Towards the end of #phonar 2011, we heard from contributor Pete Brook about his successfully crowdfunded project ‘Prison Photography on the Road‘. Pete spoke not only about the project and his time on the road, but on the kickstarter platform he used to crowdfund the project.

Just this weekend Pete condensed his thoughts into an insightful post titled ‘The Etiquette of Crowdfunding, A Recipients View‘ which can be found at this link. The full post is an essential read fro anyone with even a casual interest in the crowdfunding platform but bellow are 9 of Pete’s tips for potential ‘crowdfundees’ which are expanded on in the post.

1. Make a blooming good video.

2. Search out honest advice.

3. Incentives should be personal, imaginative, exclusive and offer potential funders a wide array of funding levels.

4. Have a really strong set of existing networks.

5. Be prepared to promote the crap out of it.

6. Involve the community.

7. Be realistic about the amount of time and energy it will take to deliver the incentives.

8. Treat your funders like royalty.

9. Only ever do one Kickstarter.

Also of interest: Joerg Colberg – ‘Crowdfunding is not a . . . → Read More: Pete Brook – Prison Photography and the Etiquette of Crowdfunding]]>

Towards the end of #phonar 2011, we heard from contributor Pete Brook about his successfully crowdfunded project ‘Prison Photography on the Road‘. Pete spoke not only about the project and his time on the road, but on the kickstarter platform he used to crowdfund the project.

Just this weekend Pete condensed his thoughts into an insightful post titled ‘The Etiquette of Crowdfunding, A Recipients View‘ which can be found at this link. The full post is an essential read fro anyone with even a casual interest in the crowdfunding platform but bellow are 9 of Pete’s tips for potential ‘crowdfundees’ which are expanded on in the post.

1. Make a blooming good video.

2. Search out honest advice.

3. Incentives should be personal, imaginative, exclusive and offer potential funders a wide array of funding levels.

4. Have a really strong set of existing networks.

5. Be prepared to promote the crap out of it.

6. Involve the community.

7. Be realistic about the amount of time and energy it will take to deliver the incentives.

8. Treat your funders like royalty.

9. Only ever do one Kickstarter.

Also of interest: Joerg Colberg – ‘Crowdfunding is not a Cash Cow’

Thank you very much for being one of the 34,298 people to date who have made this second iteration of #phonar such a success. We’ve had a whale of a time ourselves and learnt a great deal along the way from your feedback, which will go towards #phonar2012 (the Olympic Phonar).

Meanwhile our attending class of students will be working on their degree exit-projects, some of which will be the work begun alongside yours here, others will do something entirely new and we hope you’ll drop by to see how it shapes up. Don’t forget to keep us and the rest of the #phonar community in touch with how your projects evolve too. We’ll continue to use the phonar hashtag on twitter which is one way for us to keep in touch, another is to drop by our next Open class which starts in January and is called Picturing the Body (#picbod). Yet another way is to come by the Photo Book Club or even better organise an old fashioned analogue meet-up yourself with plenty of tea and booklets.

So until we tweet again, thank you for a great 2011 , it was emotional and our very best wishes for a 2012 of . . . → Read More: #phonar 2011; Thank You]]>

Thank you very much for being one of the 34,298 people to date who have made this second iteration of #phonar such a success. We’ve had a whale of a time ourselves and learnt a great deal along the way from your feedback, which will go towards #phonar2012 (the Olympic Phonar).

Meanwhile our attending class of students will be working on their degree exit-projects, some of which will be the work begun alongside yours here, others will do something entirely new and we hope you’ll drop by to see how it shapes up. Don’t forget to keep us and the rest of the #phonar community in touch with how your projects evolve too. We’ll continue to use the phonar hashtag on twitter which is one way for us to keep in touch, another is to drop by our next Open class which starts in January and is called Picturing the Body (#picbod). Yet another way is to come by the Photo Book Club or even better organise an old fashioned analogue meet-up yourself with plenty of tea and booklets.

