So, I wrote this thing a couple days ago, and sent it off to PetaPixel, who published it (presumably gleefully) and lo, there are many comments.
Of course there's a handful of simpletons, and a handful of people who agree, huzzah. Whatever, it's all about the fur flying, really, innit? (no I don't get paid, don't be stupid.)
But there are a few people who seem to think that I am simply wrong and that, in fact, more angry blog posts about theft of photos will actually solve the problem.
Let us review a little history.
When technologies for digital media matured with the internet, two major industries felt the clammy hand of death almost immediately: the music industry, and the film industry. Piracy was a big big thing. Also, any jackass could suddenly record and distribute music, or video, easily and simply. The tools and the distribution are just there. What did the big players do?
First they passed a bunch of draconian laws. The DMCA here in the USA was supposed to stem the tide by making it easy to bring miscreants to justice, and punish them horribly.
None of this did shit, of course. The bleeding did not slacken off even slightly although they did hand out a few gruesome punishments to timid grandmothers, which was terrible PR so they stopped.
Somewhere in this mess Vevo got launched. It will serve us as the template. The CEO of UMG (I think) at some point asked a grandchild, sort of desperately, "how the hell are people listening to music?" and the grandchild said "YouTube" and the CEO said "the hell. YouTube ain't paying us. But they're GONNA." and then Vevo got started to represent music videos, basically to YouTube. The upshot is that when you listen to music on youtube, the music industry gets paid. Ad revenue gets shared out.
Let's break this down a little: laws and regulations didn't do anything. Once media is digital, it's simply too easy to move around and copy. You cannot put everyone in jail, and the FBI cannot put even a single person in Australian in jail. What worked was providing a way to listen to music that was even easier than piracy and in which the industry got paid.
We see this all over now. What's easier than stealing a movie? Watching it on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu. What's easier than stealing music? Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Digital streaming media is now available, absolutely frictionlessly, over a myriad of channels that pay the industry.
The DMCA is now 99% irrelevant, and exists mainly as a tool for bloggers to harass one another with spurious takedown requests. The industries that paid for it today give very very close to 0 shits about the DMCA, they have pivoted to new models that get them paid just fine, thx.
What about all the kiddies that can use digital technologies to make their own music, their own movies? The industry has simply turned that whole thing into a sort of minor league farm system from which they recruit the next generation of talent. Since their revenues are protected, they can afford to pay, and they do, and that's that. YouTube is now, among other things, a system in which randos compete to become the next pop stars, the next TV hosts, and so on. Launch a channel, record some material, and if you amass a few million followers, someone is gonna offer you a mainstream deal. It turns out to have streamlined that whole process.
The industry isn't gambling on unknowns any more at all, they're acquiring pre-verified, already popular, talent. It has worked out beautifully for the music and video industries.
The photography industry has yet to find its Spotify, its Vevo.
Photographs are not used in anything like the same way that music and movies are, photographs are not streamed. In fact, nobody really just sits and looks at photographs. They're background.
Now, the still photography industry hasn't got anything like enough money to change any laws, and they actually have the DMCA already anyways. Naturally, the DMCA isn't doing a goddamned thing for them.
It doesn't look to me like any kind of pivot to an ad-supported model is going anyplace, because a lot of photo usage is in ads. We may yet see ads embedded inside of ads to pay for the content used by the outermost ad (and maybe ads in ads in ads, I suppose) but that honestly seems insane. Given that the only business model we've seen that seems to work in the digital realm -- and that dubiously at best -- is ads, we may be looking at the end of the line for photos as a business.
To be fair, subscription models also seem to work for streaming media, and we're seeing those in the stock photography industry (over the wails of would-be-pro photographers). There's not a hell of a lot of money in play here, though, and certainly not enough to enrich all the people who would like to become rich shooting stock photos. In fact, there's not nearly enough money to pay the models that are employed in the shooting of the stock photos that fill the coffers of the subscription-based agencies. The agencies are making money, the photographers are not. There are just too damn many of the latter.
On the other hand, obviously, there may be some pivot I'm just not seeing, here.
The key points are clear, though. If you want to solve the theft problem, as well as the various rights-grab businesses, you need to invent a system that makes getting pictures easier than these methods, and which gets the photographer paid. It's a lot easier to steal pictures than it ever was to pirate even music, though. Right-click-save (i.e. piracy) is pretty damned frictionless, making it even easier to acquire pictures for pay is going to... hard.
