Photobook Packaging and The Rivers of Power

I just wrote a piece for Photo Eye on Eamonn Doyle's mad new book End.. That's double full stops because the title End. has a full stop in it which I really don't like the look of and is kind of annoying.

But the wrapping is not annoying. In the review, which I really enjoyed writing, I rather obsess on it and talk about humming and hawing over opening it because it looks so lovely wrapped up in its yellow cellophane.

But at least I did open it which is more than some people. I met somebody who, for two long weeks, couldn't bring themself to tear into the gorgeous wrapping, who still laboured under the illusion that the book was yellow and not white. Tear the wrapping off and you get a white leatherette slipcase.

Then there's packaging. It used to be that if you sent a book in the post, it was a relatively straightforward affair of wrapping the book up with some kind of protection and sending it off. Not anymore.

If you are at all acquainted with European photobook booksellers, you'll know Tipi Bookstore. This is run by Andrea Copetti who has taken book packaging to an art form. He sends books in packages that are covered in vernacular photography and are works in themself. It looks phenomenal. I'm going to have to order something from him just in the hope that I'll hit the packaging jackpot.



But even for photographers, the packaging is becoming increasingly intricate. Take Alejandro Cartagena and his new book, Rivers of Power. This was sent in a regular Jiffy envelope but with custom made green stickers on, including one with an image from the book printed on it. There was a message on the back too,

'Hope you enjoy it! Ale'

The book itself was wrapped in paper that had the same image printed on it as the sticker.. This image showed a line of men in an office standing next to what looks like a politician. And the line of men look like gangsters. Or police? Whatever, it sets the scene for the book. And if you don't know the title of the book, this wrapping paper was sealed with another sticker, this one in grey with the title of the book printed over it.



So there you go. It's the old idea of Saul Bass that the film starts with the titles. The book starts before the title or the cover page. It starts with the wrapping. It gives you a reason to open the book. It makes you want to look.

Then you open the wrapping and you have a slipcase holding a book in place. There's a lot of text on the slipcase but, because you are curious about the men you saw on the wrapping paper, and because you think you have an idea what it will be about, you read the text. In its entirety.

It's all about the Santa Catarina River in Monterey, a river that man has tried to tame through hydraulic engineering, through underground diversions, through successive civil engineering projects that have attempted to hide the river and tame its feral rivine nature. Unsuccessfully of course, because a river is a river and over the years hurricanes and floods have let the good folk of Monterrey know in in no uncertain terms that it is alive and kicking and its flow will not be stemmed.

It's a book about Monterrey then, and in that respect it connects to all of Cartagena's other books, in particular his fantastic Carpoolers, a book which looks at the social divisions of the city and its attempts to hide away the less wealthy elements of the town.

The river's not for hiding though. Cartagena shows archive pictures of the city both in flood and not. One picture of the ranging currents is juxtaposed with what looks like the flooded city in drier times, a reminder that the potential for flooding is always there. You see the works, the politicians, the grafters, and then we're into the colour, contemporary city.

It's a city shown in the rain. Ordinary rain in an urban setting but interspersed with graps from what might be reports of extreme weather. If you've ever lived in a place that has been flooded out, you'll know what that means. There's an anxiety to rainfall that you just don't get if you're living somewhere high and dry.



Next comes pictures of the floods, then we're into the attempts to tame it and the swamps and grasslands that line the river's edge. There's the river's bed, the spaces that line the river, all liminal and Edgelandy with their coach parks and market spaces, Finally we get damage done by the river, the broken roads and the cracked tarmac, before a final dose of the river tamed is given.

It's a great book in which you're imersed in a full range of different images from different sources. There's also the sense that the books Cartagena makes, as well as being works in themselves, are also punctuation marks in a larger body of work that he's already semi-visualising in his photobooks, that the books, though great, are just a stepping stone to some huge installation that will one day take up a couple of floors of one of the world's major museums. There's a feeling that the book isn't everything, that the book is just the beginning.

Buy Rivers of Power here.

Why, Oh Why is Nothing Simple Anymore?

A short story by Thomas Boivin from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.


