Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
One thing I notice is that most people, no matter where they are from,
tend to do the same kinds of things. There is no thematic style that
can be judged as coming from one place or another. It seems to confirm
that people are similar in what images are important to them, which
includes family, friends, landscapes, cats, dogs, interesting buildings
and sunsets, at least in a general sense.

I use fotothing to document where I am in the world. The latest photo
is from where I happen to be. I travel quite a bit, so friends and
family can take a look and see, oh, look, he's in Hawai`i (again) or
Kentucky or wherever.
  

    

It's fun to discover things about your daily visual buddies.  Lovely 
compositions of garden and flower images then suddenly a new baby, or 
a tight sequence of kayaking in Alaska.
  

    
All that makes a lot of sense. A rich community, loosely joined not only by
hyperlinks and text but by images and connections among them.

So, why a book?
  

    
Hi folks,
Sorry to be late to the party. I'm one of the editors of fotolog.book,
along with Johanna (comments at 2 and 22 above). It's great to read
the comments and questions above about Fotolog, its users, and its
uses. I joined Fotolog around the same time as Johanna, early 2003. For
me it was a way to get a Web presence for my photos, without designing
and paying for my own Web site (which I had wanted to do for about a
year). But it was so easy, and fun, and, yes, addictive, that I quickly
forgot my desire for a "professional" platform for my photos, and gave
in to this new form of communication and social interaction. And the
feedback/validation Adam talks about above was very welcome: I gained a
lot of photo-confidence in a short amount of time. Four months later I
quit my office job to focus on taking pictures and starting a
freelance business. Fotolog literally changed my life.
  

    
Hi Bruce, just saw your question.
The easy answer is that Johanna had an idea that there SHOULD be a
book about Fotolog. She's in a position to know about most of the best
illustrated books produced each year (many of them directly from Thames
& Hudson!), and sees lots of interesting (and not so interesting)
cultural phenomena chronicled in "coffee-table" books every month. In
our estimation, Fotolog was and is a true cultural phenomenon, and it
had thousands of amazing photographs to boot. So from the standpoint of
a photographer who is also a publisher, it is basically a no-brainer.
I felt the same way as she did, pretty much contemporaneously. We had
emailed back and forth a few times, and after one in which I urged her
to seriously pursue a book of her own images, she sent me the outlined
details of her idea for a Fotolog book. I went bonkers and begged her
to let me work on it with her, and she said yes, thank god.

more in a bit about the Web/print issues.
  

    
Hi Andrew!

I just looked at your first (extant) fotolog entry, at
http://www.fotolog.com/along/?pid=41646
and I notice that Johanna "found" you right off the bat.  I think of that as
a hostly instinct, in terms of online community, but perhaps it is also a
curatorial or editorial instinct, when dealing with images.  How great that
you ended up working together!
  

    
Hi Gail!

That's strange, the "found" reference you make is obviously to my
first photo, which I captioned 'lost' but the link you have is to a
different photo, my 10th on Fotolog.

here's my first:
http://www.fotolog.com/along/?pid=39383

The permalink feature of Fotolog sometimes gets mixed up when clicking
back and forth between photos.

Yes, Johanna and I found each other very quickly, I think almost
exclusively because of the kinds of subject matter we post, and our
approaches towards it.
  

    
Oops.  I think I got confused by the calendar-view archives.  Isn't 
it amazing how you can become friends based on how & what somebody sees?

http://www.fotolog.com/along/?pid=39383 -- your first one -- is lovely.
No comments made on it for several months alas, but fortunately you kept
uploading.
  

    
ha, yes, it was so new to me that I was happy just to have a place to
post pictures. and at that time, it was fairly common for pictures to
go without comments. It was still a small community, maybe 5 or 6000
people, and it was still developing its identity.
  

    
yes, it is amazing, but perhaps wonderfully predictable, that we can
become friends based on what we see. After all, you could call
someone's general visual sense their "outlook" on things, and one of
the ways people fall into easy and lasting friendships is by sharing
similar outlooks on life.
  

    
Here are some more thoughts on "why a book?"...

This I think contains an implied question, which I've been asked in
various ways before: Why subject a dynamic, broad-based online
experience, shared by millions of users, to the limitations of a
static, relatively narrow print experience, which will be very lucky if
it's shared by 50,000 people? 

One answer is that we felt from the beginning that so many of the
beautiful, moving, funny, or bizarre photos we were seeing on Fotolog,
almost all by users who did not consider themselves "professional"
photographers, were just as good, if not better, than much of what gets
anthologized on coffee tables these days. They deserved to be in
print.

