The fall is a busy time for photobook enthusiasts. Not least for Lesley Martin, publisher of the Aperture book program and of the newsprint journal The PhotoBook Review. When Raw File spoke with Martin she’d just come off the back of four days at the New York Art Book Fair and, the week prior, a jury-process in which she pored over 800 books on the way to selecting 30 for the shortlists of the Paris-Photo/Aperture Photobook Awards, the winners of which will be announced at Paris Photo which opens on Thursday.
This article is part of a series of interviews with movers and shakers in the photography industry.
Martin has edited over 65 photography books with the likes of Vik Muniz, Richard Misrach, Takashi Homma and Paul Fusco. PDN named her “one of the fifteen most influential people in photobook publishing” and thanks to her promotion of experiments with materials, American Photo recognized Martin as one of the Innovators of the Year. Martin indulged her admiration of the Japanese photo tradition as contributing editor to Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s. When not curating or publishing, Martin has been down at the International Center for Photography and the School of Visual Arts (and now Aperture gallery) teaching the next generation “What Makes a Photobook Work.”
In this Q&A, Martin explains how self-publishing is pushing everyone’s creativity for the better; which paper makes for a gorgeous book; how the shifting models for funding and distribution are changing how photobooks reach our shelves; and why photographers need to know their work. She also humors our question, “What’s your favorite photobook?” and wonders why photographers don’t put their names on front covers anymore.
WIRED: How good are self-publishing practices right now?
Leslie Martin: There are 20 books in the Paris-Photo/Aperture First Book shortlist and 14 of them are self-published. Increasingly, these self-pub books are very sophisticated in their construction and the materials they use. Blurb books are still being offered and occasionally someone manages to hack the Blurb format in an interesting way but …
People are manipulating bindings, making beautiful cloth selection and doing things that you don’t find in the usual factory processes. I really respect the creativity in the self-pub world and the level of production has really increased dramatically.
WIRED: Is that because photographers are getting their smarts on?
LM: There is a growing conversation that happens online – videos of people simply paging through books, access to knowing what people are doing, knowing what is possible. That there’s a conversation around finicky, geeky details like tail bands is great. The standardization of form is up for grabs right now.
WIRED: Construction was a large factor in David Galjaard‘s First PhotoBook Award win for Concresco last year.
LM: What was great about David’s book was that the work which is about Albanian bunkers from World War II, frankly on the surface of things, doesn’t have great appeal. But the book was put together in a considered way with little booklet inserts of interviews with people who had lived through the time of bunkerization. Galjaard melded them into the printing of the pages into which they were tipped. It was mild, not over the top, and a great conceptual handling of different elements to support the work as a whole. The book as an object compelled people to go through the work. That is what a book should do.
From grazing at the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF) and jurying I saw a lot of people — through methods of shooting and organizing — playing with different modes of storytelling. When its done well it’s very rewarding to unpack.
But! People should really put their names and titles on the front covers of books! Even in the shortlist, a large number of self published books had no information on the front. People need to work on their cover skills.
Put your name on the cover of the damn book!
WIRED: Any other dos or don’ts?
LM: People can get fixated on creating a book that is like another book. Listen to your own work and hear what it needs. That sounds touchy-feely but I think when you’re editing you must pay attention. Sometimes the form can be really simple and you don’t need fancy bells or whistles.
WIRED: So self-publishing has raised the bar?
LM: There’s various competitions that now award self-publishing. There’s the Iberoamerican Photobook Prize which awards a body of work that isn’t a book but gives the opportunity for it to become a book. MACK has a First Book Award. There’s the Dummy Award at Fotobookfestival Kassel. So people aren’t even just looking at published work; they’re looking at stages leading up to it. The whole ecosystem and process is being paid a lot of attention. Photographers are engaged and challenged by the conversation. Photographers know they can spend a great amount of attention to detail and people will notice.
WIRED: Do enough people understand yet how much work putting a book together is?
LM: I think so. More and more people understand the economics of it. I don’t think people undertake it lightly.
But at the other end of the spectrum there are a lot of zines and DIY. Aperture recently did a book in the gallery as a performance with Self Publish Be Happy. We had a photographer come in, make the work on site, edited it, put it into book design and and printed it in the space. We made a book in four hours.
It can be easy or it can be a long painstaking project. There’s room for all of those different modes of production. That said, when is enough enough? Most people do undertake a body of work with the idea that getting it into book form as an end in and of itself. Not every body of work is worthy of a book.
WIRED: Thinking of work in a book form distills ideas and forces you to think about the nature of the work?
LM: Exactly. Especially if you get into design and materials. People are taking book binding courses. I’ve seen some remarkable self-made books come off a printer in the bedroom. But you can’t do that every week.