A Short Story by Thomas Boivin is a lovely book. It's a poetic affair, that tells the story of a relationship - from meeting across a table, to the beginning of passion, the apex, the highs and lows of a long distance relationship, final petering out into asymetrical falling out of love, separation, heartbreak and desolation.

It's a universal story, and the words are universal in a way. They are not pinned down in some ways, and they are certainly not pinned to the pictures which have a floaty, nebulous feel to them. So it's dreamlike. Sadly it's one of those books that is printed in a tiny edition (100) when it could sell more. How many more is the question, but I hope he prints a second edition (of more than 100).

A Short Story is a really strong example of text and image working together and it's probably (along with Yolanda by Ignacio Navas, The Spook Light Chronicles by Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley, Yu by Dragana Jurisic, Early Works by Ivars Gravlejs, Love on the Left Bank by Ed Van der Elsken, etc etc) one of my favourites.

But so many people are using supplementary elements to tell the story. At Photobook Bristol, Mark Power launched Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment ( a collaboration with poet Dan Cockrill and designer Dominic Brookman). This is an exploration of England which comes complete with poetry written by Cockrill, and delivered by Cockrill in Power's presentation, to accompany Mark's bang-on images of our soiled and faded nation.



More conventional forms of writing came courtesy of Murray Ballard's The Prospect of Immortality. This, together with Matthieu Asselin's Monsanto (winner of the Kassel Dummy Award), is one of the outstanding examples of a long-term documentary project finding its full expression in book form. In his book, Ballard looks at Cryonics and 'the quest to overcome the ‘problem of death’. Ballard is working with the text in a more considered and reduced form than is often the case in such a documentary subject, so making the story pack a punch and serves the images, rather than simply fills space.

On the Tipi table (which is a sight to behold), Andrea Copetti was showing Anne de Gelas' quite brilliant Mere et Fils and L'Amoureuse projects - both of which used extremely personal diaristic entries combined with sketches of heartbreak, loss and rediscovered passion. It really is quite beautiful.



Other books on the Tipi table showed the book form developing as object. Antonio Jiminez's Elite Controllers being one example of this.This is also an example of the merging of bookseller, publisher, gallerist and curator, a role that Martin Amis of Photobookstore has also taken on.



That is pretty much what Yumi Goto is as well. She talked about and then showed examples of work made through her Reminders Project Stronghold workshops. Again, text figured large in punching through extremely personal stories, but so did extremely intricate and beautiful design. Both Hajime Kimura (who brought his beautiful Snowflakes, Dog, Man book) and Hiroshi Okamoto (who brought his intricate and tragic Recruit book - runner up in the Kassel Dummy Awards) are examples of this.




The Reminders books are done brilliantly because ultimately there is Yumi Goto lurking in the background making sure that, design details notwithstanding, it's the story that matters. There's clarity there in other words,

But something can be good without that clarity. A case in point is the puzzle that is Eamonn Doyle's new book, End.. This comes with music, thirteen inserts, a glassine poster, a yellow cellophane wrapping that over-intrigued me (you can read all about it my review on Photo Eye next week)... Actually even reading the contents confuses me and gives me a headache. But I like it and it works and it's coming from a very different direction from just about everything.

End. is a set of 13 sections all brought together in a white leatherette slipcase, with black-embossed drawings and tip-in title sheet, wrapped in yellow cellophane.

Each section is folded to 200 x 280 mm, portrait.

Featuring 273 photographs, 20 ink drawings and a 7” vinyl sound work, these 13 Dublin “moments” comprise:

One yellow book, thread sewn, printed in black duotone with screen-printed drawings.

Two black books, thread sewn, printed with silver inks.

Three full-colour books, thread sewn, with screen-printed drawings.

Four concertina-folded double-sided diptychs in full-colour with screen-printed drawings.

One large full-colour double-sided folded map.

One 7” vinyl record tucked inside a printed and folded glassine poster.

At the centre of the work is a concertina-folded double-sided full-colour triptych.

