Under a stained glass roof, creative booklovers unite for the annual Melbourne Art Book Fair, hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria.
At an art book fair, anything goes. There are no rules about what is or isn't an art book — it's an inclusive community, with a niche for everyone (even me). I shared a table with my friend and fellow photographer, Sarah Abad (we share an affinity for tangible photographic vessels).
5 Press (always one of my favourite tables) is a collective of Melbourne-based print makers, including August Carpenter whose monochrome monoprints and hand-bound books posess the gravitas of unique and fragile objects echoing the landscapes they represent (watch this space for a possible collaboration).
I recently flew across the sea, with a suitcase full of books, to Photobook NZ, a festival that connects New Zealand's photobook community with the world. Held in Wellington at the Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa and the College of Creative Arts at Massey University, the second biennial festival welcomed high calibre international guests from around the world.
Throughout the lectures I was fortunate enough to attend, the act of returning again and again to a place, and the weaving of poetic words with photographs reverberated. I sadly missed Carolle Bénitah’s talk, who’s work literally strings together photographs, using “beads, coloured threads and scissors to alter her family photographs and albums to explore the memories of her childhood, and as a way to help her underst...
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Context: The alternative to preserving photographs, is to lose them. What does a book of lost photographs look like?
Aim: To visually represent the absence of lost photographs.
Precedent: Will Steacy's Photographs Not Taken (book cover pictured above), perhaps the only photography book I’ve bought that is entirely devoid of photographs, is "a collection of photographers' essays about failed attempts to make a picture…These mental negatives depict the unedited world and the moments of life that do not exist in a single frame." In a different vein, I have also previously created a photobook devoid of photographs, 2nd’s, after I discovering a dusty box of slides marked 2nd’s. Inside this box I found empty slide mounts along with what appeared to be accidentally mounted frames from the end of rolls of film, partially exposed, partly blank, yet curiously interesting.
Method: I began by thinking about my own experiences with lost photographs, in particul...
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WHAT DOES A DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH LOOK LIKE WHEN NO ONE IS LOOKING AT IT?
Like a million pieces of chocolate sent via Wonka Vision, waiting to be recalled, reunited, and consumed – thanks to the imagination of Roald Dahl!
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"That is the most important book you will ever make." Dan Milnor recalls telling a Blurb customer in response to the realisation that books could be a vessel for family photos, not just a commercial enterprise. “I can make a book for my family. I can use the photos we’ve had our entire lives.”
It begs the question, what makes a family photobook gift worthy, while a family photo Dropbox account isn’t a present worth sharing?
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