Photobooks! How do you do it?

[Archiver]

Godfrey has long said that he makes photo books, get them an ISBN, and submits them to the Library of Congress. High quality photobooks give me a lot of pleasure, and seeing images in a large printed format changes one's perspective on them. I have many books by Elliott Erwitt, Cartier Bresson and Mary Ellen Mark, and I particularly enjoy Daido Moriyama's Memories of a Dog because it is a mixture of his photography, and his written musings about photography, life, and memory.

So now I'd like to know how you folk create photobooks. Do you start with a theme, like a family holiday or wedding? Do you make a 'best of 2014' compilation? Do you make themed collections, like your best street work or portraits? What do you do with your photobooks? How many do you print? Do you ever sell them?

My idea is to print a high quality photobook that has my best work, along with informational captions about the subjects, the times and circumstances under which they were taken, and the gear I used. I'd like to be able to give it to family and friends, and like Godfrey, submit it to local and national libraries. The same could be done with my best paid work, taken over course of a few years at at a time, or my complete working career to date.

 

[Godfrey]

Regards the contents of the book, well, I'm not much help there... I usually have an idea for what photos fit together, and how, and how much text and technical detail might be apropos, and spend several months fighting with the idea until something gels nicely.

I've used Blurb.com the past two or three books I put together. They have a good book making app and, I believe, a plug-in for Lightroom. I haven't done it in a while, I'm way overdue. Sometimes I list the books I make for sale on my blurb page, other times not. I usually end up printing any book at least three times: a preliminary proof, a near-final proof, and the final version.

The book I made in 2012 for a book making class and exhibition is still available from Blurb:
Ways Together by Godfrey DiGiorgi | Blurb Books
That one I sold about 125 copies of, and very occasionally another still gets ordered. 🙂

To me, a book means about 50 to 100 prints. I like smallish books rather than the big coffee table sized ones ... I prefer the book to be somewhat intimately handleable.

And remember: A copyrighted publication filed with the Library of Congress does not have to be a book, per se. It can be a magazine or a folio (a loose-bound collection of themed photos bound in a cover and copyrighted as a work). There are print-on-demand magazine houses, can't remember the last I used. Folios you can do all the work and production at home, if you like that sort of thing; I've done about ten folios, even sold a few over the years. I've done folios with as few as eight photos and as many as twenty-five.

Hope that helps a little.

G

 

[Brambling]

I personally liked the GettyImages digest formats, which I received as a prize at one of the Internet competitions.
This, of course, is not an independent work of art, but thanks to them I received some general idea of directions and trends.
Large format photo books are already similar to a playboy magazine - you can tear out pages from there and hang them on the wall in the garage)))

But one thing is clearly clear to me - a photograph in your hands or on a wall, in a magazine or photo book has a completely different sound than in a phone or on a website.