Jon Tonks' Empire: An Investment for your Future

On Thursday evening, Jon Tonks is talking (I'm introducing him) at another Bristol Photobooks event about his new book, Empire.

Empire is a trawl across some of the smaller 'British' islands of the South Atlantic - St Helena, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha and the Falkland Islands.

It's a lovely book where history is embedded in the faces and lives of the people that Tonks photographs. The ancestors of the current inhabitants of the islands are the flotsam of 200 years of history; former slaves, adventurers, colonists and fortune hunters who, at some vital juncture in their lives, took a turning to the ultimate geographical dead ends of the Atlantic Ocean.

Empire is one of those books that tells you something about the impact location and topography  has on people. It's a book that goes beyond photography.

Perhaps that's why the edition of 1,000 books is very almost sold out after only two months on the market. It will sell out very shortly and after that the value will go up. There probably won't be a second edition because Jon is too busy working on another island project (different ocean, different themes) that will have anthropology as a conceptual hook.

So if you want a copy of Empire, get one now from here or here or other reputed booksellers. And if you want to make a few quid, get 10 of them now. I could do with making a few quid so I'm wondering if I should buy 10 of them. Get the 10  for £30 each and then sell them off at the end of the year for £100 each and make £70 profit on each and then I could afford a large format camera or a 100x or, more realistically, money to clear the blocked drains at the back of the house.

( It should be noted that none of the above should be taken too seriously and that it could be the case that there are loads of copies left and I'm just trying to shift a few. I'm not, but it could be the case - and if I read this elsewhere, that's what I'd think. In which case, your books would be worth diddly squat and you'd be well out of pocket. Prices more often go down as well as up. And it's only a few hundred or thousand people buying anyway. And shifting one at £100 might be relatively easy, but shifting 10? You must be joking! There simply isn't the demand unless you spread it over years and years. And who's going to do that?)

I honestly don't think there's anything wrong with that but I just couldn't be bothered to buy ten of them. That's a dealer mentality and I'm not really a dealer. I'm not a businessman. I'm not good at making money.

I live in Bath in England. If you are familiar with Bath, you will realise it is a pretty little bubble of a place, a fantasy island with badgers, alpacas and sheep. If I walk round the back of my house (the one with the blocked drains) you end up on Charlcombe Lane - that's the lane with a little plaque quoting Jane Austen; "We took a walk to Charlcombe sweetly situated in a little green valley." Charlcombe Lane is currently closed to traffic due to the annual toad migration which is odd and wonderful in equal measure. But also a little precious? Yes, sometimes.

There are a couple of great independent bookshops in Bath. Best of all is Mr B's Book Emporium. You go in there with money and you come out without any because the recommendations are so enthusiastic and spot-on. The other one is Toppings. This is also a lovely bookshop which sells lovely books, the signed ones are hand-wrapped in acetate which is definitely added value.

You get home and you know your book will always be in pristine conditon. But when you read it, it will feel plasticky and slippy. You don't get to grip it like you do an unwrapped book. It will look nice on the shelf but not to touch or hold or read.

Maybe it's the same with photobooks. They do feel nice when they are well-made and consideration is paid to materials. They are tactile things. Touching is part of the experience. But that wrecks the book. It makes it grubby and spoilt. So does lending the book out or passing them round or letting somebody else see them. So does transporting them or taking them outside a dust-free humidity controlled environment free from damp and mould spores.

But dealers, collectors, buyers, writers, freeloaders and viewers are all different beasts even if there is some overlap a lot of the time. We don't all have to look at books in the same way. I feel that I should be buying my 10 copies of Empire, but I won't because I'm too lazy and I don't have a dealer mentality. I actually wish I did, but unfortunately I undersell anything I have to offer. That is a bad thing for dealers for whom the creation of desire and need is a good thing.

And I really do feel that I should be wrapping my books in acetate, but I won't simply because I'm too lazy and stubborn.

Anyway, for the final word on the issue, and with the third volume of the Photobook History about to hit the stores, this is what Blake Andrews has to say on the subject in his 5 Tips for Photobook Collectors.

As many have commented, we live in a golden age of photobooks. All around they're blossoming like wildflowers. It seems every day another one is being popped out somewhere or other. I can hardly keep track.

Not only are these photobooks a joy to behold but, as Adam Dewar recently pointed out in The Guardian, they can be a very good investment. To take just one example from Dewar's essay, a copy of Bruce Davidson's Subway bought for £40 in 2003 is worth more than £200 today. That's a 400% return in 8 years, easily beating the S&P 500 which gained only 30% over the same period.

