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Category: Photobooks
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Awoiska van der molen
Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom.
Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molens photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing; expressing these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.
???She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places:
Sequester (2014) “photographed throughout the whole of Europe” including the volcanic Canary Islands,contains monochromatic “landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey”.
Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molen’s photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Awoiska van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing. She plays out these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.
https://www.awoiska.nl/books#sequesterBlanco
(2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.
“Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”.
Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.The Living Mountain
(2020) is “a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit.”
‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’.
https://www.awoiska.nl/books -
Print on Demand
- Self-publishing (from Book Design course)
- Exercise 5.3: Print-on-demand mock-up
Whether or not you intend to produce a book to present your photographs for Assignment
Five, suppose for this exercise that you will. During this exercise you’ll familiarise yourself
with a print-on-demand application and experiment with a book design.You don’t need to place an order for the book for this exercise.If you don’t already have one, set up an account with a print-on-demand service, such as
Blurb. (You don’t have to use Blurb, but whichever company you use must offer the option
of saving your book layout draft as a pdf document.) You’ll need to download Blurb’s Booksmart software from their site. This application is fairly intuitive.Import the photos you’ve made so far for Assignment Five into the new project.
Experiment with layout, text, titles and captions; when you’re satisfied with a draft, save it
as a pdf. If you’re using Blurb the pdf will be watermarked with their logo but this doesn’t
matter. If you’re keeping your learning log online, link this document into a blog post. If
you’re keeping a hard copy log, print the pdf on regular printer paper.Make some brief notes about how you found working with the software and briefly evaluate
your rough book design, describing any particular design choices and noting any influences
in terms of other books that inspired you.If you’re thinking about producing a book for your self-directed project, you may want to
email the pdf or send a link to it to your tutor for their comments. -
Photobooks: design and publishing
Print-on-demand and self-publishing
The expansion on print-on-demand services now makes self-publishing fairly straightforward. These enable direct sales through companies like Amazon at price mark-ups decided by the photographer. There are a number of services on offer that I looked at:
Review of options: https://www.cnet.com/news/best-and-worst-photo-book-making-websites-for-you/
But the one I chose – it is UK-based and offers the most flexibility together with full integration with Adobe CC Lightroom and InDesign is
- blurb: http://www.blurb.co.uk
This was very competitive on pricing with frequent price reduction deals once you are signed up. Shipping from Netherlands keeps postal costs reasonably low (will Brexit add taxes????) – though it is still more cost-effective to wait and order multiple publications. Blurb has teamed up with Adobe to enable easy compilation of books using plug-ins for Lightroom and InDesign. Blurb has its own software, but this offers less flexibility to edit images as they have to be sized, cropped and processed before they are laid out. The greatest flexibility for editing of the images is given in Lightroom. InDesign allows for much more sophisticated layouts of tiff images that can then be edited in Photoshop.
However the choice of book format and size, and paper stock is still limited compared to professional book publishing services.
Professional bookbinders
Bookbinding is a very specialist craft. Professional bookbinders can offer a range of quality services: mixing paper stocks, customised endpapers, gatefold pages and matching slipcases and boxes. A professional bookbinder can offer advice on materials and other design aspects, such as how easy it will be to physically open your book with your particular choice of paper, and how far your image needs to be printed from the gutter to be viewed properly, for example.
For an overview of different types of binding see
http://design.zemniimages.info/4-materials-and-process/binding/ (to be fully developed)
Book design issues
Some points to consider when designing or evaluating
- Rationale: What is the purpose of the book? What is the main concept? Who is it for? Why do you want to present your work in a book? Is the book format really the most suitable medium in which to present your work? A badly printed or poorly designed book of your photographs will not be as well received as a simpler portfolio of good quality prints.
- Selection and Editing: Edit your work strictly before even considering the layout. Do all the images sit comfortably next to each other. Do any seem out of place? Can this be resolved, or should they be omitted?
- Sequencing: Sequencing is paramount: consider how certain images relate to each other (graphically as well as in terms of the ‘connotations’ of an image, or the juxtaposition of images within the sequence).
- Text: Will you use text? What will you say? Will the text complement and reinforce the images, or challenge the viewer through contrast or contradiction?
- Typeface What typeface and style will you use? Pay as much attention to the words and their layout as you do to your photographs. Your choice of typeface communicates a lot about how you want your photographs to be read.
Book Module in Lightroom
Webinar from Blurb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JySgrXenVCk
Using InDesign series of videos
Adobe InDesign gives much more control over layout and also links to Blurb, or can be exported to pdf for other Print on Demand services.
For more discussion see my Book Design blog (to be completed by May 2017):
http://design.zemniimages.info/principles-and-process/typography/
http://design.zemniimages.info/principles-and-process/images/
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Photobooks: Inspiration
Types of Photobook
Surveys and catalogues- catalogues for exhibitions
- ‘Survey’ publications draw together a collection of individual images or a group of practitioners working in a similar area. Some surveys seem more didactic or directed at the art market, such as 50 Photographers You Should Know (2008), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (2009), reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (2005) and reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today (2010).
- Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
- John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
- Maxime Du Camp (1822–94)
- Auguste Salzmann (1824–72)
- Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.
- Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image
Inspiration
I have a large collection, but not had time to look through or properly review apart from getting some layout ideas.Colour
- Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist’s books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.
- Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.
- Urbex ‘Beauty in Decay’ this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.
Black and white
- Daido Moriyama Tales of Tono – small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.
- Algirdas Seskus ‘Love Lyrics’ Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.
- Arunas Baltenas Vilnius 2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.
- Henri Cartier Bresson in India Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.
- David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl
- Dara McGrath ‘Deconstructing the Maze’ This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html
- Xavier Ribas ‘Concrete Geographies’. Photos of concrete blocks in Barcelona. See his website: http://www.xavierribas.com. This has inside views and links to vimeos of other books like Sanctuary – no text, one photo per spread. Sometimes a cross-over image. But the onscreen resolution is not good enough to really see the images.
- Alessandro Rota A Neocolonialist’s diary. Small paisley pattern cover. Coloured photos of sheets in Lusaka. Dark night streets. Lights. See his website . And vimeo of the book. https://vimeo.com/28099164
- Irene Siragusa ‘Six weeks in Dublin’. Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website
- Book with glued images folded.
- Aids (author???). Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.
Sources and overviews
- The Photobook: A History, Volumes I, ll and III Gerry Badger and Martin Parr
- The Chinese Photobook: Martin Parr and Wassink Lundgren from the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition
- Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
- Channels on YouTube and Vimeo with videos of certain books;
- Tate video about William Klein which shows his assistant with one of Klein’s early maquettes:
- José Navarro discussing OCA students’ photobooks
Assignment 5: Perspectives on Kyrgyztstan
————————————-Photobooks offer a tactile one-to-one viewing experience for the reader were they control the place and time. Photographer/designer can give detailed narrative guidance through the images by linear sequencing and juxtaposition in page layout. At the same time, the reader is freer to override this design and establish their own viewing experience.
!! Rough notes and links. !! To be significantly updated for assessment with detailed
Photobook Key Inspiration
!! Sketchbook analysis of page design and layout of key sources of inspiration. bearing in mind copyright issues.
Photobook History
Early photobooks
Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism.
- Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
- John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
- Maxime Du Camp (1822–94)
- Auguste Salzmann (1824–72)
- Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.
Some developed more innovative design
- Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image
- Japanese Photobooks
Colour
- Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist’s books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.
- Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.
- Urbex ‘Beauty in Decay’ this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.
Black and white
- Daido Moriyama Tales of Tono – small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.
- Algirdas Seskus ‘Love Lyrics’ Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.
- Arunas Baltenas Vilnius 2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.
- Henri Cartier Bresson in India Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.
!! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.
Contemporary Photobooks
At the Brighton Photography Biennial 2016 I saw a lot of interesting innovative designs:
- David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl
- Dara McGrath ‘Deconstructing the Maze’ This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html
- Xavier Ribas ‘Concrete Geographies’. Photos of concrete blocks in Barcelona. See his website: http://www.xavierribas.com. This has inside views and links to vimeos of other books like Sanctuary – no text, one photo per spread. Sometimes a cross-over image. But the onscreen resolution is not good enough to really see the images.
- Alessandro Rota A Neocolonialist’s diary. Small paisley pattern cover. Coloured photos of sheets in Lusaka. Dark night streets. Lights. See his website . And vimeo of the book. https://vimeo.com/28099164
- Irene Siragusa ‘Six weeks in Dublin’. Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website
Unknown author/title glimpsed over other peoples’ shoulders:
- Book with glued images folded.
- Aids (author???). Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.
!! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.
Photobook How To
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJCLNKoZ8gE
Sources and overviews
To do a proper annotated bibliography of a selection of the many photobooks I have in my library. Linked to the annotated sketchbook analysis.
- The Photobook: A History, Volumes I, ll and III Gerry Badger and Martin Parr
- The Chinese Photobook: Martin Parr and Wassink Lundgren from the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition
- Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
- Channels on YouTube and Vimeo with videos of certain books;
- Tate video about William Klein which shows his assistant with one of Klein’s early maquettes:
- José Navarro discussing OCA students’ photobooks
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John Gossage
John Gossage (born 1946) is an American photographer working from Washington DC. His artist’s books and other publications use his photographs to explore the interplay between landscapes, urban environments, and the unseen or overlooked aspects of the places that are part of our everyday lives. His work not only captures the aesthetic of these locations but also invites viewers to consider the deeper stories and histories embedded within them. His work is noted for under-recognised elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and garbage, and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power.
“I am a humanist, like most of us are, I can’t really step back to see the beauty and order of all this; closeness brings chaos and dread in this case. We have done harm to the place we live, I’m told, but it seems to me that we have done the most harm to ourselves and our best-laid plans. The planet has a plan to fix this, if we don’t.”
Should Nature Change 2019I have absolutely no idea what I am doing any more and am totally sure of it. And that’s how it works’
Life and work
Gossage was born in Staten Island, New York City in 1946 and at an early age became interested in photography, leaving school at 16 and taking private instruction from Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch and Bruce Davidson. He later moved to Washington, D.C. to study, and subsequently received a grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art which allowed him to remain in the city and refine his photographic technique. He has shown his photographs in solo and group exhibitions since 1963.