WIRED: We don’t want to misrepresent self-publishing though. It isn’t new.
LM: No. People have self-published for a long time. There just didn’t used to be so many options. Ed Ruscha probably pioneered DIY.
It’s not new, but with technology intersecting with desktop publishing intersecting with print-on-demand intersecting with digital printing it is amazing what you can do now. We have yet to see a 3D printed book. We don’t know what the future holds.
Making a book is easier and more affordable. Digital printing through groups such as Conveyor Arts, Paper Chase Press and Editions One allow for smaller runs. Even Blurb has good options for customization. Bookmaking is technology driven just like other aspects of photography.
Photo: Andrew White/WIREDWIRED: What’s your favorite paper?
LM: I’m a big fan of the Japanese paper Kasadaka. It’s very lightweight and you can make very small runs of it. When you pick up one of those big bulky books but it’s really light, it’s that paper. Sadly, the plant that made it sourced trees from Fukushima area and so production was wiped out after the Tsunami. It’s the paper that we did Rinko Kawauchi‘s Illuminance on.
WIRED: And your favorite binding?
LM: Smyth. It is loose enough that it lays flat but not so loose that the boards are wobbly. it is important to be aware of that gutter. I still work with photographers who have a horror of putting an image across the gutter – to me its part of the form of the book. You can use it in a way that’s good. I’m a fan of full bleeds when it makes sense, but you must have the right binding.
WIRED: What are your focuses here at Aperture?
LM: I returned to Aperture in 2003, to get the book program back into production. We’d whittled down to just two books per season; four books per year. Now, we have ramped up to 15 or 16 books per season. Which I think is our capacity. That’s a lot in a very particular bandwidth of bookmaking. We have to be careful that we’re not competing with ourselves, that we’re not just pumping things out for the sake of putting them out. We’re expanding the types of books we’re doing. Broadening into education driven books for younger audiences. The world of people who are interested in storytelling in photography is widening. We’d really like to serve newer, younger audiences. And serve people who might not want to read “how-to” books but instead read into a photographer’s approach to image-making an image and telling a story.
WIRED: And then you have essay books.
LM: Each season, there’s always one text-driven essay book. Likewise a first book for an author or photographer. And. we’re starting to convert them into PDFs.
WIRED: How does 30 or 32 books a year compare to other publishers? What is your size?
LM: We’re a midsize independent publisher. Aperture’s book program is four or five people but we have the magazine too. We’ve a growing education program, then there’s fundraising, accounting and production. We not just a publisher. The organization is 30 people which is pretty big.
WIRED: But dwarfed by Tashcen and Phaidon for example.
LM: Yes. They make cook books and the like and that is a good way to fund the guilty pleasures; to fund photobooks because photobooks tend not to be viable in the ways that traditional publishers assess viability.
To be honest, we do think there are more mass market books that can offer a great critical perspective on photography and should be seen by tens of thousands of people. We published over 30,000 books in three different languages of The New York Times Magazine Photographs — that was a relatively mass market title for us. Then there’s something like the Diane Arbus that has been in print for 40 years and reprinted, I think at last count, 250,000. That’s nothing to Simon & Schuster or someone who is publishing Stephen King.
WIRED: What do you look for in potential book projects?
LM: First of all, someone here has to be excited about the project. That someone is usually director Chris Boot, myself, Denise Wolf, magazine editor Michael Famighetti, or special projects head Melissa Harris. We assess if we are the right people to bring the work to the world. Do we have the scope? The audience? Is it within our mission? We don’t exclude fashion or rock-and-roll but it has to be great photography that fits into the conversation of contemporary photography. There’s sometimes lovely work and it would be fun to push the boundaries but maybe it’s best as an installation?
We don’t want to pit photographers with similar bodies of work against each other. People come to us all the time with photographs of their children and say, “Look, you published Sally Mann!” It’s not that easy. There is no formula.
People still come to us and say, “I have $30,000 and a great book dummy.” It might be a decent dummy but we do have to find funding for every project. No-one can just come in with a check and think that they can be published by us. I won’t name names of publishers who do that. We try not to publish bad photographs.
WIRED: News flash! What else turns you off?
LM: People who don’t understand what they want to say or don’t have a concept. And I don’t mean concept in a complicated way. People who haven’t found their voice and they don’t know their message or who their audience is. As publisher or editor you have to very quickly imagine the book in its final form and in someone’s hands … and who that person is.
WIRED: Has the rise of self-publishing effected Aperture approach?
