ETA: Please note various corrections Jim has generously provided in the comments. It is worth noting that the problematic bindings do appear to loosen up to a state of reasonable lay-flatness, with use, and that the dust covers are holding up just fine. (these remarks will make sense in context, I promise)
In the comments under Ming's "I am making a book" post, this link has been offered up. It gives a really interesting parallax view into the world of making your own book. His process is absolutely, diametrically, opposed to pretty much everything I have done.
The summary, as I read it, is that Jim Kasson had some money available and decided to have an edition of 1000 books printed up. Very nice books. He probably spent in the general area of $100,000 on this, which may seem foolish but I am damned if I can think of a much better way to spend a spare $100,000. But the story is a bit fraught.
Jim hires a book designer he likes, and finds a press that he likes. The design is awesome. Then Jim spends a great deal of time fussing with color and formatting. It turns out that many of his pictures have a lot of what he perceives as important color that is out of gamut for the press and paper he's selected. So he spends a lot of time culling and then re-editing pictures both for crop and color.
It is the cropping that ultimately leads to a lot of trouble. He and his designer decide that they need to print things across the gutter, which means they want a more or less lay-flat binding, which the bindery used by the selected press basically cannot do reliably. There's a lot of discussion and fussing with dummy books, and sometimes the bindery gets it right and sometimes they don't. They promise to get it right on the order of 1000 books, and they do not. Well, that sucks. Ultimately, I suspect that the spines loosened up under use and the books looked OK.
Don't print across the gutter if you care about what your pictures look like. If your photos are content-driven, you might be OK as long as content isn't getting lost in the gutter, but it's still not a great solution. I am surprised that Jim's designer did not suggest that they walk away from the bindery somewhere in this process. Lay-flat bindings are not rocket science.
One other minor point. Jim wants the cadillac book, so he orders up french folded dust covers, which are a nice touch. Then he notes, somewhat pedantically, that there's a sharp-folded corner that might catch on things, or something, and asks what the press can do about it. This is the answer they came up with which I got to say I hate. The die cut rounded corner puts a sharp point into the cutout region, pretty much guaranteeing that under any sort of use the dust cover will tear along the crease. Sharp points concentrate stress.
From where I sit, this is actually a "tell" and suggests that perhaps it's time to find a new press. These guys may be great at smearing pigment on paper, but they're pretty bad at paper handling.
Anyways, let's put my experiences with doing blurb books, and hand binding books, together with Jim's story, and see what we can discover.
This first and most obvious thing is that it will pay you will to shoot with your book in mind, rather than trying to fit an already extant project into a book. If your print shapes are all over the place, it's going to be tough, no way around it. This is the root of Jim's big problem, the across-the-gutter pictures that he needs. There's just no way this looks good. Best case, you have a crease in the middle of your picture, worst case you have a bunch of glue and string and the picture all jammed into a dank valley because the book won't open enough.
Interestingly, as the problems with the binding unfold, one thing we do not see Jim doing is taking apart the dummy books that exhibit problems in the binding. I'd have had them apart in 10 minutes, and I would have known what the problem was.
I'm not blaming Jim at all, here, but I didn't find his story surprising. He jumped into the deep end, without really knowing what he was doing.
Let's say you're planning to do something similar, you've got a pile of money burning a hole in your pocket and you can't wait to fill your garage up with books.
First, buy a "build your own journal" kit from some source, such as Hollander's in Ann Arbor, and build it. Read Artemis BonaDea's definitive (and free! just google it!) book on conservation book repair, and take some books apart. It will be fun, and you'll learn a lot. Cost you $100 and a dozen hours.
Do some books on blurb, mypublisher, whatever. If you're working with an independent designer, do a book with them. Blurb, at least, has an InDesign plugin. Yes, these places have a very shallow design palette. Make your designer show you what they can do anyways. And, more importantly, get used to the process of working with the designer, of selected and sequencing photos, of proofreading, writing, laying out. Whether you're working with or without a designer, these are all things you'll be doing on the "real" book eventually. Cost you a few hundred bucks and a few dozen hours (plus whatever the designer costs -- a lot more than that, if they're any good, but still cheap at the price).
Now you actually know something about books, both how they're built, how they're written, laid out, designed, printed. You've invested a relatively tiny amount of money and a small amount of time.
