Self-publish or be damned: why photographers are going it alone | Sean O'Hagan
Ed Ruscha famously did it. Alec Soth recently did it twice. Stephen Gill is just about to do it again for the 12th time. I am referring – lest there be any doubt – to the practice of self-publishing, which is the subject of a two-day event at the Photographers' Gallery in London this weekend.
Self-publishing is not a new development in photography, but recently the trend to make, edit, design and produce your own photobook seems to have become an underground phenomenon. The Self Publish, Be Happy Weekend will showcase what the curator, Bruno Ceschel, describes as "50 exceptional contemporary photobooks" alongside talks, discussions and author signings of books that are often produced in very small editions.
On a recent visit to the Photographers' Gallery, bookshop manager John Buckle showed me a few select publications from the mountain of self-published books he has had to sift though of late. They included Ertussenuit by Dutch photographer, Sjoerd Knibbeler, a visual record of a very strange theme park he recently discovered that – as he puts it in surreally minimal blurb – "was something close to a fit of giggles". More touching is Maxwell Anderson's sad and wonderful book, See You Soon, which records his brief but intense love affair with a Japanese girl through various intimate snapshots of her. (One can't help wondering how much the constant presence of Anderson's camera had to do with the break-up.)
The photobook as art object is beautifully realised by Lester B Morrison in his book of photographs, pencil drawings and collages, Lost Boy Mountain, which Alec Soth has been championing for some time. Soth, whose critically acclaimed book, Sleeping By the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004, also self-published two titles recently: Las Vegas Birthday Book (and Sculpture) which, as far as I can ascertain, was a one-off maquette, and The Last Days of W, a selection of photographs taken over the duration of the George Bush presidency and published as a large-format newspaper. (I've seen some copies in various specialist London bookshops recently but they are fast disappearing.)
There are two touchstones for the self-published photography book: the artist's book, of which Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) is a famous and highly influential example, and the fanzine, a labour of love and obsession that came of age with the punk movement of the late 1970s and has spread to embrace every aspect of popular culture, photography included. Ruscha, who made 16 artist's books between 1963 and 1978, said later: "When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method; it was an obsolete, archaic form of communication … I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing."
Today, though, as this weekend's event shows, zine culture seems to be the prime driving force behind the self-published photography book, with many being no more than pamphlets. Whether making an artist's book or a zine, self-publishing is primarily to do with keeping control of your creative vision (the book doesn't just illustrate the art, it is the art) and being able to operate outside the often prohibitively costly mainstream publishing houses. Ironically, the self-published book, which is produced in such limited editions, often becomes a collector's item, and the price rises accordingly.
In Britain, Stephen Gill is perhaps the best-known contemporary self-published photographer, producing works such as London Fields, Hackney Wick and his forthcoming title Coming Up for Air on his own imprint, Nobody Books. In another book, Hackney Flowers, Gill painted over his own images and applied chemical processes that emphasised the theme of decomposition. This is the photobook as art object, in which every part of the process – from discovering a subject to realising it, then creating a book in which to impart it – is imbued with a level of creativity that would probably have been sacrificed if Gill had handed over his prints to a mainstream publisher.
In the current issue of Photoworks magazine, Joachim Schmid, a champion of what might be called vernacular photography (the wealth of everyday images that exists outside galleries and photobooks) as well as self-publishing, writes: "At this time, hardly anybody would dare to make confident predictions about the future of publishing. Nevertheless, I dare say that more artists will make their own books, that more of them will use print-on-demand services, and that the quality of these services will improve notably in the not-too-distant future."
In the continuing digital age, then, the future of the DIY photobook seems assured for perhaps the same reasons that independent record labels currently continue to thrive as major labels falter. The message seems to be that small is not only beautiful, it's also cost-effective and creatively liberating. In today's fragmented pop culture, some of the most interesting and challenging developments still happen on the margins, where the mainstream fears to tread.
For more information on self-publishing, visit selfpublishbehappy.wordpress.com. If you're interested in making your own photobook, visit blurb.com.
Now see this
From 10 June 2010, the Jack Bell Gallery in Vauxhall, London, is showing the work of the great African photographer Seydou Keita, who chronicled Malian society as it moved from French colonisation to independence. His large-format studio portraits from the 1940s to the 60s are of individuals, families and suited professionals, and he often used ornate backdrops and extravagant props such as Vespa scooters and flashy cars. Keita made his own prints, which show off his formal brilliance and acute eye for composition. It's on until 11 July 2010.