So everything is getting more involved, personal and generally difficult. Which is a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing because when it's done badly, the design becomes redundant and all you are left with is a mulch of inserts, pull-outs and shabby stitching that can't disguise the crapness of the content.




So it was refreshing to see Hoxton Mini Press's books. These are beautifully made and presented books that are a kind of an upscale variation on the Cafe Royal Model with a nod towards the Useful Photography brand of content. The books cost £12 and the special editions (which look fantastic) cost £40. So there's accessibility in pricing. And the content is great. My favourite was Ronni Campana's Badly Repaired Cars.

It's simple but it's pushing the book form in a different way. Photographers, designers, publishers, booksellers, everybody's pushing the book form in a different way, and those ways are not always in the same direction. There's a lot going on. What it all means is, as always, another question that neither I nor anybody else seems to have an answer to.

La Forma Bruta: Made with Pleasure and Pain

The Photobook Bristol Blog ran two interviews with Martin Amis of Photobookstore and Andrea Copetti of Tipi Bookshop. These are two great booksellers who have an instinct and knowledge of books, what is good and what sells that is beyond compare.

Both answered questions on what are the biggest mistakes photographers make when it comes to making photobooks.

This is what Martin said:

"Thinking that the project/photos actually needs to be a photobook in the first place."

Which is actually really great advice. We like books but sometimes you shouldn't make the book. That's not the place for it.

And this is what Andrea said:

There are predefined rules for making a book, like paper, binding, ink.

But within those rules, they don’t play around enough. In an exhibition you can’t change the walls, they’re just there to hold the works. In a book there are no walls, it’s flexible, you can mould the medium. Also, people don’t do enough dummies during their work in progress.

Also, a big aspect in the self-published world is that you don’t have to make it all by yourself. The feedback of a graphic designer or a third eye is always valuable: different points of views, different actors in the field – but you have to balance all the reactions of people, people might find your images pretty but they might not think in sequence or paper or… The far biggest mistake is to make a book for a pre-defined audience. You should just work for the content of your story.

One of the key quotes here is that people don't make enough dummies. That people just make one or two and expect there to be a finished book. But making a good photobook is difficult. Making a really good one is really difficult. It is bewildering when people make books quite painlessly and expect them to be brilliant. Maybe it's a bit protestant of me, but I do sense that all really good books involve a certain amount of pain in their creation. As well as a certain amount of playing around. Pleasure and pain at the same time.

You get the feeling with Martin Bollati has had some pain but also played around plenty in the making of his new book, La Forma Bruta. It's not a safe book, and you can see  that he has gone through different stages of discomfort and doubt to get to the end result.

And the end result is something that stands out both in terms of the images made and the form in which they are presented.




La Forma Bruta is a series of images shot in museums around Spain, Portugal, the UK and other countries in Europe.

They are coded and modified to make a new narrative that is both a commentary on the way we gain knowledge from museums and other such repositories of knowledge, and a new story in its own right

The book starts with the picture below which looks like a sunrise over a rock or a pyramid of some form. It's all very 2001, but it takes us back in time to a primordial age.

.

The book continues with African heads - it's the birth of man - minerals, rocks, opposable thumbs, and images that speak of the discovery of fire.



The pictures are rich with reds, yellows and oranges. These are earth colours, so it's like we're going back into our primaeval self. This is a world of the elements, of fire, and magma, and people living lives at the beginning of our human time.

Slashes of yellow cut across the page like rivers of molten iron and the story continues as humanity rises into a consciousness seared with burning beams of orange and red.

It comes in file form, with the pictures printed on glossy card so it feels archival - very strange archival but archival all the same.

I always like photographing things in museums and it's a staple of the documentary world. But it can be a bit lame. Bollati has done something with those images and reshaped them into something new that is also a commentary of sorts on how we are fed and consume the exhibits we see in a museum. So it's a kind of Evidence (Sultan and Mandel) of the diorama. But he's done it boldly in a way that looks and feels great. It's one of those "I wish I'd thought of that books." Well, Bollati did think of it, but I get the feeling lots of other people are going to be thinking in a very similar way in the next few years.

Buy La Forma Bruta here.