Now go find a printer and a bindery. You now, perhaps, know enough to lean on them harder and fire them if need be. If there's one thing clear in Jim's story is that he does not know enough, and if relying primarily on his designer and the printer for guidance at every step. He's learning as he goes, bleeding fistfuls of money at every stage.
Whether he could have gotten a better book, I don't know. Maybe this really is as good as it gets, and the best you can hope for is to have 1 or 2 fairly serious issues with the final product. Still, Jim might have saved some money or time, and certainly would have had a better personal experience if he'd gotten into the process with more knowledge up front.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Your First Book is Shit
Most of your other books will also be shit, but sometimes less so. This is why it is probably a good idea not to venture much on your first book. More on this point in a little while.
Before I start in calling out other people as idiots (which I assure you I will get to shortly), let us examine my credentials. It turns out, to my astonishment, that I have made quite a few books.
It turns out that I've done around 20 books in my life, a figure which surprised me. I'm actually getting to be kind of experienced, perhaps. I've certainly made a lot of mistakes.
25 years ago or so I did a PhD thesis. No design whatsoever, except what was dictated by the prescribed formatting guidelines for theses at Wesleyan U. Organizing the content for 70 pages took 2 years, and this is content that largely organizes itself. The content is pretty good, and has very few typos and mangled sentences.
In the intervening decades I did masses of technical writing, but only a few things that resembled books. Those "books" were largely filling in a supplied template (in this case a literal Adobe Pagemaker template, rather than a written set of instructions/rules). The design was, therefore, someone else's labor, and the organization was supplied. Much of the other technical writing required me to organize the content as well as write it, but there was essentially no design, and so it doesn't really count as "book" making. My exposure to Pagemaker was probably the most formative relevant thing here. Pagemaker, even in the early 1990s, had a lot to teach you about book design.
Of course, you don't write a million words or whatever without picking up a few things along the way.
In recent years I've made some half dozen illustrated children's books for my and various other children. Some hand written, others printed, mostly sewn bindings either quarter-ish-bound or full-bound with cloth and decorative papers. (I do own other colors of bookcloth.)
Content? Well, I had to write the things and draw the illustrations. Design? Judge for yourself. There's not a great deal of design, but there's some, and I think I mainly comported myself quite well.
I've also done an eBook on composition which I originally did a full print design for. I learned a lot about print design, but it's probably best that it wound up as an eBook. And then there are various photo books, on blurb and hand made. Here, and here, for instance. Here's a "magazine" of sorts. Perfect-bound, not sewn, with 140 pound soft cover. It's a mess and makes almost no goddamned sense. Also, it's missing a page. I shot it in an hour, sequenced it in an hour, and spent about an hour building it. You get what you pay for?
Ok. So, I've done some books.
I'm here to tell you, it's damned hard. Most of the books I've done have been, as books, in at least some important ways, shit. I'm a smart guy and know enough to go easy on the design, but it's still just about all I can do to get the pagination right.
Getting out enough of the typos and mangled sentences to make the thing flow as not quite an unprofessional mess? Very very hard. Organizing up 10,000+ words of material becomes unwieldy and difficult, especially for the uninitiated. Sequencing photographs in a sensible way that "reads"? Not exactly a walk in the park.
What I am saying is, your first book is Shit. So, don't bet your ego on it, don't bet your money on it. This stuff is hard, and you need a lot of practice at it to even get sort of good. Your first book should not be your magnum opus.
Which leads us around to some projects from other people.
The hapless Chris Gampat is going to do a print 'zine. The guy's rambling promo video appears to be shot -- literally -- in front of a bedsheet that he could not even be bothered to iron or place far enough back to at least render soft. God help us all, he's on track to get this dog funded, probably because he's recruited some internet-famous photographers with fans. Why he needs $3000 to get started I do not know. The astute reader will note that his kickstarter has essentially no information. Is this going to be a 2" x 2" magazine, or 2m x 2m, or what? All we know is "about 100 pages and gorgeous".
Chris: Listen up. This is your first print thing ever. It won't be gorgeous. It will be an ugly clusterfuck. Partly because it's your first, and partly because you have the design sense of a cow, I saw your La Noir Image mockup. For god's sake, don't blow your kickstarter wad on this.
