I often want to create something physical, usually cobbled together from stuff I have lying around. Nothing big, but something I can share with the world in some small but tangible way. I quite like pamphlets and hand-made books, little limited editions that I can leave for people to find. This time, a little pamphlet of portraits of dogs.
Side one of the sheet that I fold to make a 4″x5″ pamphlet.Side two of the sheet that I fold to make a 4″x5″ pamphlet.
After a few minutes with a publishing program I had the pages laid out so I could print them double sided, fold in half twice, add a cover, and staple.
The cover for “Taco and Tess. Portraits” pamphlet.
The center spread for “Taco and Tess. Portraits” pamphlet.
I don’t know who, if anybody, will take these pamphlets, and I don’t really care. Maybe somebody will just thumb through them. Maybe people will just move them around to get at the good books. It doesn’t matter. For me making the pamphlet was the goal.
I have begun to sort my photographs of flowers into groups. I then print a few of the images and assemble them into little pamphlets, each organized around a particular flower. A recent pamphlet focused on a few photographs of red roses.
Draft title page and back page with colophon. Printed on cheap, copy paper.
Like all of these pamphlets, this one is short. Three photographs pasted onto the pages. Very little text, limited to the first page. And like all my book/pamphlet-making efforts, this one went through a handful of drafts. Revising the text. Testing different proportions for the photographs. Printing both the text and the images on different papers.
Marked up draft of a spread from a pamphlet I recently created.
I find the process fulfilling. Something about producing something that, for me, makes photography so much richer than locking it away in some digital prison where images go to die in the social-media doomscroll.
A spread where I test out a different size image. I like this one better.
The process it iterative and full of mistakes. How many times have I pasted the wrong photograph on a particular page (as above and below)? How many times have I misassembled the pages, or misprinted them? For any normal person, I’m sure this process would be frustrating. But for me the promise of sharing my work, giving something to somebody, even if I don’t know that person, nourishes my creativity.
Heavy paper cover of final draft of pamphlet.
This particular pamphlet/study grew out of a bouquet a neighbor gave us. They were out of town when their monthly flower arrangement was delivered. They told us to take and enjoy them. I photographed the roses from the bouquet as they opened and browned and wilted. I selected three photographs for this pamphlet.
First pages of pamphlet with corrected text and photo with longer proportions (in this draft I pasted the first two photographs on the wrong pages — oops).
I drafted some text that linked the photographs, and printed and bound the pamphlet, with red thread because that seemed best suited for the photographs.
Central pages, showing rose image and red binding thread (in this draft I pasted the first two photographs on the wrong pages — oops).
I left a copy in my neighbor’s mailbox as a thank you for the bouquet. She texted to let me know she got the pamphlet and loved it — that was kind of her to say.
I don’t know how many of these I will make, maybe a few dozen copies. These are another of the “limited editions” I create, prompted by somebody or something and limited because I think there’s a small and finite audience for them. But I’m always willing and able to print more. When I have enough of these pamphlets, I’ll print an entire set and bind them all together into a book. But that’s a project for another day.
Along the ridge is a line of old power poles, serving a few houses tucked into the hills above town. Whenever I walk the trail past these poles, I photograph them, noting how much the scene changes at different times of day.
One day these poles will be gone, replaced by more modern, taller poles that bring electricity to the many houses that will cover the foothills. When that happens, at least we’ll have these photos to remind us of a simpler, less crowded time.
Flowers are powerful means of conveying emotion: condolences, loss, love, apology, friendship, thanks. Among the flowers commonly given, roses occupy a particularly important place, especially to express love. Yet, roses die quickly. Cut from the bush, placed in a vase full of fresh water, they last only a few days before petals brown and fall all over the table and the rose bud itself droops and becomes sad. A metaphor, perhaps, of the fleeting and fragile nature of romance.
#2200903.1: Study of Flowers 14.
Genetically modified and homogenized, grown in carefully controlled environments, today’s roses lack the variation, hardiness, and rich aromas of older varietals. 1867 and the tea rose. Today’s roses are standardized, like so many things in our world, even the ways we express our emotions.
#220903.2: Study of Flowers 15.
