Very few photobooks would be missed if they weren't made.

     image by Tony Gentile and the War: A Sicilian Story - the most visually coherent photobook of 2015


So at the same time as doing this blog I am also guest-editing the Photobook Bristol Blog.

This is a post from earlier in the week about the design-thoughts of Ania Nałęcka, one of the speakers at Photobook Bristol 2016.

The bold is what Ania said, so clearly and delightfully, at a lecture I saw her give. The not-bold is a less polite version based on some of the photobooks I've seen over the last year, and some of the frustrations we all sometimes have with photobooks. But it's still polite.


Why Make a Photobook? It's not always the right thing!

Less politely, the vast majority of photobooks should not be made. People make them for all sorts of reasons - but the main one nowadays seems to be to finish a body of work. And just make a book. 

But really? Does it have to be made? Almost certainly not. Very few photobooks would be missed if they weren't made. 


The Relationship between form and content - and getting that right.

Mariela Sancari's Moises is not the best book of 2016, but it does get the form, the content and the way of viewing right. It's just so right to handle.

Similarly, Thomas Sauvin's cigarette book, Till Death do Us Part, is not that great a  book really, is it? 

It's a gift shop book, a novelty book. But I love gift shops, especially when they have great gifts in, and Till Death do Us Part is a great gift. It gets it right and hits all those tactile spots in a way that ties in to the book's theme. Above all a book is something to handle, and if you can handle it nicely, that's better than a book that doesn't, especially if the handling ties so neatly into the idea of what the book is about.

The Importance of People understanding what you are trying to say in your photobook. You have to make them understand. It doesn't happen by accident!

It is the job of the bookmaker, designer, writer, photographer to tell a story. I shouldn't rely on the genius of my pictures to tell the story. Pictures don't tell stories on their own. I shouldn't pretend they do. 

The Book is something that you Construct! It's not an accident of pages that fall together. You have to make it happen.

Cover, binding, paper, smell, touch, editing, sequencing, text, interaction, plot, origami, tone... Basically everything that goes into the construction of a film, a novel, a children's book, can go into a photobook.

So if I'm going to make a photobook, I should be lazy touting my dummy pictures up on Instagram, but I should really think about the possibilities open to me. And then probably reject them all anyway, because I shouldn't be making a photobook in the first place.

How you can work with a Limited Budget. Being Poor forces you to be creative! Maybe?

Expensively printed books can be brilliant, but there might be a better way. And it might be cheaper. With fewer copies. Even if you do have the budget.

The Problem of Repeating yourself. Visually, verbally, in every possible way. Don't do it.

Just because I'm stroking my chin and being philosophical doesn't mean I'm not repeating myself. 

Just because I have use massively complex process doesn't mean I'm not repeating myself. 

Just because my pictures are old doesn't mean I'm not repeating myself.

Repetition comes in many forms. 

The Problem of Being Enigmatic. Clarity and simplicity make for ease of communication. Unless you don't want people to understand you.

There have been alot of metaphysical examinations of the world around us in recent years, and some of them are very good. 

But perhaps the time has come to draw a line under photographic rock, paper, scissors, clouds. 

And the hands holding them. 

Just because it's obscure doesn't make it poetry.

The Problem of Avoiding the Obvious. Communication is about directness and making yourself understood; avoiding the obvious does not help that. At worst it might make you enigmatic or (the close cousin of enigma) incoherent.

Sequencing is not the same as narrative. Sequencing doesn't tell a story. All that happens when picture A has a bird in it and so does picture B, is you have two pictures with birds in. A story is not necessarily told. The best books from last year had clear visual and narrative content. They were about something in other words. They had a narrative in the real sense of telling a story.  Tell a story. An interesting ones.

The Danger of 'Design'. 

Don't get carried away. Don't do the pop-ups unless the pop-ups are required.

Photography Always Comes First! That's why it's a Photobook!

It's not an essay, or a dissertation, or a paper. It's a photobook. It's visual. It's pictures. Because pictures are easy. It shouldn't be a struggle. 

The pictures comes first. 

Except for the times when people decide otherwise. There's always room for the arbitrary. Like I said, it's not that serious. 

Moisés: A book where you feel the pain.