So until we tweet again, thank you for a great 2011 , it was emotional and our very best wishes for a 2012 of Olympic proportions.

- Jonathan and Matt.

ps. If you’d like to receive a weekly digest of next term’s #picbod sessions, the related content, bonus materials and exclusive offers then you’ll need to sign up here.

The #phonar credit roll:

Click this link, or the image above to register for #picbod 2012

We will be more involved with the Photo Book Club in #picbod 2012 as we discuss the physical nature of books and look to hold several Photo Book Club ‘Meet-ups’.

In the meantime, for those of you who have enjoyed the Friends of #phonar book list, and would like to learn more about photobooks, head on over to www.photobookclub.org

- Matt

We will also be highlighting #phonar projects to keep your eyes on as they progress and grow into larger trans-media artefacts. The first in this series is called 'The Via Laietana Project' and has been produced by remote student Anna Marques I Banque.

Multimedia journalist and producer Tim Matsui spent 7 days with #phonar contributor Pete Brook during the ‘Prison Photography on the Road’ trip that Pete talked about here. In the video Tim follows Pete as he speaks with prisoners and explains his reasons for getting out from behind the desk and hitting . . . → Read More: Video – Pete Brook: Prison Photography on the Road]]>

Multimedia journalist and producer Tim Matsui spent 7 days with #phonar contributor Pete Brook during the ‘Prison Photography on the Road’ trip that Pete talked about here.
In the video Tim follows Pete as he speaks with prisoners and explains his reasons for getting out from behind the desk and hitting the road.

The #phonar screening took place this week in Coventry to showcase the projects students had embarked upon over the class, but this isn't the end of #phonar, and we will have more content uploaded through Christmas.

We will also be highlighting #phonar projects to keep your eyes on as they progress and grow into larger trans-media artefacts. The first in this series is called 'The Via Laietana Project' and has been produced by remote student Anna Marques I Banque.

A great video found over on the duckrabbit blog with Walter Murch talking sound. The post can be found below or by clicking here.

“Duckrabbit will tell you sound matters. A lot. And you need to listen to voices like that.

Walter Murch will tell you exactly the same. But, strangely, it will sound much better coming from him.

Many of you will know of Walter, but if you dont you’re in for a treat. I think it would be fair to say he’s a polymath. Want a good read for christmas? Get a copy of The Conversations for a wander through film editing, sound design and the arts in general. Its an enlightening book.

But if you do nothing else, at least listen to the man himself giving some insight into . . . → Read More: Featured Post: Sound judgment from Duckrabbit]]>

A great video found over on the duckrabbit blog with Walter Murch talking sound. The post can be found below or by clicking here.

“Duckrabbit will tell you sound matters. A lot. And you need to listen to voices like that.

Walter Murch will tell you exactly the same. But, strangely, it will sound much better coming from him.

Many of you will know of Walter, but if you dont you’re in for a treat. I think it would be fair to say he’s a polymath. Want a good read for christmas? Get a copy of The Conversations for a wander through film editing, sound design and the arts in general. Its an enlightening book.

But if you do nothing else, at least listen to the man himself giving some insight into his craft.”

Phonar contributor Jon Levy talks about some key issues in photography at the moment in the videos below discussing:

‘Getting your work published’ ‘Technology as a means to an end’ ‘Photojournalism as art’ ‘Photography competitions’ ‘Intent’

Getting your work published from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Technology as a means to an end from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Photojournalism as art from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Jon Levy on photography competitions from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Jon Levy on Intent from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

All videos produced and owned by the Open College of . . . → Read More: Jon Levy talks about getting work published, competitions, technology and more…]]>

Phonar contributor Jon Levy talks about some key issues in photography at the moment in the videos below discussing:

‘Getting your work published’
‘Technology as a means to an end’
‘Photojournalism as art’
‘Photography competitions’
‘Intent’

Getting your work published from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Technology as a means to an end from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Photojournalism as art from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Jon Levy on photography competitions from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Jon Levy on Intent from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

