Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I'm trying to think of an example of that.  It's a marvel when you see it.

I was thinking about one of the other differences between the web and a
book.  I ma captivated by the luminous quality of images on the screen.  I
think you did an impressive job with the images in the book since in my
experience some online favorites are very flat when printed on paper.  Areas
of white or very light colors in particular tend to go from a light source 
to a blank area.

Did you find any that you wanted onscreen that didn't read on paper?
  

    
There are two in the rio section which we really wanted - but which
were very noisy... so we decided to reproduce them in black and white
(consulting the photographers of course)

http://www.fotolog.com/nelson369/?pid=3862224

&

http://www.fotolog.com/interludio/?pid=4591173

& in the landscape section the misty foggy ones didn't come out as
well as
I'd hoped:

Especially kandykorn's where the colours are very subtle on (my)
screen


http://www.fotolog.com/kandykorn/?pid=8404235

You can see the 'noise' here in the book. The repro house worked very
hard on this one - we got to fifth proofs I think.

The others (below) were better - and I think perhaps because we kept
them small

http://www.fotolog.com/kandykorn/?pid=8404161
http://www.fotolog.com/kandykorn/?pid=8404275
http://www.fotolog.com/kandykorn/?pid=8404259
http://www.fotolog.com/kandykorn/?pid=8404102
  

    
I just marvel at the way the photos are thematically connected on the 
pages. Did you start with one favorite and try to find others that 
connected to it in a certain way? It reminds me of an old radio station 
that used to be around here, KPIG, that would play sets of music that were 
so subtly connected you really had to think deeply, but there it would be. 
A little puzzle and a lot of fun. 
  

    
It's great to be able to review some of those photos and think through the
process you must have undertaken to do the selecting and other editing.

Not having the book, I feel a bit at a loss to pose this well, so let me
just throw it out generally: Tell me more about the essays. You've said a
little about why they were important to the project, and mentioned a couple
of topics, but I'd really like to hear more about the content of them and
what they do in the overall enterprise of the book.
  

    
Perhaps Andrew should really answer this, being the wordsmith and all
- but he's otherwise engaged right now... I think the launch party in
New York is in full swing as I write! 

I'm looking forward to seeing some of the pictures tomorrow!


But there are four main pieces of writing

Andrew's Introduction - Not So Lonely Planet

This situates the reader: and gives the history and background to the
website, explains how the website works - what the Fotologgers use it
for (a visual diary, to 'show-off', make wise cracks etc. etc.) 

The most exciting idea for me is where Andrew is talking about the
fact that photosharing websites are an environment that is about as
unmediated as you can get... There you can find thousands of images
which have NOT been published because they have been deemed newsworthy
by a journalist. They have NOT been published because a gallerist or
curator judges them to be art. And they have not been published because
a marketeer thinks they will sell a product... 

One of the recent reviews for the book said "Entirely free of elitism
or coffee-table snobbery this venture is true creative democracy and is
a beautiful thing."

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=136798908&size=o

I'm linking to Flickr here so you can see the picture big & read the
text!

Anyhow, for me that said it all... exactly what we wanted the book to
acheive - because that what it's documenting at Fotolog. Simple really.


Then there are three texts by Nick Currie AKA Momus - his blog clcik
opera is here:

http://imomus.livejournal.com/

Generally a great read - I recommend it! Nick's background is music,
but he is interested in 1001 things and writes very knowledgably,
entertainingly and always in a questioning way about whatever
preoccupies his mind.

I clicked on a link one day and discovered his essay about
photoblogging (see comment 43 above for the link) - right then & there
I KNEW he had the perfect voice for the book... Personal and quirky and
fun... and the ability to assume his readers have intelligence! Very
important! - Personally I hate being talked down to... In an
illustrated book I want a text to provoke and spark ideas off so i can
draw my own conclusions - not to tell me everything...

Nick's texts: Public Images Unlimited, Songs of Ourselves and Digital
Communities. I think I had better let Andrew talk about these in more
detail as he worked closely with Nick batting ideas around and honing
the final pieces with his editorial eye...

In any event I must just say when I finally got a finished copy -
strangely the texts were what made me feel most proud and excited...
Funny, me essentially being a pictures person and all...

I'd be really interested to hear what anyone who has got the book and
has read the text thinks of it! 
  

    

I enjoyed the texts,  but I won't be going back to them after one time
through.  The pictures, however...
  

    
I'd love to hear about the New York party... cross-posting from elsewhere is
completely appropriate.  We'll ask our own follow-up questions!
  

    
hi folks, sorry I've been out of touch, and can't post right now,
travelling. But probably later tonight.
  

    
How funny that the text should touch you so, Johanna, more than the photos.
But you'd been living deep in the photos for longer, too, I suppose.

Were there things you wanted to do / wished you'd done but didn't with the
book?

(And whenever you want to jump in about the essays or anything else, have at
it, Andrew.)
  

    <scribbled by davadam Sat 13 May 06 10:20>
  

    
photography 340: What Did You Shoot Today II
#1054 of 1056: david adam edelstein (davadam) Fri 12 May 2006 (07:27
PM)

    I should probably go post this in the fotolog discussion going 
    on in Inkwell right now, but it seems to me that sites like
    fotolog and flickr are really showing how digital is different 
    from film, and enabling things that weren't possible before.  
    
    For a commercial photographic process, now that we have high
    resolution digital cameras, the main difference is that they 
    don't have to go through processing and scanning of images.  
    But the immediate download-post-share-discuss cycle is truly
    different from film-based photography.
  