Also, we felt strongly that the Fotolog phenomenon, which was allowing
this growing community to communicate in new ways across borders, time
lines, and age gaps, was itself unique and very much worth chronicling
in print. At the time, Fotolog had gotten some press coverage, but not
a lot. I think we probably wanted to spread the word, evangelize a
bit.

And speaking for myself, I love the unique qualities of print: the
sense of permanence; the finite format, requiring a distillation of
information and meaning; and the close quarters, which demand so much
thought and effort to produce effective visual narratives. Fotologgers
visually document their lives, and fotolog.book is a unique document of
the documenters. I think that's a valid and worthwhile endeavor.
  

    

Hello, Andrew...congratulations on the book,  My expectations were high and
you surpassed them.


It's been several years in the making.  Were there ways in which the final
product differed from the original conception?
  

    
Hey art! Thanks very much for the kind words. I think we surpassed our
own expectations too.
That's an excellent question--and I'll have to tell you about it
tomorrow! In the meantime if she's not too crazy at work I'm sure
Johanna will weigh in on it too.

a bientot.
  

    
Did the book change from the original idea? No, it didn't really.

Physically, I had quite a clear idea of what shape the book should be.
I
wanted it to feel approachable, accessible and fun.

Which  to my mind means square, chunky, and not too large a page size
- but a big enough
page to accommodate lots of pictures at a decent size, but without the
risk
of over-enlarging them - remember we were dealing with digital images
of
varying quality - some taken from low resolution cameras. It also had
to
feel substantial, good value for money, so that meant lots of pages,
on good
thick paper.

Andrew had some great ideas early on about gatefold pages and flaps
that could be used to show sequences of images - but the production
cost was too high, sadly.

Editorially, right from the beginning I knew we'd have to break the
book up
into sections - impose some sort of order, so that people who had
never
heard of the website could relate to the book too.

And we wanted some words to put the images and Fotolog phenomenom into
context, to raise and perhaps answer some of the questions that we had
asked ourselves. I think Nick Currie's texts and Andrew's introduction
did this perfectly, and that the comments used as captions give an
idea of who the people are behind the cameras. 

One of the books that made a huge impression on me over the last few
years
was the Lomo Book, published by Booth Clibborn in 2002:
http://www.booth-clibborn.com/showbook.asp?catid=6&id=81

It's a similar idea: an anthology of many images (a lot of them taken
by untrained amateurs - in the true sense of the word). A huge rambling
visual
feast. But nothing organising the pictures apart from some visual
correspondences. But NO words relating to what you were looking at. I
found
that intensely frustrating and wanted to know more... Who WERE these
people
taking the pictures, WHY did they do it?

The design brief was to come up with something approachable, not too
'precious'
Visually, I love how the book turned out. It looks varied but
cohesive, and
the loose grid we used I think gives some of the feeling you get when
you look at the
website. One lingers longer at some images, flits by some others
faster. It
was very important to me that each double-spread made a whole unit, a
narrative - that the images all "talked to each other' whether that
was by
emphasizing visual correspondences between the pictures on each page -
colour, shapes etc. or subject matter.

The reason the book so long to make - simple really: it was a HUGE
picture editing job (and a huge administrative job as well. We
contacted every contributor, first for permission, and second for the
high resolution files to print from). If we had a double spread working
well and one picture dropped out because we couldn't track the
contributor down or because it came in too low resolution, it was often
back to square one again!)
  

    
Oops what happened there? Funny line endings and line breaks! Is there
a way of editing tbis to make it more legible?
  

    

   [e-mail sent]
  

    
Our classic, beloved but old-school software allows deletions but 
not edits, and wraps at 80 characters.  Don't worry, though, you're 
worth reading through any kind of line break or learning curve.  

I wouldn't presume to ask what didn't get permission or where you 
had to start over and find yet another perfect companion piece.  

But maybe the other side -- any examples of something that you 
pictured from the outset, which came together as a layout just as 
you'd hoped?
  

    
Hah! thanks Gail 
hmmmmm.... That's a toughie... 

Do you know I really didn't have any preconceptions from the outset. 

I had designed about 40 pages myself, to present the project to the
Thames & Hudson publishing committee before the project got
commissioned. A few of those ended up in the book unchanged - not many
- as Andrew always found improvements or an even more perfect picture
to slot in. And the designer of course also had her own take on things.
(I think she had one tough job with both me and Andrew on her case -
both of us being so close to the project.)