And yet, if we look close enough, we can find variation and differences even in today’s roses, the shapes of the pedals, the colors of the stems, the peculiar way each flower decays. These two photos are form part of a pamphlet in a series of pamphlets on flowers, a sort of paper menagerie.
Zoom.Whiteboards. Smartboards. iPads. Tablets. Video. Flipped classrooms. Clickers. MOOCs. How much effort do we put into designing educational technologies? Who benefits from that effort? Rarely, it seems, the student (if the educational disaster of the last two years is any indication).
The blackboard was introduced into the classroom in the 19th century, and within a couple decades was ubiquitous. Since then pedagogues (and social critics) have praised and condemned the simple blackboard with its screechy chalk and dusty erasers. But there’s something dependable about its simplicity, and little evidence that the many innovations introduced since then have improved pedagogical effectiveness.
#220831: Blackboard as educational technology.
quid est nōmen tibi? quomōdo tē vocās? nōmen mihi est … ego mē vocō …
canis cattus fēlès je reconnais il/elle reconnaît recitāte
There is something almost poetic about the traces left on blackboards. Fleeting. Ephemeral. Momentary vestiges of teaching and resistance.
I did not know of Ray Johnson’s art before stumbling across information about the exhibit, “Please Send to Real Life” at The Morgan Library. I like the vernacular, collage aspects of his photography and art. It is not something to hang on a wall. It is not “beautiful” in any sense. But I really appreciate the immediacy of it, and its specificity. In the video introducing the exhibit, Joel Smith (the curator) describes Johnson’s work as:
Maybe the most salient characteristic of Ray Johnson’s art is its intimacy. He loved the idea of art as correspondence, as something that comes from one person and goes to one other person.
This description, “art as correspondence,” so neatly captures why I print and send postcards to random people, often unannounced, or leave small piles of them in cafes or on benches, each with some thought related in some way to the photo. Sometimes I open a map, point to a city, find some random address, and send a postcard to it. Other times I head out on foot with a stack of postcards, find a cafe, and write a bunch while enjoying a cup of coffee.
P.P. 52.12.0 — one of the early postcards in my postcards project.
Often these postcards are just scenes that caught my eye, becoming an opportunity to imagine an absurd history that could describe what I see. Some postcards are more typical, postcard images. Either way, they are opportunities to enact art as a correspondence, from me to a single other person.
#220107: Compact shelving HC450.5 through HN733.
While I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of Ray Johnson’s art, per se, I am a fan of his understanding of what art can be.
I make “limited edition” books, something between art books and photo books. They are often experiments that will never move beyond my work table, hence the “limited edition” label. I play with format, with layout, with folding pages or cut pages. Some are little more than pamphlets. I always learn something from these books.
This “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022” is another type of book. This type I tend to make for somebody I know or someplace I frequent. In this case, I assembled photographs I had taken while at Ashford Farm, a local horse farm. Over the past couple years I had spent a number of days there watching the riders and looking around the farm. I had taken pictures of horses in their stalls, people riding horses, kids in the summer riding camps, and other parts of the farm that seemed interesting to me. These episodic books are “limited editions” insofar as I suspect only a very small number of people will be interested in them.
Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022 first draft title pageDraft pages with notes, from an early draft of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”
Like all such books, “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022” went through a number of revisions in my head before I got around to printing a draft. For me, printing and assembling a draft is essential, even if the draft is small and printed on cheap copy paper. I have to see the sequence, thumb through the pages, test the folding pages and see how partial pages work.
When I’ve worked out the initial problems and arranged the pages the way I want, I tend to print a full-size draft.
Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022 another draft title pageOne of the pages in the draft of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022”Fold-out page before folding out, in a draft of Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.Fold-out page after folding out, in a draft of Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.
I spend a day or so looking at this draft just to see how it feels, especially things like format and dimensions, and to catch the last problems or issues that have thus far escaped my notice. I also think about things like binding, covers, and paper. When I’m happy with the draft (or no longer unhappy with it), I print the final version and assemble the book.
