Rudi Says This, Rudi Says That, Rudi Says the Other...

Rudi Thoemmes of Photobook Bristol with Ivars Gravlejs

This is fun! Richard West of Source Magazine interviews Rudi Thoemmes of Photobook Bristol about books, funding and believing in the hype.

Here's the key quote:

"As soon as a book is subsidised by the photographer, it means the publisher doesn't have to sell it."

He also talks about:

On starting a Photobook Festival by accident.

On why you don't want a festival in a gallery.

On taking the hype out of the photobook world.

On what has gone wrong in the photobook world.

On design taking over from content.


If you think you'll make money from photobooks, Rudi says you won't.

If you think photobooks are a big thing, Rudi says you're mistaken.

If you think the Arnolfini Museum in Bristol is really a contender for British Museum of the Year, Rudi says it's not.

If you're thinking of paying somebody £15,000 to publish your photobook, Rudi says think again. 

If you think paying money to publish your book is a contribution, Rudi says it's not.

If you do do the above and think somebody will take your £15,000 and stick your book through InDesign Template Number 4 and send it to his mates for printing and jobs done, Rudi says you're right. 



Aside from that, He's holding back a bit I think. He likes Multistory though.

Watch the full interview here.

Photobook Bristol: We've All Been Touched!

Martin Parr by Anouk Kruithof and Anouk Kruithof by Martin Parr

Well, Photobook Bristol was fabulous. It was like a joining of the European clans, with cabals of photo people coming from all over; the Dutch, the Spanish, the Belgian, the Portuguese, the Germans were all there, with students, photographers, academics, publishers, dealers and movers all mingling in the unique surroundings of Bristol's Southbank Club in sunny Bedminster.

Above and beyond the fascinating talks and presentations, and the mass of newly-printed books and the incipient buzz forming around so many of them, it was the casualness of the festival that made it such a delightful and relaxed experience where the greatest pleasure came from chatting to so many lovely people from all around the world.

It was a gathering of 200 obsessives, a gathering that in previous centuries might have been found in some kind of asylum for the harmlessly insane; The nerdometer had to be turned up to 11 as the essential questions of photobook-ology were raised and, as is the nature of these things, never quite answered.

On the Saturday night, entertainment was provided by Mik Artistik from Leeds. He summed up the weekend, and everything to do with photobooks, in a few simple lines that he rattled off in a piercing improvisation.

This is what he said.

You all like photobooks, don't you,
And you've all been touched,

There's a shop upstairs with picture books,
You've all been touched, 
I don't mean touched in a dirty way, 
You've all been touched.

A few drops of water on a window,
A picture of a boy with a wolf mask on,
oooh, 
You've all been touched.

There's a lady with her top off, 
Let's take a picture of that, 
You've all been touched. 


Which sums up photography as a whole really. But through all the talks and presentations and panels, important questions were raised, but never really answered - maybe because there isn't really an answer, maybe because half the questions were statements.



What is a photobook?

Is it a vehicle or a medium?

Why do books have a spine?

Let's make books we can pull apart.

Let's not make any more photographs.

Let's not make any more photobooks.

The Dutch have great design.

Design and form and content?

Forty pounds for a photobook?

Who is going to buy that?

Don't consider your audience?

It's great to have a patron!

Don't give up the day job!

There are far too many photobooks.

There's far too much of everything.

Everything is bad.

Everything is good.

The book as a fetish is bad!

Look, Touch, Feel, Desire!

Never trust a publisher!

Except for the nice ones...

Let's make it more available.

Let's make it less available.

Let's put it in a box.

And sell it with a print.

We don't know how it works.

We haven't got a clue.

Let's put it on the walls!

Let's put it on the ceiling! Now that is fucking mad.

It's good to be free!

It's bad to be broke!

It's bad to be rich.

I'm a real artist me.

Fuck, this box is heavy!

It's sold out now.

We've all been touched.

An East German Photobook Adventure: Tractors, Photofits and Textiles

I visited Rudi Thoemmes in Bristol yesterday. Rudi is organising the Bristol Photobook Festival that is happening in June. He also runs a photobook dealership RRB Photobooks and has a massive collection of books from the DDR, East Germany.

These are books that are virtually unknown outside Germany. They reveal a history that connects to the unified Germany of the Second World War and before, as well as to the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So they are not just photographic documents, they also reflect ideas, ideologies and world events - sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. They also reflect a sensibility that runs counter to what we take for granted, a sensibility that can be authoritarian, utilitarian and brutally direct.

The books fell into several distinct categories. One group consisted of anniversary books, books that celebrated 20years of the existence of the DDR, or (below) the 4 year anniversary of the foundation of Greater Berlin Municipal Authority.

There are albums; police albums (see the photofit picture above), army albums, school albums and factory albums. Boxed portfolio sets showed idealised housing estates or construction projects and there are fancy design additions such as this yellow acetate in this offering from the Dederon Textile Company.

 And fitting into this category are some of the best known East German photobooks that looked at the construction of Berlin's Stalin Strasse Apartment block, the coup in Chile or the conflict in the Congo.

Other offerings include travel photobooks (and these sold in huge numbers - 50,000 copies was common), photobooks celebrating international friendship. The picture below is from Addis Ababa and shows the locals being obliged to take their sunday off out to watch a DDR tractor display. What could be better than that in the noonday Ethiopian sun.

More tractors come in this children's book - it's a kind of Tractor Tom but even more animal friendly.

There were also more political books, such as Dirk Alvermann's books on West Germany and Algeria, the latter of which is especially notable (and is, along with the autobahn book, in the 1st Photobook History).

And then there are the worker's books. I particularly enjoyed the Postwomen book.

It's fascinating both for what it shows and what it doesn't show (there are no Stasi books for example), and for the scale of photographic culture that existed in the DDR, a scale that shows how deep-seated photographic culture can be, far deeper than the very narrow photographic culture that we generally talk or read about. And that's interesting! And worth examining.