LM: We’re definitely impacted. In terms of self-publishing we are aware that people can do it better themselves. Sometimes people don’t need us and we shouldn’t get in the way if it’s not the right timing.
The biggest effect upon us has been the crumbling of the bigger distribution systems which is impacted in turn by the ability of people to self-publish. There’s a whole set of factors, from what Barnes & Noble and then Amazon did [to distribution] to digital publishing. There’s less of the clockwork systems of getting photobooks into the hands of people.
WIRED: Any glaring examples of timing?
LM: This summer, Aperture will put out the first bound book of the Sochi Project. I’ve had a conversation with Rob Hornstra for several years; the first couple of times we didn’t know what a Sochi Project/Aperture partnership would achieve. But now, after 5 years, we decided it would be good to do a hybrid of this crowdfunded model for a 456-page book. Rob and his colleague Arnold Van Bruggen can rely on us to do the heavy-lifting of production and we’re working with them to see the work travel in the United States. The idea is that together we will achieve greater visibility. They’ve created visibility themselves and have a core audience of subscribers. The goal is to break them beyond that and get their work to an even wider public.
WIRED: Has Rob said what he is going to do after 2014?
LM: I think he’s focusing on the now. He’s got a show coming up in Moscow. It’s very interesting watching the response from Moscow to the work which is quite critical.
Editor’s note: Since this interview was conducted, both Rob Hornstra and Arnold Van Bruggen were denied entry visas into Russia and a planned exhibition was cancelled. This means, effectively that the photographing and reporting elements of the project within Sochi and surrounding areas have ended. The project continues.
WIRED: Will Aperture be offering presales of the Sochi Project book then?
LM: Kickstarter can be amazing for a publisher. Crowdfunding may reach an audience you wouldn’t otherwise to make advanced sales.
Aperture just did its first ever Kickstarter for Richard Renaldi’s Touching Strangers. We set the goal at $10k and we made $80k. People keep asking what we’re going to do with the extra money but it just means we’ve sold more copies. So we’re going to make more books! We found it a really rewarding way to connect with people we ordinarily wouldn’t have. It’s definitely not right for every book but because Richard’s work was about strangers interacting, the idea that strangers could contribute to making his book fitted. Richard had already built his own audience on Instagram and his online presence and we helped give it an extra little oomph. If Aperture could internally have a system like Kickstarter and say, “Hey, sign up for this book,” it would be very valuable.
WIRED: What are your thoughts on photobook collectors?
LM: The market is growing. It’s one of those striated groups. There are fetishistic collectors who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for older books. They may not be interested in newer books. It’s likes buying stocks. There’s some people who want the blue chip, others want riskier investments so they’re buying up full copies, two copies, one stays shrink-wrapped.
It’s difficult to predict. There are books like The Holy Bible by Broomberg & Chanarin that released three months ago. The publisher MACK, strategically, only prints very small numbers of any run. The Holy Bible immediately sold out before they shipped to the US market. They immediately went back to press. The first print of The Holy Bible was being sold at the NYABF for $350. The second printing is $80. There’s a little bit of gaming going on, in ways that it wasn’t in the past.
WIRED: Keeping new releases rare by virtue of small print runs?
LM: Yes. I remember during my early days at Aperture, we did a facsimile called Kamaitachi by Eikoh Hosoe. The publisher at the time Michael Hoffman said there was no way to do it because it was just too expensive. You couldn’t make many copies and so we didn’t do that book for a long time and sadly Michael passed away before we could. When I returned to Aperture, I said we’d make it happen. We made 500 copies in the English language that started out at $250 a copy and went up subsequently. It sold out quickly. It was the first time I realized the potential for making something really deluxe for which there would be a collectors market.
WIRED: How deluxe does Aperture get?
LM: Last year, for our 60th anniversary, I commissioned 10 artists to take an older Aperture title and to respond to it. Aperture Remix asked each to intervene in some way and to make something new in response to the work. It was inspired by Marcus Schaden’s Marks Of Honour; marking up a book as a way of paying homage.
We worked with great artists. Vik Muniz took the first editions of Edward Weston’s The Daybooks. Vik makes collages of photos from magazines, so he cut pieces of The Daybooks so it looked like a mouse had chewed through them. We built a draw with a glass pane that was both something that you could hang on the wall and see through layers of pages, but you could also slide out the glass and turn the pages when needed. Then the prints that came with it that were pages from the book rephotographed and that went for $25,000. It was a book and a print. That was the most high end we’ve done. The books we did in that Aperture Remix were in editions of 5. Most had prints that accompanied them.