As for the problem of now any doofus can be a creative the industry is doing fine. They're finding instagrammers with large followings to do their product photos, artists are being forced to "crowdfund" everything in sight. The photographers on the other hand are not doing so hot, generally. Increasingly, the artistic side is mastering the crowdfunding/influencer dynamic to their own ends, I guess.
There's just a hell of a lot less money on the table, as compared to the music and video based industries, and a hell of a lot more players. You don't even have to be able to sing. If you have $300 and can press a button, you too can be a photographer. This isn't a good recipe.
Again, there may be some pivot I am not seeing, but I am not optimistic.
Which brings us back around to this: It can't really be just about the pictures. You've got to bring something else to the table. Even if that's just a solid reputation for showing up on time and working fast.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Photobook Reviews are All Positive
Well, it's not quite right to say that all photobook reviews are positive. Almost all of them are, though. Colberg reviewed Mosse's Incoming somewhat negatively, I think. To what extent he was simply reacting to the success of Mosse's project is unclear.
What does seem to be true is that little photobooks, the bread and butter of the occasionally rapacious small-publishing-house industry, are almost invariably well received by the people who review them. Possibly because the only people who review these things are on the inside of that incestuous little universe, but that's just speculation.
Let's take a look at HORIZONT reviewed on the always-hilarious American Suburb X, which review you can read here.
I won't bother with the whole review, except to note that the reviewer seems to like this singularly unlikeable book, and to poke at a few of the more absurd lines.
As far as I can discern, none of the cameras I own have any propensity for order. Perhaps the author means that photographers and photography do, with using the word "camera" metonymically? In that case I suggest that she needs to get out more. Frankly, there is a great deal of Serious Art as well as vernacular photography that looks a lot like this hot mess.
While I have to admire the author's touching naivete about what capitalism can or cannot easily assimilate, this whole sentence is nonsense. It's just ugly cement buildings and generalized urban stuff. Eastern Europe has a lot of ugly cement, I am informed. There's a fair bit of this in the USA, actually. Some of those buildings remind by of UMass, Amherst.
And so on, on and on. I should at this point direct you to some remarks and some work I find myself coming back to from time to time: Vernacular Enigma. These pictures are much the same sort of thing, but are all shot in the USA, so much for the specialness of East Berlin.
To be honest, on roughly alternate days I am convinced that American Suburb X (ASX) is actually a joke, a sort of extended performance art piece. Sadly, on all the other days I realize that this sort of gibberish is all too prevalent, and that ASX is just another manifestation of the same stuff masquerading as serious writing.
Actually, I have just remembered another negative photobook review, also from ASX: SHIT but to be honest this seems to be mostly rage at the book's author, and the largest complaint from the reviewer is about someone else's analysis of the book as having something to do with homosexuality.
Ok so maybe not all photobook reviews are positive. It just seems like I keep running a lot of lazy little positive plugs.
What does seem to be true is that little photobooks, the bread and butter of the occasionally rapacious small-publishing-house industry, are almost invariably well received by the people who review them. Possibly because the only people who review these things are on the inside of that incestuous little universe, but that's just speculation.
Let's take a look at HORIZONT reviewed on the always-hilarious American Suburb X, which review you can read here.
I won't bother with the whole review, except to note that the reviewer seems to like this singularly unlikeable book, and to poke at a few of the more absurd lines.
This sort of space doesn’t respond readily to the camera’s propensity for order, and Ashkin’s photographs play on its strange, disorienting quality, looking up past the tops of buildings, peering out from behind knots of vegetation, gazing dully at the ground.
As far as I can discern, none of the cameras I own have any propensity for order. Perhaps the author means that photographers and photography do, with using the word "camera" metonymically? In that case I suggest that she needs to get out more. Frankly, there is a great deal of Serious Art as well as vernacular photography that looks a lot like this hot mess.
There’s a kind of deadpan anarchy about places like these, patchworked together out of remnants and interstices that capitalist development can’t easily assimilate.
While I have to admire the author's touching naivete about what capitalism can or cannot easily assimilate, this whole sentence is nonsense. It's just ugly cement buildings and generalized urban stuff. Eastern Europe has a lot of ugly cement, I am informed. There's a fair bit of this in the USA, actually. Some of those buildings remind by of UMass, Amherst.
And so on, on and on. I should at this point direct you to some remarks and some work I find myself coming back to from time to time: Vernacular Enigma. These pictures are much the same sort of thing, but are all shot in the USA, so much for the specialness of East Berlin.
