A Magazine from Blurb

In my last post, I spoke about my most recent experience producing a Blurb photo book as a family album. The album was of a very high quality, however the price was on the high side. If you want you photographs in print (which you absolutely should) there is another option.

In addition to photo books, Blurb also offers other book formats including trade paperbacks (best for text) and magazines. While the magazines don't have quite the print quality of the dedicated photo books, they offer a cheaper alternative for getting your photos printed and bound.

This is the option I took at the end of 2015. With the (very) recent arrival of our first son, I knew time and money for gifts would be at a premium for Christmas. So I prepared a magazine with photographs from the previous 12 months to give to family, with space for one very important 6x4 of our new arrival at the back, who came just too late to be included in the magazine proper.

Although the images from 2015 were more fresh in my mind than previous years, it was no less rewarding going through my catalogue, reassessing previously discarded images, and building a good selection of images. Once again, I undertook the magazine layout in Adobe InDesign, affording me much more design flexibility than with Blurb's own in-house software (I must stress though that Blurb's own software is thoroughly decent if you just want to make a basic photo book from a selection of photographs. But if you have any Adobe skillz at all, InDesign is worth the effort).

140 pages later, I had a magazine. 140 pages may stretch the definition of "magazine", but Blurb's print services can handle it and that's all that matters. Oh that and the familial reception. They loved it; it spawned the usual "oh Richard it looks so professional you should do this for a living because it's so professional" question/statements that ignore the practicalities of profitable publishing. My 104-year-old grandmother sits it proudly on her table, telling me every time how much she "thoroughly enjoys" reading it.


It's nice to have an appreciative audience.

And it's nice to have a physical thing. Yada yada yada, DIGITAL DARK AGE, yada yada yada. No shit, you will lose your shit at some point. Shit being your bits and bytes of data. Either through neglect or nefariousness. A physical printed thing is a hedge against that.

Besides, a physical product like this one is pleasurable to read again and again. You don't read them every day, but it's much nicer flicking through them and reminiscing than swiping through 12,397 images on your tablet/smartphone of choice.

REPENT

REPRINT!

A Photo Book from Blurb

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the physical object in the digital age. As a photographer, that means the importance of the print. The ephemeral nature of data means that already many of our memories and much of our information – that used to be physical – have disappeared. Some are already warning of the "digital dark age", an age where there has never been a greater saturation of recording devices and data, yet we have never been at greater risk of losing it all forever.

This is why it has never been more important to print. Print isn't forever, but it's for a damnside longer than data. Data comes and goes, data becomes corrupted, data gets deleted, reformatted, rendered obsolete by the march of progress (and of marketing departments). A print may get torn or creased or scratched or fade, but there is usually still something left to be seen, to be interpreted. A fragment that is not a slave to the technology of the day. All you need is vision and light. That is why I have been making a concerted effort recently to make more physical things, both photographic prints and photo books.

Blurb is a well-known provider of print-on-demand book publishing services, particularly targeted at one-off publications such as family albums and low-volume photo books. I am a regular user of Blurb, having printed my first book with them back in 2011. Since then I've printed books with a variety of papers and bindings for a variety of purposes. Some have been consciously "professional" photo books, others have more family album-oriented in their content.

It has not always been smooth sailing with Blurb, however. Their print quality back when I first started using them left a lot to be desired, and I've had to return two books because of printing blemishes and errors. But when these problems have occurred, the customer service has always been excellent and rectified the problem promptly.

Most recently, I've been taking the time to collate my vast catalogue of digital images and print something of a yearly album. This most recent album covers almost exclusively 2011. I am trying to give each its own personality, reflecting some of the content inside the album. In this most recent publication's case, it was a year spent mostly at home with study occupying most of my time. Hence the Melway-inspired cover (colours and patterns of the 1993 edition, one my dad kept for far too long in his 1981 Ford Laser).

The downside to Blurb is that they are not particularly cheap. Luckily, they have regular vouchers offering up to 40% off. While these offer good value, I would think these vouchers have conditioned customers to wait until the next promo code comes around to upload and order their books.

Book making is a great experience, however you do it. It is particularly rewarding going back through the archives and discovering photographs you don't remember taking. Indeed it's difficult to resist reopening old files and making new edits. Sometimes you look at a photo just shake your head and think to yourself "what was I thinking!?". This tinkering can be good and bad, although even with years more experience, I found myself more often than not keeping the old edits.

The Digital Dark Age is upon us.

Repent!

Or should I say...REPRINT!

