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July 3, 2010
Sean O'Hagan has an article in The Guardian on self-publishing by photographers with the democratization of publishing technology. With a decent PC and the right desktop publishing software, you can create a printer-ready book in digital form. Professional layout software such as Adobe's Indesign is relatively expensive though.
O'Hagan says that there are two touchstones for the self-published photography book the artist's book, of which Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) is a famous and highly influential example, and the fanzine, a labour of love and obsession that came of age with the punk movement of the late 1970s and has spread to embrace every aspect of popular culture, photography included.
Ruscha, who made 16 artist's books between 1963 and 1978, said later: "When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method; it was an obsolete, archaic form of communication … I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing.Today, though....zine culture seems to be the prime driving force behind the self-published photography book, with many being no more than pamphlets. Whether making an artist's book or a zine, self-publishing is primarily to do with keeping control of your creative vision (the book doesn't just illustrate the art, it is the art) and being able to operate outside the often prohibitively costly mainstream publishing houses. Ironically, the self-published book, which is produced in such limited editions, often becomes a collector's item, and the price rises accordingly.
He adds that In the continuing digital age, then, the future of the DIY photobook seems assured for perhaps the same reasons that independent record labels currently continue to thrive as major labels falter.
The message seems to be that small is not only beautiful, it's also cost-effective and creatively liberating. In today's fragmented pop culture, some of the most interesting and challenging developments still happen on the margins, where the mainstream fears to tread----self-publishing.
However, if like me, you start off with no experience with design, or with fonts, file formats, scanning, color correction, reproduction requirements of various printers, you have set yourself a gigantic task to master Indesign. It does seems counter-productive to learn all you would need to know about the program to just do one book. Self-publishing has a strong do-it-yourself tradition, but sometimes it’s quite a bit smarter to get somebody else to do-it-themselves.
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