It’s a habit. Shoot, review, publish and share.
The Grand Plan derails
Before Covid hit, I started a monthly bookmaking project where I committed to photographing and documenting my life, creating a book of my most meaningful images for that month. The books are in chronological order, and I intended to make a book a month for the rest of my life! — with a short term goal of getting to 12 books in Year 1. What a Grand Plan!!
Then Covid hit, and so did the social isolation. Whilst novel at first, pictures of empty streets or our family baking and doing gardening quickly got old - I mean I’ve got those in a book, but I lost the momentum for doing this month after month. Yeah, that happens with projects, right?
Now, a few years later, I’ve circled back to those books and realised not only how important this project was to me, but how important printing and sharing memories are to me. Looking back on the book I made in December 2019, it already seems like I am looking back at a different Steve.
Since then, though, I have made several small experimental zines and booklets, most tucked away in a box after seeing how my ideas panned out in print. I have loved the process.
Process
As photographers, we all carry a camera with us everywhere we go (You take your camera everywhere, don’t you? Sorry, phones don’t count). I find, though, that unless I have something like a monthly book in mind, I tend to forget to take pictures unless some interesting thing happens to pop up. I’ve recently mitigated that by leaving the bag at home to encourage keeping the camera in my hand. Anyway, I digress.
By having this goal of making a monthly book of what I did this month and with whom, I am subliminally prompted to start looking for stories, and start making images!
My monthly family photo books are usually chronological, and it is easy for me to just select candidates for the month, look at them all together, have the overall vision of telling the story of the month and then selecting the pictures that best tell that story.
I used to mix in non-family pictures into my monthly books, but I decided that I would keep those separate, and so have started little side books and stacks of prints to soon sort into zines and giveaways.
A nice little exercise for project work, right? The process of continually collecting and organising series of images has helped me think about and make these books for my street and potential documentary photography as well. Books will do that:
Making a photo book was instrumental in helping me become a better documentary photographer because it showed me precisely what I had and didn’t have with my story. As I built the book, I saw glaring holes in my narrative. I saw strong beginnings and weak endings. I saw muddled middle passages where a viewer could easily get lost. The books showed me the importance of writing, typography, and page design.
- Dan Milnor, How the Photography Book Changed My Approach
It’s important to say that just because I make these monthly books, it doesn’t mean that I make them to share them widely. Often, I am just showing them to my immediate family or friends, and they serve as a kind of modern photo album. With the books I make around street themes - I am often pulling them apart, writing on them , rearranging and putting them back together. If I have copies left over, I have given them away on whim, as a one-off or whatever.
I’m currently making these books in one of a few ways. The first is to just arrange them in Affinity Publisher and print them at Officeworks (You might have something similar, like a Staples, etc). That is especially the case if I want a really cheap booklet to lay with a sequence. If I am particularly pumped about a series, I might make a Blurb book.
For my monthly family books I have been using the Blurb service - they have relatively easy to use software that is good enough to make a book very quickly - I like that I am able to see the output and the price of any book I make quite easily, If you are not too fussy about output you can get a small, cheap paperback trade book for less than what you would pay to buy, scan and develop 35mm film. That’s a bargain as far as I’m concerned.
I have in the past made Blurbs more expensive and beautiful hard cover image wrap photo books, but I just like the ease, portability and shareability of their trade books. I’m thinking that if a family member ever asks for a copy of the monthly book that I make, I can always go back to the Blurb Bookwright software and just reformat it for the new hardcover, and with only a bit of effort, lay it out so it looks good and ready for print.
With street photo books, I don’t get too precious. There is no such thing as the perfect book, and it’s easy when making one-off books for yourself to just rejig and re-order. The point is to make to book, a real, tangible thing you can hold in your hand. To see what the work looks like, how the pictures relate to each other, what your ideas about sequencing and layout look like and how they flow from page to page.
I am not making these books in the present - what I mean is that I like to be a year or so behind where my shooting is - in fact, since Covid times, I am way, way behind. But that’s OK because there is an element of distance to the work that I think is a really good thing. Not only does it remove attachment from images that are not that good but it also fosters nostalgia for something I may otherwise have just looked away from. eg a picture of a tree that reminded me of a thing.
Making things
Recently, I’ve discovered Artist and Photographer Paul Treacy, who has a short tutorial online about making handmade books from photo prints. I’ve always known about these concertina style books but have never really sat down with a tutorial to try and make one, and Paul’s instruction and technique are really great. Since I started playing around with hand-binding photos into concertina books, it has just given me this creative energy to do more with prints, and it provides a focus for all the archiving and collecting I have been doing in my catalogue recently. It is a really tactile, hands on, dare I say meditative experience. There is no glue, just tape, a bone folder, scissors, a pen knife and your pictures.
I would encourage you to get into this idea of just making a book, either via the ways I’ve described above, or any other means. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s what is getting the mojo going at the moment for me, so I wanted to share. Making books, be they periodically, monthly, printed locally, via Blurb or handmade, is just one of the many ways to share and enjoy photographs. For me, it’s also a way to find direction with how I would present a project or body of work. Another piece of the puzzle that I am slowly getting my head around.
This post also appears on my substack at https://stevedimitriadis.substack.com/