After a number of years with Nazraeli Press his usual publisher is now Loosestrife Editions and Steidl. He has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and curated several photographic exhibitions.
John Gossage’s first monograph, The Pond (1985), has been republished to great acclaim.
His other notable books include Stadt Des Schwarz (1987); LAMF (1987); There and Gone (1997); The Things That Animals Care About (1998); Hey Fuckface (2000); Snake Eyes (2002); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004); Putting Back the Wall (2007); The Secrets of Real Estate (2008); and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon (2010); The Code ( 2011); She Called Me by Name (2012); The Actor (2011); Who Do You Love (2014); Nothing (2014); and pomodoii a grappolo (2015).
For Vimeo limited access versions of most of these books see: Vimeo Photobookstore.
For full list of his work see Wikipedia references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gossage#References
For details of books published by Steidtl: https://steidl.de/Artists/John-Gossage-0921316154.html
The Pond
Gossage photographed a small, unnamed pond between Washington, D.C., and Queenstown, Maryland, between 1981 and 1985.
The title was intended to recall Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but Gossage advocated a more all-embracing view of the landscape, exploring the less idealized spaces that border America’s cities and suburbs. Although many of the images in The Pond appear unruly or uncared for, Gossage found moments of grace and elegance in even the most mundane of places.
A few years after being photographed the pond had dried up.
The pond is a literary monologue, a narrative landscape book, character development — all of it. … It’s set in Queenstown, but a few of the shots were actually taken in Berlin. I won’t tell which ones. I wanted to speak metaphorically about nature and civilization, which I realized halfway through my project. It’s a work of documentary fiction. The sites are universally trivial. There are many ponds, and that one may not even be there anymore.
The book is different [from the exhibition] in that it’s a narrative. You start at page one and move your way through. I was surprised because I really liked the show once I saw it. It’s given me new things to think about — things I haven’t digested yet.
John Gossage interviewed in Katherine Boyle (2021)the sense one gets from the kind and placement of the trash around Gossage’s pond is that it wasn’t necessary to put it there, and the effect of doing so could not have been completely unanticipated; a few of the culprits may have been only willfully ignorant, but most were surely worse – those of us (I think we all do it, with varying degrees of indirection) who disfigure the landscape as a way of striking at life in general.…
Though Gossage’s study of nature in America is believable because it includes evidence of man’s darkness of spirit, it is memorable because of the intense fondness he shows for the remains of the natural world. He pictures everything – the loveliness of gravel, of sticks, of scum gleaning the water… He doesn’t even hesitate to photograph what we admire already (which is riskier, it being harder to awaken us to what we think we know), abruptly pointing his camera straight up at circling birds, and, later, over to a songbird on a wire.
Gossage does not use his survey of wood around a lake to stress an indictment; the off-road landscape through which he leads us is a mixture of the natural one and our junk, but his focus is not so much on the grotesqueries of the collage as on the reassurances of nature’s simplicities.
Adams, Robert (24 February 2013). “Robert Adams on John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986)”- New York: Aperture, 1985. ISBN 9780893812065. With an essay by Denise Sines. Edition of 2000 copies.
- New York: Aperture, 2010. ISBN 9781597111324. With a preface by Toby Jurovics and an essay by Gerry Badger.
Exhibition: John Gossage: The Pond, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 2010/2011
Should Nature Change?
It’s all about the ordinary now, the little things at the edge of your consciousness, the “signs” all around you.…
Everyone everywhere now has a small thing that has changed for them. The big things, those things that always happen to someone else, the other people, the ones on the news. The earthquakes, the floods, the fires, the disasters, are all still there in their grand scale. But it’s that the birds that used to come to your backyard are no longer there is what keeps you up at night.
John Gossage Artist’s Statement https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/disorder/john-gossage
What I have been photographing for [Should Nature Change] are moments when the normal slips, and the disorder starts. Subtle things that whisper to you that things have started to change and in all likelihood not for the best. Nature looks slightly different, it’s a bit warmer, there is a fire at the edge of town, a few of the people much younger than you have a different look in their eyes — remember the dinosaurs?
Black and white pictures of the country I come from and at this point in my life, work to understand.
The Times They Are A-Changin when I was younger I thought that song was about something different.References
- Adams, Robert (24 February 2013). “Robert Adams on John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986)”. Retrieved 2021-07-20.
- Katherine Boyle (2021-12-23) [2010-09-02]. “Nature On Display: John Gossage, ‘The Pond,’ at Smithsonian American Art Museum”. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. ISSN 0190-8286. OCLC 1330888409.
- Looking Up Ben James – A Fable Book review by Gerry Badger https://www.1000wordsmag.com/john-gossage/
- Links to Interviews: https://americansuburbx.com/?s=John+Gossage
Photography Archives
- “Artist Info – John Gossage, 1946”. www.nga.gov. Retrieved 2020-05-12.
- “John Gossage”. The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 2020-05-12.
- “”Gossage””. The Menil Collection. Retrieved 2020-05-12.