All videos produced and owned by the Open College of the Arts

Following on from Wayne Ford’s list of “Photography and Narrative“ books to explore, we are asking some of the worlds most inspirational photographic practitioners, thinkers, authors and publishers to ask them for a book nomination that

“is notable/ inspiring/ seminal/ provocative, in it’s narrative structure/approach or perhaps in it’s ‘discussion’ of narrative”

We hope you’ll enjoy the Friends of Phonar Photobook list as much as we have and find it a valuable and inspirational resource, keep coming back as it grows, if there’s anyone you’d like to see on there then please tell them about it and drop us a line too.

Phonar 2011 was brought to you by Jonathan Worth @jonathan_worth (Ship’s Captain), Matt Johnston @mjohnstonmedia (Chief Engineer), Paul Adkins (Sound Engineer) and Jonathan Shaw @time_motion (Harbour Master).

Very special thanks go out to the #phonar crew:

Wayne Ford. For his enthusiasm, support, and seemingly inexhaustible Photobook knowledge.

David Campbell For his piloting skills and academic freight.

Fred Ritchin, Stephen Mayes and Cory Doctorow for their inspiration and generous support.

Jon Levy and the FOTO8 crew, for their patience, generosity and enthusiasm

Fred Ritchin, Ben White, Richard Stacy, Mike Lusmore, Pete Brook, Travis Shaffer and Adam Hopkins for their inspiring lectures and continued engagement.

Michael David Murphy for allowing us to transform his Unphotographable posts.

John . . . → Read More: Alec Soth, Andy Adams, Cory Doctorow, David Campbell, David Gray, Edmund Clark, Elinor Carucci, Geoff Dyer, Gilles Peress and MANY MORE … THE FRIENDS OF PHONAR BOOK LIST]]>

Following on from Wayne Ford’s list of “Photography and Narrative“ books to explore, we are asking some of the worlds most inspirational photographic practitioners, thinkers, authors and publishers to ask them for a book nomination that

“is notable/ inspiring/ seminal/ provocative, in it’s narrative structure/approach or perhaps in it’s ‘discussion’ of narrative”

We hope you’ll enjoy the Friends of Phonar Photobook list as much as we have and find it a valuable and inspirational resource, keep coming back as it grows, if there’s anyone you’d like to see on there then please tell them about it and drop us a line too.

Phonar 2011 was brought to you by Jonathan Worth @jonathan_worth (Ship’s Captain), Matt Johnston @mjohnstonmedia (Chief Engineer), Paul Adkins (Sound Engineer) and Jonathan Shaw @time_motion (Harbour Master).

Very special thanks go out to the #phonar crew:

Wayne Ford. For his enthusiasm, support, and seemingly inexhaustible Photobook knowledge.

David Campbell For his piloting skills and academic freight.

Fred Ritchin, Stephen Mayes and Cory Doctorow for their inspiration and generous support.

Jon Levy and the FOTO8 crew, for their patience, generosity and enthusiasm

Fred Ritchin, Ben White, Richard Stacy, Mike Lusmore, Pete Brook, Travis Shaffer and Adam Hopkins for their inspiring lectures and continued engagement.

Michael David Murphy for allowing us to transform his Unphotographable posts.

John Powell for his support and direction regarding behavioural economics.

It’s nearly impossible to thank all of the people who contributed one way or another to phonar over the ten weeks, as I write this over 32,719 people have dropped by the class this term, up from 700 in 2010.  It’s a terrifying thing, to have that many people looking over our shoulders and Matt and I remain very nervous about it. However we’ve both been corrected, enlightened, inspired and supported in equal measure by a community of learner-practitioners that we’re grateful to consider ourselves a be part of.

To that end …. we’re going to do another Open Class in the New Year.

This will fall midway through the second year for our BA students and as such is different in pitch to phonar. We still aim to address complex issues by chipping away at them through the weekly tasks, and we still ultimately value the learning process over a final product, however “Picturing the Body” (#picbod) ends in an exhibition and as such we place much greater emphasis on artisanal craftsmanship.