Next up, Ming Thein is going to do his first book ever. It is equally vague, but it will be gorgeous, it will be a magnum opus, it will summarize all his thinking into one mighty work. Now, I don't believe for a second that he's actually doing a book. This is posturing to produce the desired burst of slavering sycophancy from his cultists, and it will eventually peter out because it is simply beyond the ability of others to produce a book to Ming's high standards, etcetera and so forth. But, let us for a moment grant him credibility.
Ming: For god's sake, do some smaller projects first. Unless you are blessed with an editor and design staff from heaven (see below), with a budget of infinity, your first book will be Shit.
Onwards. Let's take a look at Katrin Koenning's first book, Astres Noirs. Interestingly, I think this might not be Shit. Katrin has collaborated with another photographer, as well as a very snappy publisher with access to some serious design chops. Isn't that interesting. Hat tip to cphmag, and I may have more to say about Katrin later. She's interesting.
Katrin: Well done.
Finally, let me throw into the mix Peter Lik's hilariously awful Equation of Time. It might not be his first book, but it's surely his biggest book, and boy oh boy is it Shit.
Peter: Oh, the hell with it. Carry on mate, you're doing bloody brilliant.
Before I start in calling out other people as idiots (which I assure you I will get to shortly), let us examine my credentials. It turns out, to my astonishment, that I have made quite a few books.
It turns out that I've done around 20 books in my life, a figure which surprised me. I'm actually getting to be kind of experienced, perhaps. I've certainly made a lot of mistakes.
25 years ago or so I did a PhD thesis. No design whatsoever, except what was dictated by the prescribed formatting guidelines for theses at Wesleyan U. Organizing the content for 70 pages took 2 years, and this is content that largely organizes itself. The content is pretty good, and has very few typos and mangled sentences.
In the intervening decades I did masses of technical writing, but only a few things that resembled books. Those "books" were largely filling in a supplied template (in this case a literal Adobe Pagemaker template, rather than a written set of instructions/rules). The design was, therefore, someone else's labor, and the organization was supplied. Much of the other technical writing required me to organize the content as well as write it, but there was essentially no design, and so it doesn't really count as "book" making. My exposure to Pagemaker was probably the most formative relevant thing here. Pagemaker, even in the early 1990s, had a lot to teach you about book design.
Of course, you don't write a million words or whatever without picking up a few things along the way.
In recent years I've made some half dozen illustrated children's books for my and various other children. Some hand written, others printed, mostly sewn bindings either quarter-ish-bound or full-bound with cloth and decorative papers. (I do own other colors of bookcloth.)
Content? Well, I had to write the things and draw the illustrations. Design? Judge for yourself. There's not a great deal of design, but there's some, and I think I mainly comported myself quite well.
I've also done an eBook on composition which I originally did a full print design for. I learned a lot about print design, but it's probably best that it wound up as an eBook. And then there are various photo books, on blurb and hand made. Here, and here, for instance. Here's a "magazine" of sorts. Perfect-bound, not sewn, with 140 pound soft cover. It's a mess and makes almost no goddamned sense. Also, it's missing a page. I shot it in an hour, sequenced it in an hour, and spent about an hour building it. You get what you pay for?
Ok. So, I've done some books.
I'm here to tell you, it's damned hard. Most of the books I've done have been, as books, in at least some important ways, shit. I'm a smart guy and know enough to go easy on the design, but it's still just about all I can do to get the pagination right.
Getting out enough of the typos and mangled sentences to make the thing flow as not quite an unprofessional mess? Very very hard. Organizing up 10,000+ words of material becomes unwieldy and difficult, especially for the uninitiated. Sequencing photographs in a sensible way that "reads"? Not exactly a walk in the park.
What I am saying is, your first book is Shit. So, don't bet your ego on it, don't bet your money on it. This stuff is hard, and you need a lot of practice at it to even get sort of good. Your first book should not be your magnum opus.
Which leads us around to some projects from other people.
The hapless Chris Gampat is going to do a print 'zine. The guy's rambling promo video appears to be shot -- literally -- in front of a bedsheet that he could not even be bothered to iron or place far enough back to at least render soft. God help us all, he's on track to get this dog funded, probably because he's recruited some internet-famous photographers with fans. Why he needs $3000 to get started I do not know. The astute reader will note that his kickstarter has essentially no information. Is this going to be a 2" x 2" magazine, or 2m x 2m, or what? All we know is "about 100 pages and gorgeous".
