The Future of Photobooks

Please choose a presentation from the link above!

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:21:00 -0700

Hi there. This is a Tumblr that was put together as a way to present highlights from the Future of Photobooks project produced by Miki Johnson (RESOLVE Blog) and Andy Adams (FlakPhoto). It should still make sense if you just look through it as is, but if you saw Miki’s presentation at the Apple Store or Andy and Miki present at Flash Forward Festival, you may want to pick a specific version (where it says “Choose your presentation”). Thanks!

The Future of Photobooks: A cross-blog discussion

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:21:00 -0800

Spurred by a feature on FlakPhoto highlighting the winners of Blurb’s Photography.Book.Now contest, RESOLVE teamed up with Andy Adams, creator of the online photography showcase, to build a month-long cross-blog discussion around the Future of Photobooks. It started in December, 2009, and ran through January 2010.

In order to include as many viewpoints as possible, we asked bloggers to contribute posts, shared some of their best ideas, then brought it all back to a central point where readers could grasp the larger issues more easily. You can see the results in these three discussion posts, each moderated by a contributing blogger.

Those discussions addressed three ideas: photobook CREATION, CONSUMPTION, and DISTRIBUTION. And those are loosely the categories that are explored in this presentation.

FlakPhoto is a daily photography website that celebrates the art...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:06:00 -0800

FlakPhoto is a daily photography website that celebrates the art & culture of photography online. Produced by Andy Adams, the site highlights new series work, book projects and gallery exhibitions from an international community of contributors.

*I could never have produced this project without having a tireless, passionate, amazingly well-connected collaborator like Andy. If you haven’t checked out the work he’s doing at FlakPhoto, I recommend you do so IMMEDIATELY.

Crowdsourcing - A definition

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:50:00 -0800

From Wikipedia: “The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.”

* We’re going to be talking about “crowdsourcing” a lot, so here’s a quick definition. A classic example is a users forum. The old model is: I come to the Apple Genius Bar if I have a questions about my new iPad. That still happens, but the other option is to go on the Apple forums where other users are answering each others questions. Instead of information coming from one source (Apple), it’s coming from lots of different ones and being organized by Apple, ultimately saving both them and the user time and energy.

This is a real-time feed of tweets including #photobooks. This...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:49:00 -0800

This is a real-time feed of tweets including #photobooks. This is a very simple example of crowdsourcing — what we did with The Future of Photobooks project was more complicated, but was built on the same simple idea: In our world of information overload, individuals drawing on their own knowledge base to answer a centralize question can pick out valuable insights more efficiently than one person trying to do the same thing on their own.

Future of Photobooks by the #s

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:34:00 -0800

# of posts by contributing bloggers = 54
# of comments + responses = 197*
# of unique viewers = 13,700*

Moral of the story? Involving a large group of people from the beginning means an idea or project can spread wider, faster because those same people are invested in seeing it do so.

*For the RESOLVE blog alone. The impact across the other 54 blogs was obviously even greater.

Predicting vs. Empowering

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:19:00 -0800

“Allow us to rephrase this inquiry into something more active and, we hope, productive: What SHOULD photobooks look like in 10 years? The fact is, we are the ones who will decide.”
~From The Future of Photobooks

We quickly realized that asking people to “predict” what photobooks would look like in 10 years was somewhat futile, and not our original intention. What we want to do is expand people’s concepts of what a photobook COULD or SHOULD be in the future. And also to help everyone realize that that future is their own to shape.

With options like wedding album books and print-on-demand magazines, literally everyone can now publish their own book. So when we say, “We are the publishers of the future,” we mean it quite literally.

Don't worry, physical books aren't over

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:03:00 -0800

Before you decry the rise of digital publishing and the “death” of physical photobooks, you’ll probably want to know that the number one thing we heard during this project, over and over again, was that people LOVE their photobooks. They may decrease in number, they may change their main purpose, but we don’t think they’re going away any time soon.

"There will always be a place for printed photographs and therefore printed photo books. That place..."

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:48:00 -0800

“There will always be a place for printed photographs and therefore printed photo books. That place may seemingly diminish in the growing array of digital options. However, there is nothing that can replace the feeling, not just the actual weight in hand, of a book. Books are history, past, present and future.”

- Rachel M. Wolfe

Keep Your Shutters Open: Foto Future

"Photobooks are here to stay and may even replace the traditional photograph in 10 years. It makes a..."

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:33:00 -0800

“Photobooks are here to stay and may even replace the traditional photograph in 10 years. It makes a lot more sense to see photographs of an event presented in a book format rather than a stack of 4x6 photographs.”

- Mark Druziak

Comment on Tell us what you think about the future of photobooks!

Fetishizing physical photobooks

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:20:00 -0800

As Darius Himes points out in his post: “Publishers are not really debating the future of ‘books,’ if by books we mean the future of ‘recorded human language.’ They are debating the future of the sales of printed books in the quantities they are used to.”

The same goes for photobooks. Except that photobooks have, by and large, always been a hard sell to publishers. They are usually printed in small runs (3-5,000) and are rarely big money-makers.

In some ways this is the perfect time for physical photobooks to come into their own as true art objects. In the same way that analogue and even antique processes are hot right now, traditional and experimental photobooks could become fetishized, high-demand art pieces, as Jonathan Worth explains below and in his Future of Photobooks post.

"The generation currently breaking into the industry have inherited a fond nostalgia for analogue..."

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:18:00 -0800

“The generation currently breaking into the industry have inherited a fond nostalgia for analogue processes (think Holga, Lomography or witness the dramatic rescue of Polaroid). Developing and exploiting this demand is one of the areas that photographer’s business practices can and should focus looking forward. The book is just one element of this.”