To be honest, on roughly alternate days I am convinced that American Suburb X (ASX) is actually a joke, a sort of extended performance art piece. Sadly, on all the other days I realize that this sort of gibberish is all too prevalent, and that ASX is just another manifestation of the same stuff masquerading as serious writing.
Actually, I have just remembered another negative photobook review, also from ASX: SHIT but to be honest this seems to be mostly rage at the book's author, and the largest complaint from the reviewer is about someone else's analysis of the book as having something to do with homosexuality.
Ok so maybe not all photobook reviews are positive. It just seems like I keep running a lot of lazy little positive plugs.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Quit Bellyachin'!
Everywhere you turn in the photographic press you see the same kinds of articles over and over.
Sure, fair enough. These things are all all sad, and some of them are illegal. So what? You're standing around in rising waters already hip-deep, whining that someone oughta fix the levees. Stop it. This is the situation on the ground, and another angry blog post about how unfair it all is is not going to change that. Stop complaining and start building a raft.
How are you, as a photographer, going to accomplish whatever it is you have a yen to in this world?
Do you want to make money taking pictures? Well, too bad. Photos are too easy to take, too commodified. Sell your clients something they can't get from their phone, or some rando from craigslist. Sell them an experience, with photos. Sell them a book, with photos. Sell them a "personal branding campaign," with photos. If you have to, sell them a coupon to a local restaurant, with photos. Figure it out.
Do you want to play the photo competition game? Well, competitions are going to take your rights. Put your grownup pants on, and make some photos for competition that you're willing to kiss goodbye. Make other photos for your portfolio. They can be real similar, it turns out.
You don't want people stealing your pictures? Don't put the ones you want to keep online. If you need an online presence, put some other ones up. Photos you're willing to kiss goodbye.
And so on, on and on. This is the world, people. Pull your socks up, quit bellyaching, and start figuring out how to live in this world.
Stop complaining about the levees and start building a raft.
Or, you can put your camera down and take up needlepoint. I hear that's a thing too.
Such-and-such a competition or service is just a rights-grab! You have to give up your rights to your images! Total party foul!
Everyone steals everyone else's pictures which is totally illegal! Lame!
Losers with weak cameras are undercutting professionals left and right! I have a sad!
Phone cameras are terrible but everyone keeps using them! #dslrs4lyfe, yo!
Everyone steals everyone else's pictures which is totally illegal! Lame!
Losers with weak cameras are undercutting professionals left and right! I have a sad!
Phone cameras are terrible but everyone keeps using them! #dslrs4lyfe, yo!
How are you, as a photographer, going to accomplish whatever it is you have a yen to in this world?
Do you want to make money taking pictures? Well, too bad. Photos are too easy to take, too commodified. Sell your clients something they can't get from their phone, or some rando from craigslist. Sell them an experience, with photos. Sell them a book, with photos. Sell them a "personal branding campaign," with photos. If you have to, sell them a coupon to a local restaurant, with photos. Figure it out.
Do you want to play the photo competition game? Well, competitions are going to take your rights. Put your grownup pants on, and make some photos for competition that you're willing to kiss goodbye. Make other photos for your portfolio. They can be real similar, it turns out.
You don't want people stealing your pictures? Don't put the ones you want to keep online. If you need an online presence, put some other ones up. Photos you're willing to kiss goodbye.
And so on, on and on. This is the world, people. Pull your socks up, quit bellyaching, and start figuring out how to live in this world.
Stop complaining about the levees and start building a raft.
Or, you can put your camera down and take up needlepoint. I hear that's a thing too.
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Another Thing
This is another Rogue Photo imprint product. It is not in the numbered sequence of official "issues" but is rather a side project, using some of the same aesthetic.
It is overtly political. Marked up by one penny, because I like round numbers. You shouldn't buy it, though, because it's a very Bellingham specific political tract. Even here it probably won't be particularly on-point in a year or two. We hope.
Bellingham Zoning Zine
This is a 5" x 8", black and white, economy paper, trade book, the cheapest product blurb sells. I'm not sure the cover will even come out in color.
As usual, the point here is that you can preview it. The book was put together very very fast, it's not supposed to be polished. The pictures were all shot one weekend in Seattle. This is deliberately propagandist. While as far as I know there are no outright untruths in it, certainly there is no nuance. It's intended to be sound-bitey, punchy, and "essentially" truthful, even if a detail here or there is mislaid of misstated.