So there’ll be introductions to hand-made book making, lots of arcane wet darkroom process and the opportunity for the online participant to have their work printed by our undergraduate specialists. There’ll be more lectures, more interviews, more guest contributors, more of PhotoBookClub and we’re very excited to announce the launch of our Open-to-all Postgraduate Photography Course.

If you would like to head straight to one of our contributors recommendations, click on their name to jump down

Alec Soth
Andy Adams
Cory Doctorow
Daniel Meadows
David Campbell
Edmund Clark
Elinor Carucci
Elly Clarke
Fred Ritchin
Geoff Dyer
Gilles Peress
Grant Scott
Harry Hardie
Jeff Brouws
Joel Meyerowitz
Jörg Colberg
John Edwin Mason
Jonathan Shaw
Jonathan Worth
Ken Schles
Larissa Leclair
Ludwig Haskins
Lynn Broadbent
Matt Johnston
Michael Hallett
Rt Hon. Michael Gove
Miki Johnson
Mikko Takkunen
Nathalie Belayche
Peter Dench
Pete Brook
Sean O’Hagan
Simon Roberts
Stephen Mayes
Steve Pyke
Todd Hido
Wayne Ford

Alec Soth – Photographer

Update 09/12/2011
“As for narrative photobooks, well, this is a topic of enormous interest to me. There are so many books to be discussed. But the narrative book of the year (and for me the book of the year generally) is A Criminal Investigation by Watabe Yukichi. Such a great book.”
Watabe Yukichi
A Criminal Investigation

Suite vénitienne
Sophie Calle

Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain des Prés
Ed van der Elsken

Andy Adams – Editor and Publisher, FlakPhoto.com

Wisconsin Death Trip
Michael Lesy
What I find most fascinating is the false narrative / meaning the book creates – that photographer Charles van Schaick’s photographs document the psychotic people of a 19th century Wisconsin town. In fact, author Michael Lesy constructed a kind of mash-up narrative by assembling (remixing?) vintage photos with tragic newspaper clippings of the day that had no direct relationship to one another. Before I’d even seen a copy of the book, I was hearing word of mouth recommendations about the spooky stories it told. The book went on to several reprints and spawned a film of the same name. More here.
I spent four years working in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s photo archive (where the Van Schaick collection is housed), and published a Flickr set of photographs from which the book is drawn a few years ago. You can see them at this link, if you’re interested.

Cory Doctorow – SciFi Writer

Dead Air
Iain Banks
I think it’s the first post-mobile-phone thriller. My review

Daniel Meadows – Photographer and Documentarist

Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge
Rebecca Solnit
Muybridge is my favourite photographer.  He achieved something that only a few photographers have managed: he changed forever (and irreversibly) the way we see.
This is a great book which deals with photography (and a photographer) whilst also managing to include the annihilation of space and time.  It’s a great story too.  Adventure, skullduggery, sex, riches, murder, intrigue, courtroom drama… it has all kinds of weirdness too.

David Campbell – Author

Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans
Robert Frank, Sarah Greenough (ed)

The Mexican Suitcase, 2 volumes
Cynthia Young (ed)

Susan Meisalas: In History
Caroline Brothers, Edmundo Desnoes, Kristen Lubben, and Susan Meiselas

Edmund Clark - Photographer

Afghanistan: Chronotopia
Simon Norfolk
For the way Norfolk introduces the idea of historical narrative or ‘The
Museum of the Archeology of War’ through the layers of events or time
defined by the lyrical destruction in his images.

Fig
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
A splendid visual conceit exploring the dark themes of colonialism,
acquisition, ownership, classification and objectivisation through the
whimsical narrative of a bizarre photographic collection.

The Americans
Robert Frank
The narrative of a nation through the ‘classic’ American experience of the
road trip.

