Let me introduce you to some old friends.
I certainly don’t have the world’s best photobook collection, in many ways it is not even a collection. There have been no rules applied in its creation. Some are gifts, some were too cheap not have a look. Heteroglot I think is the word. Some are missing, loaned, purloined, misplaced in moves-Mark, you still have my Paul Strand and my Friedlander One Eyed Cat!
I don’t buy as many photobooks now as I used to, even though the availability and selection has never been better. A Photographer’s Place may be gone, but we have our friends now at Dashwood here in New York. It’s a treat going in there, I feel guilty because I rarely buy anything there. Aren’t we all a little cash-strapped? But photobooks are as much for the lookey-loo as they are to to buy and own. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent as a young photographer scanning the spines of photobooks in a variety of bookstores over the years. I was not alone, this was part of “the education” of becoming a photographer. There was a distance and an intimacy that is the paradox of any obsession. Libraries, books and old things can do that. They create a silence, a place to dwell in.
Probably some good work but I will never get to browse any of them. How can I know if I like it? I don’t make friends easily…
Despite it’s inefficiencies, the old school publishing model put books in the pews of this old church and you could go in to worship every other sunday. Or like movie marquees, the titles on the dust-jackets offered a world that was just out of reach. Photobooks in days past had the element of the exotic and foreign about them, a club that you could never join, but aspired to. We don’t like that anymore, it gets labeled “elitist” or “un-democratic” or not “accessible.” And our aspiration has been exploited by innumerable contests where the only path to success is to win!
The photobook of yore was where I learned what is was to be a photographer. As unrealistic as that sounds. Almost by default, there was really no other place. You read Forwards and dust-jackets and biographies, all 606 pages of Shadow and Substance, the life of W. Eugene Smith by Jim Hughes, or the Weston Daybooks, a two-volume set-and you put yourself in their tripod sticks. There was no one telling you how, in art schools you surveyed the same books and imitated your professors, commercial photographers used assistants, so you assisted. Workshops offered a chance at shouldering up next to your idols, for a short while, but the photobook could be your constant companion. And through it you got to know a photographer’s work over time and with respect to what was relevant in your life at that moment. Most of the photobooks I “know” I don’t even own, but have tasted over the years, either in libraries or in stores. Let me share some deep dark secrets; I don’t even own a copy of The Americans! I’m such a fraud! And oh how I wish I had stolen that Life & Work Werner Bischof from the Kingston Public library in 1992! Now its out of print…
Joke: Brett, when you go down to the market don’t forget to get peppers…
December 21. I can’t go on this way. I must acquire a formula for my portraits. I compromise anyway-and give far too much of myself to an unappreciative audience.
Yesterday, I quit-put down my prints on which I had spotted all morning. Poor technique? Yes, but not my fault-finger prints and scratches and bad retouching done by others-retouching necessary to make an American of questionable age look like a vivacious senorita. I quit, I say, and paced the floor the afternoon-the worst reaction to professional portraiture I ever had. It made no difference to me that rent was due and the work had to go on….
Yet here I am this morning at my desk, working harder than ever, attacking this negative almost with a ferocity, as though it were one of the tasks of Hercules. The outward and superficial reason that if it is not done by tomorrow I cannot go to El Toreo Sunday!-and five foot letters announce Silveti y Nacional!
(What was I complaining about portraiture the other day? Same as it ever was!)
Tell me what a twenty-five year old living with his parents in Ajax can learn from Edward Weston in Mexico in 1924 about being a photographer-? Maybe if I figure out SEO finally I can go to the Bullfights on Sunday? But this was part of “the education,” learning what came before. Photobooks were the cathedral of the ancients, but they didn’t seem ancient even when they were. When your only point of reference is the book on a shelf Weston is just as alive as the person next to you. Ansel Adams wrote The Camera, The Negative, The Print in the early 80′s, detailing principles that had been in use for decades. It was neither new nor old, it was just “Photography” and part of the curriculum.
One of my teachers said that a student of his had learned black and white printing mainly from looking at photobooks-he thought that this is what a good print should look like, and since he had no access to actual prints, it was all he had to go on. The point being, photobooks were responsible for many aspects of the craft and it’s transmission over the years. For many it was the sole point of connection to the medium. We now have the luxury of unlimited search the world over, seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan is now possible, in the days of the photobook, you were limited to what was published. Here we have another facet; for better or worse, the photobook was a gatekeeping mechanism. Making it to a store shelf confers a status on the work, it also reinforces status. Now from the point of view of me seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan I much prefer the internet. But from the point of view of separating wheat from chaff there is nothing wrong with a few barriers to entry.
Sadly, I never really internalized these rules.
We take the online community for granted already, but pre-internet, you suffered your successes and failures alone. Or you shared letters with friends and classmates. One photobook that was very important to me early on was Ted Orland’s “Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity”, mostly cobbled together from a correspondence between the author and another young photog-Sally Mann. It is sort of their modern day emails to each other, published. But because they are letters, we get a care and depth of expression that is timeless. In the book you get a picture of what “emerging” photographer meant circa 1973-1984, the drudge-work, the uncertainty, but mostly the idealism. It is not unlike blogs today, at least the blogs that I like to read. Photobooks were web “point-oh” you could say.
Ted’s Photographic Truths: Photographers fade faster than photographs…
The last point I want to make about photobooks is that recently some have become fetishized collectibles. I suppose in a world where images are in infinite supply, we must ration every possible point of purchase in order inflate their value. I don’t feel this is a healthy situation. It is a sad fact that inefficiencies of the old publishing model meant that photographers made no money creating books, they never sold well, and the bulk of them were then remaindered and then pulped. But you can go down to Strand and revel in the exhaust of this process, and pick up copies relatively cheap. In the secondary market they have long lives, like those people I suspect you see at company parties year after year but never find out their names. It is comforting to know that they are still there. Now a lot of good work is going into print on demand- a place where I can’t browse, move in alongside, live in, a virtual marketplace of limited runs that sometimes are created to sell out, be buzz-worthly, and appreciate in value. At least that is what the email blasts are urging me to do, only twenty copies left!
Obviously I have mixed feelings about this. I love that anyone can self publish a great book, except for the fact that it will have little impact beyond an even smaller number of people that the old publishing model serviced. But I’m ready to see the end of the day dominated by a few large imprints publishing yet another book no one needs to see. Taschen you know who you are. Breasts. Really? And I am a fan of the breast, clearly. But I am not a fan of the last few years of pseudo-porno photobooks depicting behind the scenes of any number of moral low-tide pools. Publishers think or know these books sell well enough to justify their production. And photo books where magazine fashion photography is paraded as art. Ya know, without the typography these pictures are BO-RING.
But I think the photobook does not serve the same purpose now. It is not the wooden church of the photographic, the point of first contact. It is becoming a quick status symbol. A collectible to flaunt your discerning taste. A tick box on the list of photographic things you try when you are starting out, like toy cameras and tilt-shift. None of them will be around long enough to show the next generation of photographers what it was like back in your day.
Really nice.
wonderfully written and sadly true