It is overtly political. Marked up by one penny, because I like round numbers. You shouldn't buy it, though, because it's a very Bellingham specific political tract. Even here it probably won't be particularly on-point in a year or two. We hope.
Bellingham Zoning Zine
This is a 5" x 8", black and white, economy paper, trade book, the cheapest product blurb sells. I'm not sure the cover will even come out in color.
As usual, the point here is that you can preview it. The book was put together very very fast, it's not supposed to be polished. The pictures were all shot one weekend in Seattle. This is deliberately propagandist. While as far as I know there are no outright untruths in it, certainly there is no nuance. It's intended to be sound-bitey, punchy, and "essentially" truthful, even if a detail here or there is mislaid of misstated.
Monday, February 25, 2019
Show Me Something
The title is my favorite line from the not-very-good movie "Red 2." Helen Mirren's character (a professional assassin) is under fire, has been picked up by a hit man driving some sporty little car, and they are fleeing a bunch of very angry dudes with a lot of guns. She requests, laconically, very British-ly, that the hit man 'show her something,' so he throws the car into a spin and she fires enormous pistols out both windows and makes a lot of black Land Rovers explode. It is a wonderful, glorious, deeply stupid, set piece. You can find it on YouTube.
The point of this, though, is that when I hand you a book with photographs in it there is an implicit contract. I am stating that I want to show you something. This applies to a portfolio, a slideshow, a web site of pictures, anything. It is part of the cultural baseline surrounding photographs.
You can look at three books, Not Safe For Work (particularly Showcaller): Pixy Liao's Experimental Relationship shown in its entirety here in a video made by Colberg; Talia Chetrit's Showcaller in preview here; and Michael Ashkin's HORIZONT again as a preview here.
I hate all of these books. They all strike me as profoundly stupid, bad, books. But.. why? I don't hate clumsy vernacular pictures. I certainly don't hate picture of girls with very little clothing, or no clothing at all. I quite like a lot of the kinds of things that appear in these books.
I have to admit that I do kind of hate the prevalent design tropes of placing pictures randomly in spreads for no particular reason, sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes jammed in a corner. Hey let's bleed this off the bottom for no goddamned reason at all. But that's not the fault of the pictures, it's the lazy designers who simply copy bad ideas from one another.
Now, by way of Daniel Milnor, yet another artist to look at: Siân Davey. Siân does a lot of that twee shit I hate: she shoots film, she shoots medium format film with a Mamiya 7. Her pictures have a vernacular look, there's an almost forced sense of vérité. Hipster bullshit.
The difference is that I like this work.
It occurs to me that Davey is making an honest effort to show me something and the other three are not. Liao and Chetrit are doing performance for the camera, which performance is wilfully opaque. I am not supposed to understand this material. I am, in a way, not permitted to understand these performances. Ok, so this is partly a response to "male gaze." There is a strong element of here is a woman, she is nude, or nearly so, and she is not available which I guess makes a certain sort of sense. Kinda. But at the end of the day, Ms. Chetrit, I can still see your genitals, and they still give me ideas in the way that exposed genitals do.
Ashkin's book, if you read the blurbs and what passes for "reviews" in these degenerate times, is a book about process rather than photography. His photographs push back against photography itself, defying its standards and processes. Apparently they do this because he shot horizontals, and then cropped them to verticals. Also the pictures are all just random bullshit from some depressing neighborhood in Berlin. If anyone thinks this is some sort of defiant stand against convention, they simply haven't been paying attention.
Anyways, HORIZONT is another collection of material which is not intended to be understood. I, the viewer, am almost explicitly excluded from any understanding of what the hell is going on. Michael Ashkin's response to the implied show me something is a flat no.
Liao, Chetrit, and Ashkin are not creating windows. They appear, in fact, to be explicitly creating a wall instead; they are engaged in a kind of anti-communication. One cannot help but wonder if the point of the wall is to suggest the presence of a treasure inside. One then wonders if the treasure is real, or whether there is only a wall. It hardly matters, though, because all we on the outside have is the wall. If you and I wish to converse, it doesn't matter whether you don't speak English, or if you won't. Since I don't speak Latvian, no conversation is going to occur either way.
Siân Davey in contrast is showing me something. There are people, things, places, that she has some feeling toward, some connection with. She seeks to share with me something of that. She invites me in to her space with her pictures, rather than walling me out. Her pictures are a window.