Chris: Listen up. This is your first print thing ever. It won't be gorgeous. It will be an ugly clusterfuck. Partly because it's your first, and partly because you have the design sense of a cow, I saw your La Noir Image mockup. For god's sake, don't blow your kickstarter wad on this.
Next up, Ming Thein is going to do his first book ever. It is equally vague, but it will be gorgeous, it will be a magnum opus, it will summarize all his thinking into one mighty work. Now, I don't believe for a second that he's actually doing a book. This is posturing to produce the desired burst of slavering sycophancy from his cultists, and it will eventually peter out because it is simply beyond the ability of others to produce a book to Ming's high standards, etcetera and so forth. But, let us for a moment grant him credibility.
Ming: For god's sake, do some smaller projects first. Unless you are blessed with an editor and design staff from heaven (see below), with a budget of infinity, your first book will be Shit.
Onwards. Let's take a look at Katrin Koenning's first book, Astres Noirs. Interestingly, I think this might not be Shit. Katrin has collaborated with another photographer, as well as a very snappy publisher with access to some serious design chops. Isn't that interesting. Hat tip to cphmag, and I may have more to say about Katrin later. She's interesting.
Katrin: Well done.
Finally, let me throw into the mix Peter Lik's hilariously awful Equation of Time. It might not be his first book, but it's surely his biggest book, and boy oh boy is it Shit.
Peter: Oh, the hell with it. Carry on mate, you're doing bloody brilliant.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Please note call for submissions -
On my other little project, the Manifesto page details a permanent call for submissions, but I have posted as well, putting that call front and center. Click Here!
Monday, January 23, 2017
Public Funding of the Arts
This is just an essay stitched together from ideas and facts borrowed from other, wiser and more knowledgable, people. I recently ran across a comment from a perfectly intelligent left-leaning fellow (a Scot living in Spain) to the effect that there should be no public funding of Art.
Firstly, what's the point of Art anyways? It's a luxury we permit ourselves when times are good. Did you manage to gather a few extra edible roots and bugs this summer? Hie thee to the cave, and get to daubing pigment on the walls! Is this notion of agriculture and trade working out? Mix pigments with eggs, and apply the colors to wooden panels, for the education and delight of the ruling classes! And so on.
In these modern times, much of the world especially here in the west, has a surplus of resources, at least beyond the minimum required to survive and bear young. Some people choose to devote some of this surplus to work we call Art.
In these same modern times, we have come to the conclusion, generally, that Art is good for us. It enlarges our minds, delights our senses, and so forth. While people argue about whether this Art or that Art is worthwhile, the general consensus is that Art as a notion is something good for us, something our society ought to be making and consuming, that it is indeed something we should spend a portion of our surplus on.
But how should that spending occur? Those who oppose public funding will sometimes suggest that the artists should simply support themselves through sales of Art (the Scot remarked on above stated exactly that). This falls apart as soon as you admit that Art which is not particularly marketable might also be worthwhile. What about the artists whose work takes a great deal of time to come to fruition? Making Art in order to sell it to purchase the needs of life will color the work, as anyone who compares Art photography with Commercial photography for as long as a millisecond can see. And so forth. No, forcing the artists to support themselves through sales of work probably isn't what we want as an overall solution. Of course, some artists will sell work and buy food, there's nothing wrong with it. But it doesn't give us all of the Art we want.
Capitalism, while remarkable efficacious, isn't a magic and complete solution for much of anything. It certainly doesn't seem to cover Art very well at all.
Well, there's private funding, right?
Yes. Yes there is. Private funding, however, is fickle. In the USA there are a small handful of pretty good opera companies. Perhaps 3 that are really quite good. Funding is largely or entirely private, and is an increasing struggle as the fickle wealthy turn increasingly to funding medical research, hospitals, and so on. Art is on a down cycle, Medicine is up. In large swathes of Europe, I am given to understand, the attitude is that Opera is basically a utility. You can no more operate a city without an Opera Company than you can without a Sewer System. Without opera, you might as well be living in Australia, or the United States. That simply won't do. The result is that there's a fair bit of public funding, and a lot more very good opera in Europe.