P.S. the book pictured above is not available publicly on Blurb, it's a Richard-only special

Photobook Review: We Make the Path by Walking

Paul Gaffney's We Make the Path by Walking follows the fringes of man's influence on the environment. It follows that proverbial path less taken, but instead of moralising, makes the man-altered world a pleasure to behold. New Topographics, this is not (at least not until the final pages), but it is a sort of curious, lyrical journey with the environment.

The journey follows, strangely enough, the path that is made by walking. Gaffney trekked some 3,500km across the European continent to bring us these images - an achievement in itself. The images he brings back are not purely of the natural environment, nor are they man-made. Each photograph features traces of both, beginning with a dominant natural environment that finally gives way to (or at least shares) the man-altered one.

Like using an electric shaver on a cocker spaniel, the path that has been carved out first by history and then followed by Gaffney is one that has not grown back the same way. This is probably what I like the most about the book - how the images achieve a natural rawness without resorting to a look of isolation and wilderness. In this images, I feel that the sounds of the man-dominated world were never out of earshot.

I went on a walk once. I saw lots of trees, too. They are charming. Couldn't hear lots of cars, but when I did hear one, it sure was loud. I always loved seeing the headlights of cars driving in the state forest at night during cadet camp. The endless shadows played around my senses. But I digress.

I'm sure there are other tracts of art-speak that can be applied to this book, but it's really just a simple, beautiful book that contains lovely lyrical images. And I've run out of adjectives.

It is presented in a printed slipcase and once removed from said case, is lovely and raw. Its binding is rough and visible (of the Smyth type I believe) but more than very fitting for this book. It can even lie flat.

Unfortunately for you, unless you've already a copy, the first self-published print run of 1,000 has sold out. There is apparently a "special edition" to be published soon. The book has been featured on many "top photobook" lists (because without lists, the world ceases to function) and has been nominated for awards and such.

All in all, it's a great little book that perfectly fulfils all the hopes and dreams artists hold for a self-published title. There's probably more to say about the book in art critique mode, but when my reaction to it seems so innate, there's little reason to go on about it.

Highly recommended.

We Make the Path by Walking
Paul Gaffney
Self-published, 2013
ISBN: 9780992600402
Extent: 78pp
Paperback with cardboard slipcase

Photobook Review: The Lost Border

This is the first of two reviews that follow along a similar path. Brian Rose's The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain is a simply elegant book which visually charts that famous geopolitical fault line which existed in one form or another from 1946 until 1989.

Rose chronicles the Inner German Border (innerdeutsche Grenze or simply die Grenze) and eastern borders of Austria and Italy in colour with his 4x5 view camera in a series of photographs captured between 1985 and 1989. Travelling multiple times between New York and Frankfurt, Rose hired a VW van and drove the length of the border, taking photographs as he went.

The resulting images of the stark geopolitical reality would have been unexceptional in the 1980s. In a way, these are images that could have been captured by anyone, but only Rose had the tenacity and sufficient presence of place to do so. The borders, of course, no longer exists as they do in this collection. The few instances where border fortifications remain along the Inner German Border, they do so as a sort of Disneyfied theme park historical attraction. The potency and dread of a border defended regularly with lethal force is somewhat diminished by tourists standing around and gawking at the remnants of a possible flashpoint of World War III.

It is refreshing to view images of the various national borders. All too often discussion of the Cold War focuses on the Berlin Wall, forgetting the borders of death which divided half of Europe. Sadly it's easy to forget the harrowing tales of escape and tragedy along these long borders.

Inner Border Memorial at Hötensleben, with larges pieces of the installation in situ including the notorious death strip

Although the barbed wire, concrete towers and death strips seemed a permanent feature of the eastern European frontier, Rose notes that even in 1985 they seemed crumbling and unwieldy. The top-heavy concrete guard towers (look at the one on the cover) expressive of a still potent regime on the brink of collapse. Rose's images are landscapes first and foremost and they are extremely well crafted. His use of colour helps create a sense of reality, documentary and immediacy that would be sorely missed in monochrome; his 4x5 negatives would be a sight to behold. 

Less than five years after Rose started this project, the political divisions of Germany would be formally ended with the physical ones crumbling away shortly thereafter. Europe would charge headlong into an ill-advised political and economic union that essentially amounted to a Bundesrepublik takeover of the entire continent - what they couldn't achieve through warfare, they achieved economically. Meanwhile, ethnic tensions began to boil over in the Balkans... 

Rose's images of a frontier long-gone act as a memento mori; motivation to go out and capture the world that exists now before it is changed forever. All it takes is a VW van, a camera and some balls.

The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain 

Brian Rose

Published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2004