Elinor Carucci – Photographer

Update 10/12/2011
“I would like to add:
The Contact Sheet
Steve Crist

Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography
Susan Bright

Mother Exposed
Bertha Alyce

2010 choices
Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lihiri

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Nan Goldin

Elly Clarke – Photographer

If one thing matters, everything matters
Wolfgang Tillmans

Fred Ritchin – Writer and Editor

Borges y Yo (Borges and I)
Jorge Luis Borges (incl in ‘Maker’)
The extraordinary short story by Sr. Borges about him and him

Las Babas del Diablo (The Devil’s Spittle)
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar’s short story about photography, literature and life, with shifting pronouns, translated as “Blow-Up” for the Antonioni movie that it did and did not inspire


Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems)
Raymond Queneau
The simplest and most beautiful of hypertext poems, from 1961

Geoff Dyer - Author

Under a Grudging Sun
Alex Webb

Requiem (Cape)
Horst Faas/Tim Page (eds)
Obviously this one  not arranged by  a photographer but worth paying some  attention to the way editors/curators can give narrative shape and coherence to a disparate body of work

Gilles Peress – Photographer

Reperages
Alain Resnais

Grant Scott - Photographer, Editor – Professional Photographer Magazine

Chronicles: Volume One
Bob Dylan
Words as pictures, memories and impressions of a moment in time. Non linear storytelling of the highest form. Fractured and fragmental like the best photo story. This is a photo book that doesn’t need photos to inspire.

Harry Hardie - Curator, HOST Gallery

Kitintale
Yann Gross
A great example of where photo book publishing is exciting right now – a small print run, on newspaper, and beautifully packaged. Not only is this a collectible book from an incredibly interesting rising star of documentary-based work, but it tells a fantastic, yet humble story.

Jeff Brouws – Photographer

Update 10/12/2011
Oxbow Archive
Joel Sternfeld

Wendover: The Half Life of History
Mark Klett


A
Gregory Halpburn

2010 Choices
Invisible City
Ken Schles

The New Europe
Paul Graham

The Valley
Larry Sultan

Pictures from home
Larry Sultan

Joel Meyerowitz – Photographer

The Americans
Robert Frank

Looking at Photographs
John Szarkowski

Jörg Colberg – Founder and Editor – Conscientious, Writer and Photographer

The Map (Chizu)
Kikuji Kawada
My choice would be Kikuji Kawada’s ‘The Map (Chizu)’ for reasons that are almost impossible to explain, I tried it here

John Edwin Mason – Historian and Photographer

American Photographs,  Museum of Modern Art, 1938
Walker Evans
Very probably the most influential of all photo books.  Demonstrated that photographic narrative can be carried along by the sequencing of images and that meaning (elusive though it may be) can be produced by their cumulative weight.  Can also be read as a road trip (it was actually the work of several).

The Americans
Robert Frank
The impact of Walker Evans’ American Photographs can be felt on every page.  Not coincidentally, Evans helped to secure the Guggenheim that put Frank on the road across America.

South Africa:  The Structure of Things Then
David Goldblatt
Another of Evans’ photographic off-spring.  As in American Photographs, buildings outnumber people — decidedly so, in Goldblatt’s case.  An implied, although not actual, road trip, through what was then the land of apartheid.  The built environment and the sequence in which it is seen reveals the complexity of the nation’s character.

Paterson
George A Tice
Tice does for a small industrial city, in New Jersey, what Evans and Goldblatt did for entire countries.  Carefully sequenced, plainspoken, large-format images led viewers through and into the city.  Buildings dominate, but people and the natural environment insist on being part of this story of grit and endurance.

JazzLife
William Claxton
The road trip that Robert Frank would have made if he’d been in love with jazz and the people that play it.  A long, rich voyage of discovery, with photographic sequencing that evokes the rhythms of jazz.

House of Bondage
Ernest Cole
Cole, who, despite the name, was African, takes viewers on a journey into day-to-day reality of a South Africa shaped by apartheid.  Anger informs, but never overwhelms, the images and text.  The impact of the photos makes the words almost superfluous.