The final cover of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”Tack hanging in door from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”A horse looks out of its stable, from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”A horse walking in a ring, as seen through the fence, from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”
For “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022” I assembled 51 photos I had taken last year and this year. Landscape orientation with a number of fold-out pages seemed ideal. The pages would be large enough to accommodate both landscape and portrait photos, and the fold-outs would let me include some 16×9 proportion shots. I used a binding (often referred to as “Japanese Stab Binding” though also similar to the binding used on “Chinese-style notebooks”) and cover that echoed utilitarian notebooks. I used a smooth, bright matte paper for a couple copies and bamboo-washi paper for another. Each copy is unique — not only did I print them on different paper (my favorite was the Awagami bamboo paper, mainly because of the feel), but I also used different thread for the stitching and in one case different stock for the cover.
Here are a few more photos from this book.
A horse looks out from its stable, from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”A young girl pausing to look at a horse in the barn, from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”Tack hanging on the wall in the tack room, from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”A stirrup, from the final version of “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022.”
In the end, I made three copies of this book, one for me, one for a friend, and one for the people who own Ashford Farm and let me loiter and take pictures. These episodic projects exist somewhere between creativity and art. I am happy to have made this book and need not share it with anybody, hence creativity. But it does something more when I share it with an audience that might be interested, hence art.
I might make another copy or two. I might not. If you want one, let me know. Maybe we can work something out.
I find something compelling about Bernd and Hilla Becher’s book, Typologies of Industrial Buildings. Juxtaposing numerous individual examples of industrial structures highlights their similarities and their differences. It also draws attention to often overlooked or ignored architecture, encouraging us to see design and aesthetic choices, to view these utilitarian structures as art. While each of their photographs, taken alone, is interesting, when taken together they are a sort of conceptual art, as well as a study in form.
Infrastructure #220621.1
The Bechers’ work lies behind my interest in otherwise overlooked infrastructure. Windmills, manhole covers, utility poles, high tension towers, bridge supports. These are all opportunities to focus on the mundane in an effort to find the interesting.
Infrastructure #220621.2
Manhole covers. Lots of people have found manhole covers interesting. Some people use manhole covers to make great prints. Other people have spent time photographing them. But what happens when we consider them in large numbers? Can we produce a typology of manhole covers? Sewer covers, storm drain covers, utility covers, and communications covers. In the process, can we see the traces of their histories? The imperfections, individual marks of fabrication, scars, and design quirks of individual foundries. Do they also reveal the history of industry, consolidation, and shipping? Local foundry names giving way to larger, regional foundries, which are then replaced foundries in foreign countries.
Infrastructure #220621.3
I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing here. But maybe there is.
The value, for me, in coming back again and again to similar subjects is finding what I do and do not like. Maybe in the process I improve my technique, but that’s less interesting to me than watching how my aesthetic sensibilities shift. I seem regularly to return to flowers.
Karl Ove Knausgård is suspicious of photographs, or any art really, that he likes for primarily aesthetic reasons. A profound Protestantism, he thinks, rejects anything that comes too easily, that doesn’t require effort and work. He worries that he must contemplate a photograph in order to discern its meaning and therefore its significance. Only such photographs that demand such reflection and analysis can be art. This assumption, whether explicitly linked to Protestantism or not, seems common amongst both photographers and people who talk about photography (and also seems to justify, at least in part, the ubiquitous “artist’s statement”). To be art, a photograph must contain but conceal some aspect of the photographer’s identity or philosophy. Often, photographs are mechanisms of self realization and self expression. They must have a real intention.
Today, amongst real photographers and connoisseurs of photography, few compliments are more damning than “beautiful.” Art, it seems, is not beautiful or even pretty, but is meaningful and revelatory. Art demands that we acquire the knowledge to appreciate it as art. Pretty pictures are dismissed as “calendar” or “hotel” art.
#220220.2: Study of Flowers 12
I find such an approach limiting and elitist. I am perfectly happy for some creative expression (art?) to have layers of meaning that the sufficiently prepared viewer can disentangle and appreciate. But I am unwilling to imply that only such creative expressions are art. Insofar as I care about other people seeing my work, I would rather thousands of hotel guests looked at one of my photographs as they walked through a lobby than a handful of visitors pondered one while they stood in a gallery. This photograph has no deeper meaning. It is merely a photograph of a flower that somebody found visually pleasing enough to hang in an office. That’s good enough for me.