Opera companies are, it turns out, quite expensive to operate, and to excel they really require reliable funding. It takes decades, at a minimum, to build a really good company, and if your main donor decides to buy a wing at the new hospital one year, well, that sets you back quite a bit.
Public funding is necessary, as I see it, to fill in those gaps. To support the unpopular artist, the long-term project, to cover the gaps when private funding fails. Isn't this always the role of public funding for anything? To cover the gaps between what we collectively want, and what can be funded properly by other means. To fill those gaps, we pay taxes and hire people to spend them as wisely as they might.
Of course you can argue that the result is My Tax Dollars going to fund terrible art. Yes, that's going to happen. There's no way around it, you take the good with the bad. You can argue that it's a way to funnel My Tax Dollars into the hands of greedy art dealers, and that's probably true as well. I don't see anyone saying that ought not fund fire departments, because it's just a way to funnel tax dollars into the hands of greedy hose manufacturers.
There is no doubt that government funding of the Arts is wasteful and rife with graft. The annual budget for the USA's National Endowment for the Arts is slightly more than the cost of a single F-35 fighter (without engine), which is a deeply inferior military aircraft that the USA absolutely does not need, but will end up buying some thousands of eventually.
Your country is probably not as bad, but I expect you can think up some pretty good examples. There are more immediate areas deserving our attention on the point of graft and waste.
Furthermore, graft and waste appear to be simply part of the package to one degree or another. In order to collective fund the things we want but cannot otherwise fund, we accept a modicum of graft and waste. It's the way of the world, although railing against it is also a good idea.
Firstly, what's the point of Art anyways? It's a luxury we permit ourselves when times are good. Did you manage to gather a few extra edible roots and bugs this summer? Hie thee to the cave, and get to daubing pigment on the walls! Is this notion of agriculture and trade working out? Mix pigments with eggs, and apply the colors to wooden panels, for the education and delight of the ruling classes! And so on.
In these modern times, much of the world especially here in the west, has a surplus of resources, at least beyond the minimum required to survive and bear young. Some people choose to devote some of this surplus to work we call Art.
In these same modern times, we have come to the conclusion, generally, that Art is good for us. It enlarges our minds, delights our senses, and so forth. While people argue about whether this Art or that Art is worthwhile, the general consensus is that Art as a notion is something good for us, something our society ought to be making and consuming, that it is indeed something we should spend a portion of our surplus on.
But how should that spending occur? Those who oppose public funding will sometimes suggest that the artists should simply support themselves through sales of Art (the Scot remarked on above stated exactly that). This falls apart as soon as you admit that Art which is not particularly marketable might also be worthwhile. What about the artists whose work takes a great deal of time to come to fruition? Making Art in order to sell it to purchase the needs of life will color the work, as anyone who compares Art photography with Commercial photography for as long as a millisecond can see. And so forth. No, forcing the artists to support themselves through sales of work probably isn't what we want as an overall solution. Of course, some artists will sell work and buy food, there's nothing wrong with it. But it doesn't give us all of the Art we want.
Capitalism, while remarkable efficacious, isn't a magic and complete solution for much of anything. It certainly doesn't seem to cover Art very well at all.
Well, there's private funding, right?
Yes. Yes there is. Private funding, however, is fickle. In the USA there are a small handful of pretty good opera companies. Perhaps 3 that are really quite good. Funding is largely or entirely private, and is an increasing struggle as the fickle wealthy turn increasingly to funding medical research, hospitals, and so on. Art is on a down cycle, Medicine is up. In large swathes of Europe, I am given to understand, the attitude is that Opera is basically a utility. You can no more operate a city without an Opera Company than you can without a Sewer System. Without opera, you might as well be living in Australia, or the United States. That simply won't do. The result is that there's a fair bit of public funding, and a lot more very good opera in Europe.
Opera companies are, it turns out, quite expensive to operate, and to excel they really require reliable funding. It takes decades, at a minimum, to build a really good company, and if your main donor decides to buy a wing at the new hospital one year, well, that sets you back quite a bit.
Public funding is necessary, as I see it, to fill in those gaps. To support the unpopular artist, the long-term project, to cover the gaps when private funding fails. Isn't this always the role of public funding for anything? To cover the gaps between what we collectively want, and what can be funded properly by other means. To fill those gaps, we pay taxes and hire people to spend them as wisely as they might.
