Creative: Stories That Bind: 20 Years at Blurb

I’ve been here fourteen years and nine months. I’ve been saying “fifteen,” so I stand corrected. If you only knew how this came about. I’ve been intrigued by printing my work since the very beginning. The wet darkroom, desktop inkjet, and then on to books, bound, loved, and preserved. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I had other plans. I wasn’t sure what those plans were, but they didn’t include a decade plus of being “Blurb’s man in the field.” Photographer at Large to Creative Evangelist to Creative Ambassador to just “Blurb guy.”

I have both, but mine are mired together at the DNA level, which is why I’m still here. It’s not like I turn this job on and off. It’s just on, all the time. Like water on a slow boil. Simmering through text, email, phone, Discord, YouTube, and this site. A life on display with paper as the foundation.

I was around when this film was being made. A real crew. I loved watching this come together. For someone like me, a total film hack, it was interesting to see how quickly these folks worked and how they had to adapt to incredibly challenging environments. They used a new camera. The footage looks stellar. I had to film something in this same location a few weeks back, and almost nothing I created is usable.

This film is about print, people, stories that bind, and Blurb. Reflecting on all the experiences I’ve had, the people I’ve encountered, who have helped, informed, or somehow guided me, have me almost teary-eyed. Almost. This company has allowed many stories to be told, continuing a human tradition that we’ve been passionate about since we first started drawing on cave walls. Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s founder, is the guilty party. She had the tenacity to push that rock uphill so it could roll down for the rest of us. A “stem winder,” my mother would say.