle and an end - a narrative that somebody has thought about, a sequence that somebody has thought about. That takes time. Time to put together, time to produce and time to be enjoyed by the end user.
A book is more than the sum of it’s parts, each image will have neighbours and those neighbours (hopefully) have been picked because they make a point - whether that’s an editorial one, or an aesthetic one, or an emotional one - the best books collect images in a sequence that do all these things - make editorial, aesthetic and emotional points.
As a reader all you can do is turn the pages - you can’t shuffle the pages out of the sequence they are bound in an order that the author, editor and/or publisher has committed themselves to.
I like that.
I like it that the permutations aren’t infinite. I like the thought that someone has committed themselves through an edit and sequence to communicating a specific thought, message or feeling (or all three).
I like the fact that someone has thought about and committed themselves to the page size, the feel of the paper, the typefaces used and the physical binding.
I don’t know what the physical future of the photobook is, but I hope whatever it is, it still means that someone has committed themselves to an edit, a sequence, and thinks about the best layout for those images, rather than it just being a freeform collection where each individual image is more important than the whole…
If that’s what happens what’s the point? We may as well just stick to browsing the internet…
And to be frank I agree with Fred Ritchen:
http://www.pixelpress.org/afterphotography/?p=897
I haven’t seen anything out there on the web or as an app resembling what I would call a good book (a tight edit, good sequencing and a good layout) that really gets me going… I haven’t seen anyone do anything really interesting with the format… Something that makes me want to return a week or month or year later to enjoy the images and stories and feelings again… The way I do with the physical books I have on my shelves…
But if YOU have please, please, point me in that direction… I want to enjoy them too…