Of course you can argue that the result is My Tax Dollars going to fund terrible art. Yes, that's going to happen. There's no way around it, you take the good with the bad. You can argue that it's a way to funnel My Tax Dollars into the hands of greedy art dealers, and that's probably true as well. I don't see anyone saying that ought not fund fire departments, because it's just a way to funnel tax dollars into the hands of greedy hose manufacturers.
There is no doubt that government funding of the Arts is wasteful and rife with graft. The annual budget for the USA's National Endowment for the Arts is slightly more than the cost of a single F-35 fighter (without engine), which is a deeply inferior military aircraft that the USA absolutely does not need, but will end up buying some thousands of eventually.
Your country is probably not as bad, but I expect you can think up some pretty good examples. There are more immediate areas deserving our attention on the point of graft and waste.
Furthermore, graft and waste appear to be simply part of the package to one degree or another. In order to collective fund the things we want but cannot otherwise fund, we accept a modicum of graft and waste. It's the way of the world, although railing against it is also a good idea.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
New Project
I'm not happy unless I'm doing something, I guess. I have a new project under way.
The United State of Americans.
Read the Manifesto and submit work, if you like. Pictures of Americans, ideally, and ideally illustrating that we all pretty much look the same regardless of politics. Or just follow along. I'll be taking pictures of people to make that point, as best I can, from time to time.
The United State of Americans.
Read the Manifesto and submit work, if you like. Pictures of Americans, ideally, and ideally illustrating that we all pretty much look the same regardless of politics. Or just follow along. I'll be taking pictures of people to make that point, as best I can, from time to time.
Crit: Andrea Costa
Andrea asked nicely, and so I am finally getting around to looking over his work! We've collaborated slightly, so I have a personal bias here, but I think it's fairly slight.
Andrea has a Zenfolio site and I'll look over a couple portfolios he's got up. One of the problems with a portfolio website like zenfolio is that they tend to degenerate into disorganized, or at any rate not sensibly organized "notebooks" of stuff. We see Andrea has a group of pictures around a lens, groups of pictures around camera types, that kind of thing. While useful for Andrea, I don't consider it "best foot forward" as it were! No offense meant, these things are doing double duty as a personal notebook and a public face, there's not much to be done about that.
However, there are two portfolios that are clearly designed as groups of pictures that go together for the sake of the pictures, and let's take a look at these.
The first one is "24 Origins" which I think is a really well designed project. 24 very similar pictures of the artist's feet, in the same shoes, allegedly taken in 24 different time zones. I confess that I am dubious about whether Andrea actually did that much traveling to get the pictures, but if he did, well done on getting the similarity of look in all 24 pictures!
At first glance this looks like a fairly stupid vanity project. And let's be honest, I am not setting out to prove that it's not. Still, the conceit of 24 time zones, 1 common element (Andrea's feet), is a good one. Looking more closely at the pictures, we see that what we're really looking at is straight-down photographs of texture and pattern as found on the ground. Now, we see this sort of thing (without the feet) all the goddamned time too, and generally I don't much like it. You can point the camera straight down almost literally anywhere and get this sort of thing. "Process" it up to look "polished" and there's a class of people that will click Like over and over.
But Andrea has done one better than that, and it's that step that makes it, I think, worth the while. He's sequenced these pictures really really well. I mean, it's possible that he chucked them down in random order and that I am simply finding pattern where none was intended, but I really doubt it. Watch how the textures and patterns flow.
Each photograph has a strong connection, in terms of texture or pattern, to both the previous picture and the next one. Sometimes the pattern in the previous picture even appears to be "scrolling off" to the left, to bring in a new pattern.
Without the feet this would read as deadly serious Abstract Art, and would likely fall apart under the weight of its own conceit. With the feet, we can take it more lightly, as an exercise in whimsy, and I really think it works.
Is it Important Art? Certainly not. Is it a bit twee? Yep. But it works. There's real charm to it. This would be perfectly charming and appropriate printed and hung down a long hallway, perhaps. One by one, the pictures are mildly witty, mildly artistic, inoffensive and easy to look at. And then they reward a slow amble down the hall with a cup of coffee in hand, picking out the flow of pattern.
And now the second portfolio, "The Thin Veil" which appears to have been judged already by heads no doubt wiser than mine. Nonetheless, I will offer my thoughts.