Ok, so maybe it's me that's wrong. Maybe the point of photographs in particular and art in general need not be to show me something. Maybe there is room for a defiant NO! You could argue that I am simply an unsophisticated viewer, if you liked.
I'm gonna disagree with you on all points, though. Art in general, and photography specifically, has to be about communication. The whole point of the photograph, all of its special properties, are pointed at the idea of showing me something. If you want to not show me something, you can anti-communicate as well with a blotch of ink on a page as with a peevish, opaque, photo. At least with the blotch we would all know where we stand, rather than mucking about with this bait-and-switch business.
A large percentage of contemporary photobooks appear to be playing this game. They offer up a set of photographs, with their built-in implied let me show you something and then they snatch it away, leaving only opacity.
I don't much like it, and I am not fooled. There is no treasure, there is only the wall.
The point of this, though, is that when I hand you a book with photographs in it there is an implicit contract. I am stating that I want to show you something. This applies to a portfolio, a slideshow, a web site of pictures, anything. It is part of the cultural baseline surrounding photographs.
You can look at three books, Not Safe For Work (particularly Showcaller): Pixy Liao's Experimental Relationship shown in its entirety here in a video made by Colberg; Talia Chetrit's Showcaller in preview here; and Michael Ashkin's HORIZONT again as a preview here.
I hate all of these books. They all strike me as profoundly stupid, bad, books. But.. why? I don't hate clumsy vernacular pictures. I certainly don't hate picture of girls with very little clothing, or no clothing at all. I quite like a lot of the kinds of things that appear in these books.
I have to admit that I do kind of hate the prevalent design tropes of placing pictures randomly in spreads for no particular reason, sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes jammed in a corner. Hey let's bleed this off the bottom for no goddamned reason at all. But that's not the fault of the pictures, it's the lazy designers who simply copy bad ideas from one another.
Now, by way of Daniel Milnor, yet another artist to look at: Siân Davey. Siân does a lot of that twee shit I hate: she shoots film, she shoots medium format film with a Mamiya 7. Her pictures have a vernacular look, there's an almost forced sense of vérité. Hipster bullshit.
The difference is that I like this work.
It occurs to me that Davey is making an honest effort to show me something and the other three are not. Liao and Chetrit are doing performance for the camera, which performance is wilfully opaque. I am not supposed to understand this material. I am, in a way, not permitted to understand these performances. Ok, so this is partly a response to "male gaze." There is a strong element of here is a woman, she is nude, or nearly so, and she is not available which I guess makes a certain sort of sense. Kinda. But at the end of the day, Ms. Chetrit, I can still see your genitals, and they still give me ideas in the way that exposed genitals do.
Ashkin's book, if you read the blurbs and what passes for "reviews" in these degenerate times, is a book about process rather than photography. His photographs push back against photography itself, defying its standards and processes. Apparently they do this because he shot horizontals, and then cropped them to verticals. Also the pictures are all just random bullshit from some depressing neighborhood in Berlin. If anyone thinks this is some sort of defiant stand against convention, they simply haven't been paying attention.
Anyways, HORIZONT is another collection of material which is not intended to be understood. I, the viewer, am almost explicitly excluded from any understanding of what the hell is going on. Michael Ashkin's response to the implied show me something is a flat no.
Liao, Chetrit, and Ashkin are not creating windows. They appear, in fact, to be explicitly creating a wall instead; they are engaged in a kind of anti-communication. One cannot help but wonder if the point of the wall is to suggest the presence of a treasure inside. One then wonders if the treasure is real, or whether there is only a wall. It hardly matters, though, because all we on the outside have is the wall. If you and I wish to converse, it doesn't matter whether you don't speak English, or if you won't. Since I don't speak Latvian, no conversation is going to occur either way.
Siân Davey in contrast is showing me something. There are people, things, places, that she has some feeling toward, some connection with. She seeks to share with me something of that. She invites me in to her space with her pictures, rather than walling me out. Her pictures are a window.
Ok, so maybe it's me that's wrong. Maybe the point of photographs in particular and art in general need not be to show me something. Maybe there is room for a defiant NO! You could argue that I am simply an unsophisticated viewer, if you liked.
I'm gonna disagree with you on all points, though. Art in general, and photography specifically, has to be about communication. The whole point of the photograph, all of its special properties, are pointed at the idea of showing me something. If you want to not show me something, you can anti-communicate as well with a blotch of ink on a page as with a peevish, opaque, photo. At least with the blotch we would all know where we stand, rather than mucking about with this bait-and-switch business.
