Creative: Patagonia Book, Treatment Two

Ya, okay. I get it. What a difference. What a change. Have you abandoned your photographic roots? Nope, but the power of the notebook, the power of design, and the power of all things new have Uncle Danno doing spinning hook kicks, and I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve seen too many photography books. It’s like the Nick Nolte character in Under Fire, when confronted by Gene Hackman after faking a news photograph. “Maybe I’ve seen one too many bodies,” he says before Hackman lays him out. By the way, for you hipster dorks who dress like 1980s photojournalists, this movie was made for you. On a serious note, it’s one of the ONLY photography-related films in which the main character was clearly trained on how to hold and use a camera. I’ve seen this film at least twenty times. On a side note, the coverage of Latin American wars was hugely influential in my becoming a photojournalist. (Meiselas, Dickman, Nickelsberg, Hoagland, Simon)

So, I’ve moved on.

Moved on from my old mentality and tried to find something new, a blend, if you will. I still believe in the power of a single strong image to carry a spread, but I also feel like I need to adapt and improve my design. If you are designing a book for fellow photographers, especially if you live in a small, cliquey world, like people who dress like 1980s photojournalists, for example, you can do anything and get away with it. I would describe preaching to the visual choir this way. When I attended the New York Art Book Fair, I witnessed numerous examples of this. Average to subpar work was showcased in beautifully printed books with numerous customizations, printed in small quantities, and then sold only within that small clique. The book never ventured into the bigger, badder world. (If I see another image of friends at a party followed by an out-of-focus friend in the woods followed by a still life trying to be Eggleston followed by an urban, abstract landscape followed by “I’m a film photographer,” proclamation, I’m going to lose my mind.)

This does not interest me.

No offense, but I don’t care what fellow photographers think. I’m after big game. I’m after the public. The people who may or may not care about photography, or even the story I’m attempting to tell. And my books tend not to be about me saying, “Look how great I am.” Artist-driven? No. Story-driven? Yes. Straight picture books can make an impact, and I’m glad other people are still making them, but I believe that to reach a general public almost destroyed by technological crack cocaine, I might need to try something else.

The spreads you see here are not the final product. These are just initial sketches. What prompted these works was color; exploring color a bit more. I’m NOT a fan of colored pages with photographs, but I am a fan of colored backgrounds with text, as I mentioned in an earlier post. With these colors comes mood- a specific, more playful, more upbeat mood- so I need to take caution with how and when I use colors like this, but it’s nice to experiment for future projects. Once I spend more time with color, I might shift my view on using color with imagery.

What I create moving forward, at least for now, will be something between what I was doing and what you see here. I will also be adding in my handmade items, such as scans from my notebooks. The upcoming Patagonia Workshop is centered around journaling, so this should be a good test. And I’ll also be doing light journaling work during the upcoming Albania Workshop.