I've been collecting photobooks for a while. I think I have a pretty good sense of the market. I know which books have staying power and which don't, and what separates the gems from the common schlock. 

What follows are a few brief tips I've compiled for the savvy book collector written from an investment perspective. 

And here are his 5 Tips on Photobook Collecting. You may need to read the post/comments in full to get the complete sentiment of Blake's thoughts. I certainly did and I'm still not entirely sure where he's coming from. It's great advice?

1. Follow your taste 

2. Mint Condition Only 

3. You can time the market 

4. Get it in writing

5. Supply and demand

Kiev: Blurred and a Little Bit out of Focus

I don't know if photographs should make you act, but they should stir something. A lot of the recent pictures from Kiev did just that, but at times it was just too spectacular; the smoke and the ash and the shields were too reminiscent of a volcano going off. They were distant and cold.

The massacre of protestors (and there's a little undercurrent of propaganda going on there. Always remember that Stalin allied himself with the Nazis. No getting away from that once you get down to Nazi name-calling) changed all that.

There has been smart photography on Ukraine by Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Donald Weber among others, but I also like Paolo Ciregia's take on events. He's a young Italian photographer who is still in Ukraine somewhere, but his pictures have a poetic ebb and flow to them that realises something of the spiritual depth of emotion involved in events. With his focus on isolated individuals (and this selection accentuates that) there seems to be a kind of determined calm in the maelstrom of events.

Photographs as Decoration for our Conscience

I read this article in the Guardian by Jonathan Jones and got rather confused. This is the headline.

A shocking image of Syria's brutal war – a war that will continue regardless

Even the most horrific photos are not able to prevent wars happening, they remain decoration for our conscience... 

Well, there are a number of assumptions being made here; that photographs do make us act, that if they don't make us act they are somehow culpable, and that by not making us act they become flippant additions to our conscience. 

I think Jones is rather mistaken on all these things. He's placing the weight of the world on photography and photographers. Photography is about more than just making us act. Images such as the one featured above involve news, reaction, evidence, emotion, history, empathy and a sense of humanity. It ties into a historical  geology of images in which similar scenes are remembered/imagined or relived. 

Does it make us act? Not really? But why would you weigh photography down with that responsibility. Why not put that weight on the written word? Has the Guardian made us act on Syria? Has Jonathan Jones made us act on Syria? Has anything made us act on Syria and if it did what would that action be? Is anything so black and white that it can be solved by a two dimensional print of 1/125th of a second, however finely composed or filled with evocative faces?

It seems odd that Jones, who is a writer, should be placing that weight on photography when it is clearly the responsibility of writers and newspapers to make us act. They have a great heritage in the UK of doing so. Think of Harold Evans and the thalidomide campaign. Think of the Daily Mail and all it has done to engender hostility to minorities in the UK - acting isn't necessarily a good thing. 

Jones gets even more confusing when he says

This is a great photograph – and it wants the world to act

It's a photograph! It's inanimate even in its digitised form. It may be weaving
its way across the internet but it doesn't have a mind, a soul or a will of its
own. it doesn't act, it doesn't perform, it doesn't do anything.

So who does the doing. Photographers do the doing. They snap the pictures
and do the doing. As Jones says,

Where there are wars there are heroes with cameras

Heroes with cameras? Photographers are not heroes! There are some who
think they are, but they are sadly mistaken. They make for good stories
and I, for one, am interested in the photographer narrative, the stories
they tell, the way they connect history into images and enrich it in the process,
but heroes? No.

The sad thing is I do feel some sympathy for Jones. I get the feeling that he
wishes pictures did make people act, did evoke feelings that went beyond
sympathy, pity or indifference. Maybe pictures do that sometimes? Maybe?
I really don't know. I'm a bit like Jones really. I wish they did, but sadly
they don't.

German Family Album Walking to War

My final offering from my German family album for a while. By the end picture, Kristalnacht and the Anschluss have replaced the Berlin Olympics in the living memory.

My German Family Album Landscapes and Power

More from my German family album. I am finding it interesting and a bit heartbreaking how everything is recontextualised through the era. My grandfather (who was not a Nazi in any way)  used to work for Siemens (he revolutionised how to string power lines across a valley) and that is why the power stations and control panels are in there, that is why a train is in there, that is why bleak landscapes are in there. But in the context of 1930s Germany and what came after, these are not benign pictures.

German Family Album

More from my German Family Album.

My German Family Album

So it goes with the German family album, which is where these pictures are from - my German family album. Everything changes when it's Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The arms change, the landscapes change, the factories change. More of this later.

The seaside pictures are from Baltrum in the Friesian Islands and the top picture is from a small village in northern Germany.