The Sound I Saw
Roy DeCarava
DeCarava first invites viewers to share his vision and sensibility before leading them outward into an exploration of African-American life in New York, in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  His photos convey meaning and emotion that is beyond words, much like the music — jazz — that informs DeCarava’s way of seeing.

Moving Spirit:  Spirituality in South Africa
Paul Weinberg
Another inward journey that eventually leads outward.  Another implied, though not actual, road trip.  An examination of the many, changing facets of South African spirituality — traditional, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu.  A photographic style developed during the height of the struggle against apartheid turns to contemplative subjects with great effect.

Seconds of My Life
Jamel Shabazz
An exuberant, extraverted engagement with African-American popular culture in the post-Civil Rights era.  Shabazz finds meaning in the faces, clothes, and postures of the men and women, boys and girls that he encounters, mostly on the street.  Narrative is implied as styles and backgrounds change.

Jonathan Shaw – Photographer

Broken Screen, Expanding The Image Breaking the Narrative – 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken
Noel Daniel

Jonathan Worth – Photographer

I found this as hard as most people, and so chose the two books who’s narratives have had the most profoundly positive effects on me at different points in my career. Steve Pyke’s book changed the way I saw things could be done. Fred Ritchin’s book changed the way I think.
I could read the Sky
Steve Pyke

After Photography
Fred Ritchin

Ken Schles - Photographer

Update 18/12/2011
Here are 4 more books for the #phonar book list. I’ve picked these today because I’m feeling a bit sentimental. Tomorrow I’d maybe pick four others.
New York Is
Robert Frank and Gilbert Millstein
NYTimes

Here is a book that is a favorite of mine because 1. I stumbled upon it. 2. It has some great images and an interesting backstory. 3. It’s rare as hell. 4. It was a kind of throw-away, but not and was and wasn’t, and for me certainly isn’t 5. I like it. 6. My copy is beat to shit and so what- except that when I look at it I have to treat it as carefully as a dead sea scroll. 7. It’s got images by Robert Frank. And 8. It’s got images by Robert Frank that not many people have ever seen or if they did they didn’t know they were “Robert Frank’s” when they saw them and most of those people are probably dead by now anyway.

This book is a compilation of a series of ads run in the NY Times made in the mid to late 1950′s —images created about the same time as The Americans. This title is not on the list of Frank books to be reissued by Steidl and will likely remain an extreme rarity. It was made as a give away to advertisers who advertised in the New York Times. These are classic Frank images. In some Frank inserted family and friends in the pictures and used them as “models.” There is a picture of Frank’s kids out in Central Park with Rudy Burkhardt and his family cavorting together. I found the book in a warehouse bookshop in Detroit a few weeks after I had seen a pristine copy for the very first time at a photography fair in Los Angeles being sold by Bondi Books from Japan.

Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay
Mary Ellen Mark

I first saw this book by Mary Ellen Mark when a review copy of it came to the Strand Book Store where I was working. I must have been 20 at the time (or 19? it was an advance copy after all). It was making the rounds among the people who worked at the store and was seen as quite risqué among the staff drag queens. Trannie prostitutes in full color doing their thing and living their lives in an exotic forbidden far away place with an extreme color palette. I hadn’t really seen many photography books up until then and this wasn’t quite National Geographic or Henri Cartier Bresson. Was it art or voyeurism? And the color. Mama-mia! Pow. It left me with a lot of questions and even more curious about the possibilities of photography. A year and a half later I was working for Gilles Peress, Mary Ellen’s ex-boy friend. But that’s another more complicated story.

Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts = People of the 20th century
August Sander (Link to 2002 English reprint)

I’ve got this copy of the “Menschen” of the 20th Century by August Sander. Another book I fell in love with it at the Strand book store when I worked there. I think I paid a half week’s salary for it. Every week we’d get paid in cash in an envelope and then we proceeded to line up with books we’d want to purchase back from the store. We’d show them to a store manager and they’d proclaim a discounted price to you (you never quite knew how substantial the discount might be, but they knew every book and then tell you what you could have it for after duly examining it and turning it in their hands. Most time they’d just slap it down on the counter and declare a price adding it up on a clunking electrical adding machine, sharpened pencil tucked behind their ear). I truly was working for the company store. I originally wanted the english version, which had a very different text by different authors, and for that it was considered a different book, but by the time I came around to coughing up the dough, the english language version was out of print. I didn’t care I couldn’t read this book. And still haven’t and can’t. I’ve seen many versions of his work now, and I remember well the revered and revealing manner in which Lisette Model talked about Sander’s work in her slide show lecture. I have a few of these images as prints on my wall and never tire of rediscovering images I love in the book or discovering some anew. A lost world of aliens that lived in a different world and in a different time, but are as real and present as my children playing in the next room.

Blaise Cendras, La Banlieue de Paris
Robert Doisneau

‘Doisneau’s best book, characteristically humane, captured the postwar suburbs of Paris just before they changed beyond recognition from spirited working-class neighbourhoods to the urban wasteland that architects and planners created from the 1960s onwards.’ [Parr/Badger I, 201]. (From Sims Reed website)

This is a book I don’t have and would love to own. You see, there is still something to live for.

 

2010 Choices

Telex Iran
Giles Peress
In terms of structure and narrative approach, the one that comes foremost to my mind this cold December morning is Gilles Peress and his book Telex Iran, or here the English title, Iranian Telexes.
I think it was a radical break to the traditional photobook structure in that it, at first glance, looks like a traditional photojournalist take on an “exotic” place of conflict in the world. The images are strong in that B&W photojournalistic tradition, the heroic western (European) male gaze looking at an inscrutable area of conflict (in this case the Iranian Revolution). But what turns this narrative on it’s head is the inclusion of a running dialog of telexes, those primitive means of communication between faraway places before the advent of the internet. Telexes were short and terse teletype communiqués. The images are personal, visceral and present and describe a whole world that is chaotic, dangerous, inscrutable, palpable, poetic. This, in the the greatest tradition of Magnum photography, that started with H-C Bresson and worked its way down to Philip Jones Griffith. But the telexes subvert the experience of the images and describe a world unseen, one that we begin to recognize all too clearly, on the way media works in the west (or I should say did work). About deadlines and office chatter, holiday plans and the feeble attention spans of readers of truncated news cycles. This is where the book transcends the traditional oeuvre, and brings it to a new place beyond the straight narrative of the so called “objective” journalist and becomes a searing commentary on the whole structure and practice of news gathering, its co-option and self-defeating attachment to commercial interests and the media’s portrayal of geopolitics. And so simply and elegantly and seductively done. Images alone could not have done this and text could not either. For me it was a turning point in understanding the narrative possibilities of the photobook. For me it opened new ways to see and understand, not only the photobook, but ways to look and see and understand the world.

Larissa Leclair – Photography writer, curator and collector

Intensive Care
Andrea Stultiens
(third book down – also click on the link to look through the book)

Thinner Air
John Mann

Ludwig Haskins – Photographer

Southern Frontiers’ – A Journey across the Roman Empire
Don McCullin
This is a sublime photo book!

Cowboy Kate
Sam Haskins
The first creative photobook to use pure visual narrative was my father’s ‘Cowboy Kate’ in 1964. He never used a story (however flimsy) in a book again – just themes. It’s certainly one of the reasons why ‘Kate’ was such a huge success.

Lynn Broadbent – Fellowship Director, Royal Society of Arts, USA

Animal’s People
Indra Sinha
Indra Sinha’s novel ”Animal’s People” which is set in post Union-Carbide Bhopal.  This book has stuck with me for years.