I think between us we must have seriously considered about 9,000
images!!! And ended up with the magic 1001. (Actually I think it's a
few more - we stopped counting after that!)...

Favourite pages today.... well the psychedlic food spread which you
can see here:
http://www.fotolog.com/johannaneurath/?pid=12089532
Those who know my pictures a little will see it's just my cup of tea,
restrained muted colours and not a hint of kitsch ;)
(not)

and I love the spread with Nick Currie's preface: 
http://www.fotolog.com/fotologbook/?pid=12301336
you need to read the text really to get this.

http://www.imomus.com/photoblogging.html

scroll down to the bottom of the page where the subheading says "THE
SCHOOL OF ART KNOCKS"

 
  

    
http://www.fotolog.com/beebs/?pid=8582609
You have to look at this properly (from the psychedlic food spread) -
my photo of /beeb's photo in the link above doesn't do it justice. 

I was a bit worried about how it would come out in the book - it's so
luminous on screen - and one can never quite replicate transmitted
light (from a computer screen - or a photographic transparency) into
reflected light - anything that's reproduced by lithographic printing
where you are restricted to the four traditional printing colours.

In fact the whole book was a HUGE learning curve for our production
department - a whole book done digitally with no hard copies to colour
correct to. Unheard of at Thames & Hudson! (we still prefer good old
fashioned prints or transparencies on the whole!) 

The repro house we used checked every single image against the Fotolog
URL - sent 'wet" proofs to London, where we checked for colour again.
We had to proof some images five times before we got them where we
wanted them!

Ok I think that's enough of me now. Friday night here in London and
the weekend has begun. I should be down the pub celebrating a gorgeous
May evening!
  

    

Very enlightening, Johanna, thanks.
For anyone in San Francisco reading this today, there's an opening of a
group photo show tonight that will include 6 contributors to the fotolog
book, and I will have a few copies there for people to see

Opening starts at 6 pm.  Music by dj ExtraLars from 8:00pm until late.
Oxygen Sushi Club
795 Valencia Street @ 19th, S.F.

If you can't make it tonight, the show will be up through May 27th, so drop
in any evening, Tuesdays through Sundays, 6 pm on..



We'll be toasting Johanna, Andrew, Adam and nyone else we can think of.

I want to add to the book discussion that those who study and admire page
layout can learn a lot from this book.  There are many connections, both
subtle and obvious, between and among the photos in each one or two page
layout.
  

    

oh the psychadelic food theme, this picture of ours:

http://www.fotolog.com/chow/?pid=10551596

is in the book. i got email from kayo or arto, i forget, telling us to get
in touch about the book, and had to keep passing it on to my husband who
actually took the pic. (i however, made that jello, uhhh, formation, for my
MIL's 80th bday party-- per her request.)

(our fotologs, woefully neglected these days are /snyders  /baumans  &
/unauthorizedarto )
  

    
Okay. That's a bit frightening. Well executed, apparently, what with it
being all shiny and crisp (yet jiggly, one still expects). Nonetheless
frightening.

As with that link, ya just never know what you're going to get on the Web.
Is that ever a problem on fotolog -- radically unexpected images? Was that
ever a consideration in developing the book?
  

    

  (and this reminder: those of you following along at home are welcome
   to join in by asking the operator to connect you to inkwell@well.com
   and reciting your contribution there by e-mail.)
  

    
> radically unexpected images

From a user's point of view, it seems to me that people always want 
attention.  The group logs spend a lot of time asking people to play 
by the rules/within the themes... like here:
http://www.fotolog.com/fotologbook/?pid=12315994

The rules wouldn't be reposted if there hadn't bee a few people 
uploading unrelated material to a group project, in hopes of being
seen.

That's a dynamic that is caused by a spotlight and the desire to jump
into it, and it goes on all over the net, in text and multimedia, of 
course.  Even though the technology democratizes the tools in many ways it
is still necessary to build an audience, credibility, a distribution
network for yourself.  People just as are as naive and impatient as the 
young band in the garage who wants to be an instant hit after learning a
set's worth of songs.  

So that's one element of finding jarring, out of context images now and
then. 
  

    
we tried to keep jarring out of context pictures out of the book of
course... Although I hope we got some unexpected ones in though!

Part of the delight of the website is often clicking on a small
thumbnail and it opens up large into something very different from what
you had imagined.. Funny what scale does to an image...