-

Jonathan Worth

New Photographics: ‘The Future of Photo-books’ A response

Collaboration is key

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:03:00 -0800

Our first discussion focused how photobooks could be created. The most consistent thing we heard on that front was that collaboration is on the rise. This is just one example…

“We are seeing photography collaborations being born every single day on the web, in forms that are more specific to the web … There will be more and more artistic collaborations that will flood the market with hundreds, if not thousands of new publications that will feature photography-related projects, interviews and articles.”

— Green Tea Gallery Magazine | The Future of Photobooks

Around the World - Street Photography in B&W Six...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:50:00 -0800

Around the World - Street Photography in B&W

Six international photographers came together to create this video using new technologies like Twitter (which is how this started) and Vimeo. All the organizing and image file forwarding was through emails and Twitter. Obviously creative collaboration is getting easier every day.

*As this quote suggests, one of the big reasons these collaborations are happening is that the internet and digital technologies are making it exponentially easier for photographers to communicate from every corner of the world. But just because it’s possible, doesn’t tell us why it’s so attractive right now.

It seems likely this is a reaction against the sort of “lone artist” syndrome bread by digital production. Sure, I can make all the photos, retouch them in Photoshop, design some pages in InDesign, upload them to Blurb, and then publicize it all through my blog. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But we all know that we get huge creative energy from collaborating with editors and designers and publishers and writers. What’s exciting now is that the artist gets to decide at what stage he or she WANTS to collaborate, and it’s easier than ever once that decision is made. See below for more examples.

Publication

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:45:00 -0800

A bi-annual periodical produced by street photographers for street photographers. Produced in London by Nick Turpin Publishing. Consists of an illustrated color booklet of essays and articles accompanied by 22 unbound prints with a different theme for each edition. Submissions are welcome and the endeavor is self-financing, with no advertising, so purchase price for each edition pays for the next.

From Nick:

PUBLICATION #1 Inspiration was our launch edition sold exclusively through our online presence www.in-publication.com and promoted completely through Twitter and Blogs which led to wider recognition such as a feature on the BBC.

The site allows photographers to upload their images for consideration in future editions which also helps spread the word about the periodical.

By not selling through physical shops we keep, on average, 40% of the cover price that they would normally take.

PUBLICATION launched on November 28th 2009 and went into profit the week before Christmas, the second edition on America launches on the 28th May 2010.

I started it for two reasons, firstly, I felt that we are all street photographers now and street photography needed a printed outlet and, secondly, I felt people were ready to hold photographs in their hands again as objects after a decade of viewing them on monitors.

I think it shows that while mainstream magazines with high overheads and broad appeal are struggling, small innovative, quality, niche magazines cans till turn a profit.

Lay Flat

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:30:00 -0800

“Founded in January 2009 by Shane Lavalette, Lay Flat is an independent imprint that specializes in unique, small-run and limited edition photography books and multiples. We work collaboratively with both emerging and established artists to create books that both express a vision and exist as artful objects in themselves.”

Lay Flat 01: Remain in Light
40 pages, saddle stitched + 20 unbound photographs
5.5 x 7.5 in. / 14 x 19 cm.
Edition of 1,000
Published January 2009

*Lay Flat also has an additional layer of collaborative spirit, since Shane works with a different guest editor for each edition.

Pictory - Your best photo stories

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:15:00 -0800

“Pictory is a showcase for people around the world to document their lives and cultures. Anyone can submit one large, captioned image to each of Pictory’s editorial themes. I’m editor, designer, and founder Laura Brunow Miner, and I will select a few dozen of the best items from each theme to appear in each showcase.”

*Pictory is an online photo magazine that is crowdsourced, insofar as anyone can submit a single photo that fits the theme with a personal, descriptive comment. But it’s a new and more sophisticated application of the crowdsourcing idea, since it is more precisely described as being “curated,” by editor Laura Brunow Miner, as well as guest editors.

We English - Simon Roberts

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:59:00 -0800

We English by Simon Roberts

“During the course of this project members of the public were invited to post ideas of events and leisure pursuits that I could come and photograph. It struck me as a suitably democratic way of working, positioning me as it did alongside my fellow countrymen - a citizen, not just an onlooker - and attempting to involve people, to a certain degree, in their own representation.”

*I like the idea of applying crowdsourcing to research and idea generation, not just content creation. I love that Simon is crowdsourcing not just because it helps him get a really wide variety of ideas, but because it makes sense for the creative ideology of of his project. Plus it’s smart marketing, because every person who wrote in, and there were hundreds, is deeply invested in that book — I guarantee will buy a copy and tell their friends to do the same.

The Obama Time Capsule - A customizable, POD book

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:59:00 -0800

The Obama Time Capsule: “A new type of photo book where you create a unique version by adding your pictures to the existing photos and essays of Obama’s historic journey to the White House.”

This kind of collaboration between the artist and the audience is likely to increase, especially with the increasing ease, quality, and cost-effectiveness of on-demand printing, as the observation below suggests.

“I see the lines between pro and pro-sumer converging further with content from both ending up in books on demand. So a pro will publish a book with their works and allow the consumer to add their take on the subject and print the book with the combined photos included.” ~Jason Sandifer, comment on Tell us what you think about the future of photobooks!

Our second question was, How should photobooks be CONSUMED in...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:13:00 -0800

Our second question was, How should photobooks be CONSUMED in the future. By consumed, we just meant a general interaction with a photobook, which these days can include looking, reading, listening, watching, and manipulating.

This video of Kathleen Walkup, Director of Book Art Program at Mills College, is a great place to start stretching our minds about what how to approach a book. These aren’t specifically photobooks, but wouldn’t it be great to see photobooks this innovative?