A large percentage of contemporary photobooks appear to be playing this game. They offer up a set of photographs, with their built-in implied let me show you something and then they snatch it away, leaving only opacity.
I don't much like it, and I am not fooled. There is no treasure, there is only the wall.
Saturday, February 23, 2019
Rogue Photo: Call for Proposals
I've done a few publications on Blurb over the last year, working my way toward a sort of an aesthetic, under the vague moniker of "Rogue Photo" which hits more or less the right note of rebellious but not entirely serious. Here are the first three covers:
The progression is very much toward a black and white duotone cover with red notes. I have added a red spine, more or less on impulse, and I like how that's working out.
So, that's the aesthetic of this notional imprint thing I call Rogue Photo.
I'm thinking of it as a series, numbered and dated, and occasional out-of-sequence "production of" one-off items as well. Pictured above are issues 1 and 2, and the Zoning Zine is an off-sequence one-off.
Content-wise I lean toward what I wrote out in this Manifesto a few weeks ago.
I could make these things all day more or less forever, I think, but part of what I want to do is collaborate. Hence, this Call for Proposals.
The Manifesto is not submission guidelines, it's just where I am at. I am as likely to be interested in ideas that violently oppose mine as I am ideas that align with them. I do prefer black and white photos, and I am almost certain to want some combination of text and pictures by the time we're done.
It's best if you have an idea, some sort of fairly clear concept, and some pictures, but also that you are stuck. If you're not stuck, get outta here and finish your own thing, there's no need for me here. If you need encouragement, I am happy to yell at you to finish it from time to time.
I am not a promoter, I bring no audience. If you have an audience and a desire to make something to sell to them, great. I've for some ideas on how that might be done. Whether some final product would sell 0 copies or 10,000 copies is not of great interest to me, but I am open to pretty much any possibilities there.
What I do bring is a collaborator with ideas (me) and you can judge for yourself whether I have good ideas or bad ideas. I also write, and can provide words. Or pictures. Or both. Again, I am idiosyncratic here, it is up to you to decide whether you want to try it out or not. I also design, and I think I generally can muddle my way through to something that is at the very least interesting and sometimes quite good.
Got an idea? Got a concept? Got some pictures? Write me an email at amolitor@gmail.com and let's do something. I have a couple things people sent me earlier, and I am open to pursuing those with those people.
You will always retain all rights to your work, and can back out at any time. If, by some weird confluence of events, money gets involved, we'll sort that out when the time comes.
The progression is very much toward a black and white duotone cover with red notes. I have added a red spine, more or less on impulse, and I like how that's working out.
So, that's the aesthetic of this notional imprint thing I call Rogue Photo.
I'm thinking of it as a series, numbered and dated, and occasional out-of-sequence "production of" one-off items as well. Pictured above are issues 1 and 2, and the Zoning Zine is an off-sequence one-off.
Content-wise I lean toward what I wrote out in this Manifesto a few weeks ago.
I could make these things all day more or less forever, I think, but part of what I want to do is collaborate. Hence, this Call for Proposals.
The Manifesto is not submission guidelines, it's just where I am at. I am as likely to be interested in ideas that violently oppose mine as I am ideas that align with them. I do prefer black and white photos, and I am almost certain to want some combination of text and pictures by the time we're done.
It's best if you have an idea, some sort of fairly clear concept, and some pictures, but also that you are stuck. If you're not stuck, get outta here and finish your own thing, there's no need for me here. If you need encouragement, I am happy to yell at you to finish it from time to time.
I am not a promoter, I bring no audience. If you have an audience and a desire to make something to sell to them, great. I've for some ideas on how that might be done. Whether some final product would sell 0 copies or 10,000 copies is not of great interest to me, but I am open to pretty much any possibilities there.
What I do bring is a collaborator with ideas (me) and you can judge for yourself whether I have good ideas or bad ideas. I also write, and can provide words. Or pictures. Or both. Again, I am idiosyncratic here, it is up to you to decide whether you want to try it out or not. I also design, and I think I generally can muddle my way through to something that is at the very least interesting and sometimes quite good.
Got an idea? Got a concept? Got some pictures? Write me an email at amolitor@gmail.com and let's do something. I have a couple things people sent me earlier, and I am open to pursuing those with those people.
