This section of the course material has got me thinking in wider terms about how I look at photographs and to reflect on photobooks as physical items, artefacts in their own right. This not only ties in, to an extent, with the essay that I have written for Assignment 4, but is also relevant to what I am thinking about for the physical presentation of the sequence of images I made for Assignment 2, and also how I might approach Assignment 5.
How do I look at photographs? Inevitably most have to be viewed on-line. The sheer range of material that needs to be looked at for the purposes of the course work means that this is the only practical approach available, in the absence of an accessible, local, public or institutional library with a significant holding of photographic work. The Side gallery in Newcastle has an impressive archive but is of course presently closed and in any event is not somewhere that I would be able to go on a sufficiently regular basis.
Physical exhibitions are similarly limited. Whilst I have been over the last few years to as many local shows as I could, mostly at the Side, they have been few in number, and are now non-existent.
Then there is my own library. This is fairly substantial as a whole (though not comparable with that owned by one of my favourite writers about reading and the ownership of books, Alberto Manguel, whose library is made up of 35,000 or so volumes!) with a photography section that is growing steadily. Obviously, there are plenty of books that have been acquired on the basis of the OCA reading lists. Many though are photobooks – monographs and exhibition catalogues – that have been bought purely out of personal interests and tastes. It is these that I find the most satisfying to use: being something of a Luddite I still prefer the physical feel, the heft, the weight, the smell, of physical books. I find I engage with them more deeply, not least because I get to know them over a longer period and at a more leisurely pace than the internet encourages. It is these books, few of which appear on any of the reading lists, though some of which are from time to time referred to within the course material, that tend to influence and inform my own work more profoundly, even when not necessarily obviously directly relevant to a particular assignment or exercise. There are limits imposed by cost (I shudder to think how much I have paid over time for this modest collection; quite a lot of photobooks today are pretty expensive) and space. This though is the medium that gives me the greatest satisfaction.
Letting my eyes roam across the shelves in my study, which is where all of the photography books in the house live, I am struck by the range of publishers. There are a few under the imprint of some of the big guns in the art publishing world, such as Prestel, Thames & Hudson, Phaidon, but the majority are by much smaller, independent, specialist publishers. Judging from the number of new photobooks coming out on a regular basis this is an area of publishing that seems to be, if not necessarily thriving, at least surviving. I am also struck by the number of books that are self-published or put out by tiny presses, most of which are really nice physical artefacts in their own right, and really interesting photographic work.
The next thing that strikes me is the range of bindings and physical presentation. Most, although varying considerably in size, proportions, and layout, are in conventional book form, either hardback, or soft. Those that really stand out are mostly, at least in my collection, East Asian, specifically Japanese, books – either by Japanese, Chinese or Korean, artists, or published by Japanese companies. There are pamphlets that are little more than folder paper, elaborately stitched bindings, boxes (some elaborate in their own right) containing multiple elements, loose sheets, concertina folds, you name it. Perhaps the most impressive “book” that I have seen was produced by Goliga in Tokyo in very limited numbers of work by Rinko Kawauchi that takes the form of a traditional Japanese scroll in a bespoke wooden box: absolutely beautiful but also, as a result, rather expensive and with very few copies still available. How I wish … dream on!
The relevance of these musings to work for this course is that, as I have written in connection with Assignment 2, I have been thinking of submitting that sequence of images in book form, as a concertina, rather than a conventional book. This is something that I have been working on of late, now that I have a decent printer of my own, enabling me to experiment with different possible prints that might work in the form of such a book. What in particular this process has prompted is a rethink of the outcome of the assignment itself. Specifically, because of the physical constraints imposed by such a book format, I have had to rethink how I approach the map element that is to go on the reverse of the photographs. This is turning into an interesting case of the format to an extent dictating content. I will write more on this in due course.
Coming back to the course material, the William Klein interview I found very interesting because of my focus on his work in the essay for Assignment 4. (The link in the material is no longer working but it was not too difficult to find it on the current Tate website and a new link is cited below.) Unfortunately, the section in which Klein’s assistant talks about an early maquette of his New York book is frustratingly short and does not actually say anything about how and why the book is arranged and laid out as it is. This is a shame because in my opinion the layout is one of the things that helps make this book so successful, as a photobook in its own right but also as an unorthodox “landscape” of New York, as I argue in the essay. I would dearly have liked to hear more about the process that the book went through to reach its final state. This book is an interesting example of the argument made by Marshall McLuhan that “the medium is the message”.
For Assignment 5 I have already been thinking about producing a set of postcards. For the “fine art” alternative a book might well be appropriate, or at least trying as an experiment if nothing more. I already have some thoughts on this and it is encouraging to see that the OCA video about photobooks confirms some of those ideas. The nature of Klein’s project meant that a “busy” layout was appropriate and adds much to the outcome. For what I have in mind, something much more straightforward, minimal even, would be much more appropriate and effective. I am nowhere near ready with that project yet so in the interim, for the purposes of exercise 5.3, I am going to have to use an existing set of images.
As an aside with regard to Blurb, although I have not used them before I do have a book produced by them. It was made by one of the artists who had a residency with VARC and is a visual diary of her year in the wilds of Northumberland. The quality is pretty good and I do not recall it being particularly expensive when I bought it.
http://oca-student.com/node/66693
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/william-klein-11498/william-klein-pictures
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 