We worked with Doug Rickard who took copies of Stephen Shore‘s Uncommon Places and sourced photographs and postcards that were line with the aesthetics and scenes that Shore was sought out. Shore was inspired by postcards of that time, so we made books that took parts of Shore’s Uncommon Places and basically made a new book that wove together Doug’s work with Shore’s work.
Photo: Andrew White/WIREDWIRED: I’m encouraged that you turn down projects even if a photographer has $30,000 in their pocket. Many publishers don’t. It seems, at this point, photographers almost expect to be asked to bring a large amount of money to the table?
LM: Bringing money to a big publisher is not a very good business model. In fact you can make more if you self-publish because you’re not selling through a third party to a vendor that’s going to want a fifty percent discount. It’s a law of diminishing returns when you go through that many people to get a book out. It’s a tough business and I think people have an awareness of needing to be able to put energy into the fundraising aspect of the publishing.
WIRED: Any meaningful geographical differences between regions in photo book making.
LM: With the Japanese, it’s a historical touchstone with the 60s and 70s. At that time, the Provoke Era was trying to recreate the way we interact with photographs. Any and all boundaries were being pushed — bindings you had to unfold and unpack. The craftsmanship of making was part of the culture. You saw some really remarkable books AS art objects.
The Dutch are more utilitarian in their approach. Part of the theory is that their graphic design industry and the photography industry at a national level were merged for a long time, so there was a lot of conversation between product and graphic designers and photographers, and as such a willingness to take risks with materials with a slightly more explosive approach to design.
WIRED: Newsprint. Fun? Supplementary? Temporary fad? Essential?
LM: Obviously newsprint is about injecting an immediacy into what can sometimes be a very hyper-produced or over-produced world of bookmaking. Newspapers are a nice way of binding words and images. It has a particular set of connotations and some people use it for no reason at all. It is a trend. As is the use of uncoated paper, just now.
WIRED: It can’t be a collectors game though. It will yellow and wilt.
LM: I’m interested to see what happens to books and publications on newsprint or uncoated paper. They won’t be archival. Or perhaps someone will design a plastic airtight cover to keep these things pristine and pull them out decades later and sell them for tons? In the short term, newsprint is fun – it can be really cool.
The Photobook Review is on newsprint. We’re just putting to bed the fifth edition which includes a section on book production and materials and mentions newsprint. The whole spectrum is wide open. You can reproduce work on a photocopy machine or you can print work in deluxe objects. Some people take that too far. I don’t think you should have to sell your book with its own coffee table to support it!
WIRED: Who’s been producing recently?
LM: I think Rob and Arnold with The Sochi Project have been good practitioners. They’ve made newspapers, postcards, sketchbooks, weird accordion fold-outs, billboards made from 8×10 unbound paper. It’s been about little incremental projects and they’ve found the right form for each. That’s due in large part to their collaboration with designers Kummer and Herrman.
Stephen Gill is an amazing book-maker and his forms can be pretty pure and straightforward. He uses details like great silk screening on the covers.
WIRED: Favorite photo book?
LM: My decision is usually based on what is in my peripheral view at a given time. Takuma Nakahira‘s For A Language To Come comes to mind. This may be self-serving, but I was very pleased with our Kamaitachi facsimile. I love the original so maybe that’s a cheat.
I also love the Daido Moriyama TKY Printing Show that we did. It was the first time we did a performance piece in the gallery with Ivan Vartanian of Goliga. We put up a collection of photo based images (front and back) — each one a gatefold. Each visitor was given a card to checking-off the 20 images on the wall they each wanted; they had to select and sequence images and then hand their card to the work-station which would assemble a books with its own silkscreened cover. Ivan was sat in the middle printing off pages.
I need to not think of a Japanese photobook! I have a weird book called How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb. It’s a one-color terribly-designed book, but I don’t know if it was done facetiously as an archive project. There’s very little information.
WIRED: And finally, how’s the busy Fall season going for you? All reports were that the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF) was overwhelming.
LM: The NYABF is best to do in small doses. You have to be judicious in what you really engage with. There’s a lot of events this time of year. Unseen in Amsterdam which has an installation of Offprint. Unseen is the Dutch equivalent of the NYABF. Then Paris Photo, also with Offprint and other spin off events. And the Kassel Fotobookfestival in October.
A lot of smaller publishers and artists are pegging launches to these events, which makes sense. If you’re a small publisher and you don’t have distribution, they are a great way to make direct contact with an audience. Established structures of distribution get books widely seen but you get smaller and smaller returns. A direct sale is very good, so when Aperture is working with limited edition books, we focus on these fairs too.
WIRED: Actually meeting people! Is it damaging to the human spirit if one only looks at photographs on the internet?
LM: I don’t think it is damaging, I think it is an impoverished experience.