Matt Johnston – Photographer

Readymades
Jeff Brouws
More for the attention to detail in sequencing of images and chapters than the traditional narrative story

Niagara
Alec Soth

Michael Hallett – Photographer and Chairman, Distinctions Advisory Board, Royal Photographic Society

The Americans
Robert Frank
There is really only one book that fits most perfectly into your request and it has to be Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’. I came across it when i was a young visiting professor at Rochester, NY. A year or so ago I wrote a piece for the RPS journal. Any person involved with narrative has to know this book backwards.

Rt Hon. Michael Gove -  Secretary of State for Education

Lost Victorian Britain
Gavin Stamp

Miki Johnson – Writer, Editor and Photography Consultant

Ed Kashi
Three
This is a multimedia piece I put together for Ed Kashi’s book, THREE, in which images from his 30 years as a top documentary photographer are combined into triptychs that consciously abandon the idea of context or traditional narrative. I like this book because it reminds us all that no matter how long you’ve been working or how tired you are of looking at your own stuff, you can always find a new way to see.

Ed Kashi – THREE from Miki Johnson on Vimeo.

Mikko Takkunen – Photographer and creator of photojournalismlinks

Capitolio
Chris Anderson
I think Chris Anderson’s Capitolio is one of the most narrative of photobooks. We aren’t given a story or information on individual photographs but the ‘cinematic journey’ as a review (http://bit.ly/BuKdE http://bit.ly/cRj1cD) called it, pretty much forces u to try to build narrative.

Nathalie Belayche – Curator and photo editor

‪The Great Unreal‬
‪Taiyo Onorato‬ + Nico Krebs

Peter Dench – Photographer

Broken Empire
Gert Ludwig

Pete Brook – Photography Writer

Zona
Carl de Keyzer

Too Much Time
Jane Evelyn Atwood

Intimate Enemy
Robert Lyons

Family
Chris Verene

Sean O’Hagan – Photography Writer – The Guardian

A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia
Alixandra Fazzina
Here’s what I said about its narrative structure in my review:A Million Shillings, though, is a book that does not abide by the normal rules of reportage. Its narrative unfolds in an almost novelistic way, as her camera tracks a journey that, for the few that survive, often ends in a kind of dismal limbo of uncertainty in a refugee camp in Yemen. Many of Fazzina’s images of the everyday life there have an intimate and painterly quality: the muted blues and greens of the clothes, the sad stoicism of the faces, the abiding sense of futility – and extraordinary humility – that attends this kind of survival. Here, the photographs serve the story and you may find yourself lingering, as I did, over her almost holy portraits of the displaced. Full review.

Sabine
Jacob Au Sobel
It’s basically a visual diary of his relationship with an Inuit girl. Bloody brilliant and hard book that uses the loves story to tell all kinds of other bigger stories.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/may/28/art3

Simon Roberts – Photographer

Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out
Edmund Clark
For 2010

Joel Sternfeld
American Prospects
All time book

Stephen Mayes - Managing Director of VII Agency NY

After Photography
Fred Ritchin
This is not a book of photojournalism nor specifically about photojournalism, but Ritchin’s thesis about the transition from analogue to digital imagery has powerful implications for every producer and consumer of documentary photography in all its forms.

Belgicum
Stephan Vanfleteren
An astonishing reportage from a photographer whose strength and potential influence has yet to be fully realised.

Infidel
Tim Hetherington
Hetherington covers some familiar tropes of conflict photography, but expands into zones of extraordinary intimacy which are very unfamiliar in traditional reportage. He brings a new vision to conflict photography.

Steve Pyke – Photographer

Invisible City
Ken Schles

Todd Hido – Photographer

Pictures from home
Larry Sultan

Raised By Wolves
Jim Goldberg

Wayne Ford – Creative Director

The Chinese
Liu Zheng
One I should have put on my list!

1. Look for off the shelf quality packaging solutions and print your
postcards, books to fit to make your product compete in a retail environment
without having to do costly bespoke packaging. I used wrapology for a nice
two piece postcard box and Secol print sleeves for the books -
http://www.secol.co.uk/