You will always retain all rights to your work, and can back out at any time. If, by some weird confluence of events, money gets involved, we'll sort that out when the time comes.
Friday, February 22, 2019
Crit: Thicket
A few weeks ago one of our regular commenters, David Smith, posted a link to a PDF book he's made, Thicket. I downloaded same, and have looked at it from time to time since, and now I shall presume to review it. After a fashion.
I do not know offhand if this book is intended as a magnum opus or a joke, or something in between. If I squint I can imagine practically anything as an authorial intent. I am going to treat it as an object made with serious intent, as a work-in-progress, this being my best guess at David's intentions. At any rate, the book certainly makes sense seen that way.
The first thing that struck me about the book was, to be honest, confusion. The book completely lacks any nod toward the standard front matter that books have (title page, half-title, colophon, etcetera, etcetera.) Now, to my mind, most modern books have way too much of this crap, I quite dislike leafing through apparently endless repetitive rot before I get to the body of the book. On the other hand, though, a page or two of material allows a sort of soft landing on the content itself. We expect to turn a page or two, to reminded of what it is we're looking at (title) and get a more or less blank page or two to catch our breath and settle in. To be confronted with content the instant we open the cover is a bit unexpected.
Having sorted out that this is content, and that content is recto, with blank verso pages, we can then page through it. It is very very short, 12 pages, 6 pictures in all, plus one for the covers.
The next thing that struck me was a sort of resemblance to John Gossage's book The Pond (which I think Mike C. might have brought to my attention only a year or two ago.) In fact, I went looking for a source of pictures of that book to see if this was a direct homage (I do not own a copy of The Pond) and as far as I can tell it is not, particularly. Thicket uses full bleed pictures recto, The Pond is more mixed up design-wise, and so on.
Still, the resemblance is there. Both use a collection of pictures, each picture being more or less just some stuff, not very interesting, to evoke a kind of sense of place. Gossage and Smith both give is a large hint in the title, and we obligingly imagine a Pond or a Thicket, respectively.
The same picture appears on both the front and back covers, and I am unsure what to make of that. I'm not sure that's a choice I would have made, and the fact that it is clearly a conscious choice begs the question "why?" to which I have no answer.
Does Thicket work? Yeah, I think it works fine.
I don't particularly love it, but that is purely a reflection of my personal taste, not anything fundamental that I can point out (viewing it as a work-in-progress, as noted).
I do not know offhand if this book is intended as a magnum opus or a joke, or something in between. If I squint I can imagine practically anything as an authorial intent. I am going to treat it as an object made with serious intent, as a work-in-progress, this being my best guess at David's intentions. At any rate, the book certainly makes sense seen that way.
The first thing that struck me about the book was, to be honest, confusion. The book completely lacks any nod toward the standard front matter that books have (title page, half-title, colophon, etcetera, etcetera.) Now, to my mind, most modern books have way too much of this crap, I quite dislike leafing through apparently endless repetitive rot before I get to the body of the book. On the other hand, though, a page or two of material allows a sort of soft landing on the content itself. We expect to turn a page or two, to reminded of what it is we're looking at (title) and get a more or less blank page or two to catch our breath and settle in. To be confronted with content the instant we open the cover is a bit unexpected.
Having sorted out that this is content, and that content is recto, with blank verso pages, we can then page through it. It is very very short, 12 pages, 6 pictures in all, plus one for the covers.
The next thing that struck me was a sort of resemblance to John Gossage's book The Pond (which I think Mike C. might have brought to my attention only a year or two ago.) In fact, I went looking for a source of pictures of that book to see if this was a direct homage (I do not own a copy of The Pond) and as far as I can tell it is not, particularly. Thicket uses full bleed pictures recto, The Pond is more mixed up design-wise, and so on.
Still, the resemblance is there. Both use a collection of pictures, each picture being more or less just some stuff, not very interesting, to evoke a kind of sense of place. Gossage and Smith both give is a large hint in the title, and we obligingly imagine a Pond or a Thicket, respectively.
The same picture appears on both the front and back covers, and I am unsure what to make of that. I'm not sure that's a choice I would have made, and the fact that it is clearly a conscious choice begs the question "why?" to which I have no answer.
Does Thicket work? Yeah, I think it works fine.
I don't particularly love it, but that is purely a reflection of my personal taste, not anything fundamental that I can point out (viewing it as a work-in-progress, as noted).
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