The first thing we note is that there are massively strong graphical elements pulling the whole project together. A heavy vignette, loads of grain, and an interestingly soft tonality in the pictures themselves which conflicts with the heavy blacks the vignette brings in. I quite like the look. Also, I heartily approve of selecting a strong look, any look, to bind the pictures together.
The look creates a strongly dreamlike feel, which is supported and emphasized by the long exposure times yielding motion blur, and often the subject matter.
The subject matter is all over the place, and I cannot detect a theme as such. I see a lot of pictures which could easily be deeply symbolic (two dice on the dash of a car, a silhouetted airplane, trains, reflections, a shaggy pony grazes, statuary). Two photographs of the same street fair (?) taken hours apart might mean something. A few of the pictures don't seem to yield and strong sense of "a symbol" to me, but most of them feel symbolic. Symbolic of what? I don't know, and I don't think it matters.
Possibly, even likely, the locations would be meaningful to a local. If, as the surrounding text perhaps hints, these were all shot in the same city, it's reasonable to assume that there's some sense of that same place throughout. Certainly much of the architecture looks similar, and the overall flavor is, even to this American, distinctly European. It feels even to me that these certainly could have been shot all in the same square kilometer, on the same day, but I don't feel an inevitability there. They could also, I feel, have been shot weeks and countries apart. Which may or may not be the point?
In any case, I feel that this is a somewhat stronger portfolio in terms of being Important Art although it's still leaning too heavily to my eye on graphical elements rather than any deeper "meaning" whatever I even mean by that. Not to suggest that I would weaken the graphics -- I would not. Rather, strengthen the "meaning" somehow. "The Thin Veil" does, I think, a genuinely masterful job of evoking a sort of dreamlike, almost hallucinatory sensation. These could easily be images (I use that word deliberately, and not as a fancy way of saying 'picture') drawn from a dream of the city.
What is lacking, to my eye, is a stronger sense of what I might feel. Do I (or does Andrea) love the city? Fear it? Was this a good dream, a bad dream, or a dream that we learned something from?
All in all I was happy to look at these pictures. I looked them over pretty thoroughly a few weeks ago, and went back today to find that I liked them even better today than before. I think the work is well done. It doesn't blow my socks off and excite me the way new work occasionally does, but it's leagues better than 99.9% of what's out there. "The Thin Veil" earned its award, and deserves it.
As for the rest, I confess that I didn't even click on most of the other portfolios!
Andrea has a Zenfolio site and I'll look over a couple portfolios he's got up. One of the problems with a portfolio website like zenfolio is that they tend to degenerate into disorganized, or at any rate not sensibly organized "notebooks" of stuff. We see Andrea has a group of pictures around a lens, groups of pictures around camera types, that kind of thing. While useful for Andrea, I don't consider it "best foot forward" as it were! No offense meant, these things are doing double duty as a personal notebook and a public face, there's not much to be done about that.
However, there are two portfolios that are clearly designed as groups of pictures that go together for the sake of the pictures, and let's take a look at these.
The first one is "24 Origins" which I think is a really well designed project. 24 very similar pictures of the artist's feet, in the same shoes, allegedly taken in 24 different time zones. I confess that I am dubious about whether Andrea actually did that much traveling to get the pictures, but if he did, well done on getting the similarity of look in all 24 pictures!
At first glance this looks like a fairly stupid vanity project. And let's be honest, I am not setting out to prove that it's not. Still, the conceit of 24 time zones, 1 common element (Andrea's feet), is a good one. Looking more closely at the pictures, we see that what we're really looking at is straight-down photographs of texture and pattern as found on the ground. Now, we see this sort of thing (without the feet) all the goddamned time too, and generally I don't much like it. You can point the camera straight down almost literally anywhere and get this sort of thing. "Process" it up to look "polished" and there's a class of people that will click Like over and over.
But Andrea has done one better than that, and it's that step that makes it, I think, worth the while. He's sequenced these pictures really really well. I mean, it's possible that he chucked them down in random order and that I am simply finding pattern where none was intended, but I really doubt it. Watch how the textures and patterns flow.
Each photograph has a strong connection, in terms of texture or pattern, to both the previous picture and the next one. Sometimes the pattern in the previous picture even appears to be "scrolling off" to the left, to bring in a new pattern.