Moisés by Mariela Sancari seems to be a modest affair. It's not too big, there are not so many pictures and the pictures that are included have an unspectacular quality to them.

At the same time, it's not at all modest. It's a project book, an installation book, that is both a visual portrayal of the grief Sancari felt for her dead father (he's the Moisés of the title), and an attempt by Sancari to come to terms with that grief, a grief complicated by the way in which Moises died.

When Moises killed himself, Sancari and her twin sister (who were 14 at the time) were not allowed to see the body. Was it because of the 'sin' of suicide or because of Jewish burial law. We can't be sure.

But already there is a huge amount of emotional energy invested in the story and it is this energy that Sancari brings out in her pictures. Because after he died, the family never talked how Moisés died, about the non-seeing of the body, about that layer of a grief that was laden with both anger and guilt.

Sancari set out to confront this silence through her art. She put an advertisement in the newspaper asking for paid volunteers answering to the age (he would be if he were still alive) and appearance of her father to model for her. Several people answered the ad and she photographed.

Moisés the book is one end result of this process. It has a triptych cover with double spines, so the pages fold out left-right, left-right, left-right rhythm. The first pictures are fragmented images of her father. You see him in bits; a jaw, a hairline, an ear, fragments that mirror Sancari's half-buried memories.

Then you open up the pages and you see the first volunteer in three frames; a quarter back profile, a full profile and a two thirds profile. The model stands there with his stern mouth and his swept back hair and he probably looks nothing like the real Moises, but he's wearing his old cardigan. There's a touching point, a hook.



The next model is bald, has a moustache and collapsed cheeks where his teeth used to be. He looks nothing like the first one. Fold the pages out and the third is a wide-mouthed man with a thatch of grey hair. We get four pictures of him and he's wearing the same cardigan as the first man. The models change, the clothes repeat, each could be Sancari's father, each most definitely isn't. There's a mix of social types, of projected futures, of degrees of aging. And then we get to the end and a man is combing Sancari's hair, the memory of the past brought into a counter-intuitive present.



The final page shows the ad that Sancari put in the paper. And finally we see what Moisés 'really' looked like in a photograph.  A caption reads, To go back, begin from the right. So we go back and we see it differently; a neck, and another neck, and the neck again, red-raw, with abrasions. So that tells us something. And the men come back, but it's all a different view and the sad eyes, the brittle hair and the aging skin become something else again.

It's a slow and touching book. If it were a film, it would be Amour. The design fits the purpose but you need to know the story before you start which might be a barrier. Maybe that's why there's a slipped-in brochure with a text by Erik Kessels highlighting those projects that get to the emotional core of the big themes of life; Araki's Sentimental Journey, the work of Seichi Furuya or Fusco's Funeral Train.

Sancari's book gets to that emotional core. It's love, guilt and grief wrapped up in a quiet and apparently simple book. Sometimes you get the feeling that for photography to be good it has to be difficult in some way. You need to go through a pain barrier. You can feel that Moisés was difficult to make and is far more complex and multi-layered than it first appears. It's a book where you can feel the pain.

 Read more about the project here

Buy the book here

Photobook Bristol: The Man with the Golden Shoes

Ah, Photobook Bristol!

Well, it's photobook luvvie time, but it is over and it really was such a wonderful and open event with great speakers that went from the beautiful photography of Tom Wood, the intensity of Laia Abril, to the soulfulness of Carolyn Drake, the domestic delights of Anna Fox, the invention and wit of Erik Kessels and the charm and insight of Catherine Balet.

 It was a privilege to be able to have a drink, listen to and talk with some of the most innovative,  dynamic, sociable, funny, soulful, considerate, caring and above all, creative people in photography, publishing, teaching and design, as well as see new work and students getting in the photobook mix. And that's what makes it such a unique festival - it's small size and it's openness. It's a feelgood festival despite being in England which isn't really a feelgood kind of place,

Three great books were launched. Peter Mitchell's Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody, Laura El Tantawy's The People, and Mariela Sancari's Moises, more of which before the summer break.

And Ricardo Martinez Paz was there with Catherine Balet (who you will hear much, much more of when her new book is published) and his golden shoes. And that was delightful.  And very, very cool. Cool and open. There's a good combination!

So that's my symbol for the weekend: The Man with the Golden Shoes. Click Click and off we go...

See an album here.