Without the feet this would read as deadly serious Abstract Art, and would likely fall apart under the weight of its own conceit. With the feet, we can take it more lightly, as an exercise in whimsy, and I really think it works.
Is it Important Art? Certainly not. Is it a bit twee? Yep. But it works. There's real charm to it. This would be perfectly charming and appropriate printed and hung down a long hallway, perhaps. One by one, the pictures are mildly witty, mildly artistic, inoffensive and easy to look at. And then they reward a slow amble down the hall with a cup of coffee in hand, picking out the flow of pattern.
And now the second portfolio, "The Thin Veil" which appears to have been judged already by heads no doubt wiser than mine. Nonetheless, I will offer my thoughts.
The first thing we note is that there are massively strong graphical elements pulling the whole project together. A heavy vignette, loads of grain, and an interestingly soft tonality in the pictures themselves which conflicts with the heavy blacks the vignette brings in. I quite like the look. Also, I heartily approve of selecting a strong look, any look, to bind the pictures together.
The look creates a strongly dreamlike feel, which is supported and emphasized by the long exposure times yielding motion blur, and often the subject matter.
The subject matter is all over the place, and I cannot detect a theme as such. I see a lot of pictures which could easily be deeply symbolic (two dice on the dash of a car, a silhouetted airplane, trains, reflections, a shaggy pony grazes, statuary). Two photographs of the same street fair (?) taken hours apart might mean something. A few of the pictures don't seem to yield and strong sense of "a symbol" to me, but most of them feel symbolic. Symbolic of what? I don't know, and I don't think it matters.
Possibly, even likely, the locations would be meaningful to a local. If, as the surrounding text perhaps hints, these were all shot in the same city, it's reasonable to assume that there's some sense of that same place throughout. Certainly much of the architecture looks similar, and the overall flavor is, even to this American, distinctly European. It feels even to me that these certainly could have been shot all in the same square kilometer, on the same day, but I don't feel an inevitability there. They could also, I feel, have been shot weeks and countries apart. Which may or may not be the point?
In any case, I feel that this is a somewhat stronger portfolio in terms of being Important Art although it's still leaning too heavily to my eye on graphical elements rather than any deeper "meaning" whatever I even mean by that. Not to suggest that I would weaken the graphics -- I would not. Rather, strengthen the "meaning" somehow. "The Thin Veil" does, I think, a genuinely masterful job of evoking a sort of dreamlike, almost hallucinatory sensation. These could easily be images (I use that word deliberately, and not as a fancy way of saying 'picture') drawn from a dream of the city.
What is lacking, to my eye, is a stronger sense of what I might feel. Do I (or does Andrea) love the city? Fear it? Was this a good dream, a bad dream, or a dream that we learned something from?
All in all I was happy to look at these pictures. I looked them over pretty thoroughly a few weeks ago, and went back today to find that I liked them even better today than before. I think the work is well done. It doesn't blow my socks off and excite me the way new work occasionally does, but it's leagues better than 99.9% of what's out there. "The Thin Veil" earned its award, and deserves it.
As for the rest, I confess that I didn't even click on most of the other portfolios!
Thursday, January 19, 2017
A Notion I Cannot Shake
I have this peculiar idea that I cannot really put in to words, past what I am about to write.
I think I like photos (which is the same as saying "I think good photos are...") which are what they are trying to be as hard as they can.
It's some sort of authenticity thing? Weston's pepper is an eroticized green pepper, as hard as it knows how to be. Powerful photojournalism/documentary photos genuinely are photos of something powerful and perhaps important. A good portrait is trying as hard as it can to be a window into the subject's soul.
Most photos aren't trying very hard to be anything, except possibly a copy of another photo.
Anyways, that's several days of noodling there, and it's not a lot.
I think I like photos (which is the same as saying "I think good photos are...") which are what they are trying to be as hard as they can.
It's some sort of authenticity thing? Weston's pepper is an eroticized green pepper, as hard as it knows how to be. Powerful photojournalism/documentary photos genuinely are photos of something powerful and perhaps important. A good portrait is trying as hard as it can to be a window into the subject's soul.
Most photos aren't trying very hard to be anything, except possibly a copy of another photo.
Anyways, that's several days of noodling there, and it's not a lot.
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