    
(that's me quoting myself and following my own advice :-)
  

    

I agree -- that's a profound way in which it's different.  And that 
extends even to "chimping" where you display and share and discuss in 
person while looking at the photo.
  

    
Fotolog, Flickr and even putting photos up on blogs add two things that are
at the heart of the social dynamic of all of this.  One is the possibolity
to be found by strangers (or friends of friends), the virtual gallery
dynamic.  The other is the ability to respond in written words or other
images.  Those two things make something awfully powerful.

They lead to learning, for one thing.

I had studied photography seriously in my teens and early twenties, but even
though I loved museums and art and photo books, I had no faith in my sense
of composition.   Within a week of being on fotolog I was learning what
kinds of composition make me go "wow" because when I uploaded I would see
other images in thumbnail format next to mine, and I'd think "better
composition!" far too often.

At some point I saw a glorious photo thumbnail that truned out to be 
an image of a shower curtain with a caption that it was nearly midnight 
and the photographer had just managed to squeeze this shot in and kept 
her vow of an image she liked every day.

I decided to do that, and I kept it up for the most part for almost a
year.  I learned more than in any class I ever took, from being "on
assignment" for one group or another, or having a specific person's living,
changing, unfolding work in my mind.

Some of the groups that evolved at fotolog were literally games -- 
like the sequential numbers group.  I rushed out one afternoon to find a
particular number -- and have it also be a photo that please me -- 
because the group had gotten stuck.   That's a silly but concrete example
of how socializing and improvisation unfold in a visual space.
 
  

    
Hehehe Gail can totally relate to your last comment...! Have done very
similar things myself...

And I guess sort of related to davadams comment, but I notice that
when I am really plugged into Fotolog or Flickr my sense of time
changes... 

Two or three days seems an eternity if one of my friends or favourites
hasn't uploaded any new pictures.... And I am far more aware of the
seasons and nature - wonderful if you live in the centre of a big city
like I do...
  

    
And to jump back up to kayo's question (back up there at comment 53). 
"Did you start with one favorite and try to find others that 
connected to it in a certain way?"

We shuffled everything into sections first and then printed out colour
contact sheets of thumbnail images... which we scribbled all over...
trying to find connections between images... Most spreads in one
section will have SOME sort of theme however tenuous that connects all
the images on that double page - even if it's totally opaque to anyone
but me, Andrew or Karolina the designer!

And sort of relatedly to the above, recently, someone sent me a link
to this article:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,18925277,00.html

after I read the article I thought how sad - but also how true - and
that now that everything is so available (& in such abundance!) the
people who get on and the people who are successful are the people who
are good EDITORS, whether that's the photographer or artist themselves
or someone trying to make sense of it all...

For me an important part of Flickr or Fotolog is that each of us is an
editor as well as publisher...

And we are editing both our own images AND other peoples - we choose
who we look at, we choose who's Fotolog to jump to next, and we all
make our own patterns out of the images we see... Unlike in a newspaper
or on TV or indeed a book (even fotolog.book) where someone else has
pre-edited the images for us...
  

    
Interesting... I was just thinking as I looked at some favorites on flickr 
(I WISH YOU WERE LISTENING FOTOLOG PEOPLE) that I wished I could make sets 
out of my favorites... 
  

    

I confess, have an extreme, obsessed user-point-of-view agenda for 
What Should Fotolog Do and What Should Flickr Do in order to each 
be better but not identical to one another.  (But I'm deeply sympathetic 
because working at The WELL has made me painfully sensitive to 
technical, social and financial hurdles in development and innovation.  
Just keeping going is a real accomplishment.  Spawning a beautiful 
book is rarity for any site of any kind!)

Some kind of fave gallery on fotolog and some kind of friends-of-friends
gallery-like mobility on flickr have been such an obsession of some of us
that I even set up a blog specifically to work out my obsessive issues in
those areas.  http://gailwilliams.wordpress.com/  (Just in the spirit of
full disclosure.  But that's mere topic-drift here.)

Johanna, the article about the ubiquity of images is interesting.  Fifteen
years ago I was arguing with people here that having all this text-based
talking and chatter was the death of writing.  But it just isn't.

I imagine that the monks who copied manuscripts in the middle ages may
have found the idea of universal literacy horrifying, why, it could lead
to just anybody making a permanent record of just anything!  Yet 
important writing is rare and valued.  For example, not many written
diaries are historic gems.  More literacy doesn't kill beloved 
writing, it makes some but not unlimited competition for well-written 
books and articles, but it sure does make more filtering desirable!  
Perhaps Visual Librarian is a job title of the furture.  
 
But of course the focus of your book is on populism...
even though some of the people you selected have training in photography
or visual arts, when they are at fotolog they are doing something new and
different.  It's usually very casual, and sometimes it is quite a bit like
braided visual diaries.  And that explains the "yearbook" context for the
fotolog.book, one of many ways it can be experienced.

How is this book performing in the context of your catalogue, Johanna?
Your press seems to do mostly fine art, design and antiquities.  Did this
push a boundary, and if so, is it a promising direction for your company?
  

    
And, to add to Gail's print-oriented questions, what's next for fotolog?
What's planned (that can be revealed without having to kill us or buy our
silence)?

Users, here: What would you like to see develop on fotolog?
  

    
Yes, yes, the death of 'something' is always being predicted when new
media emerge... Video would ruin cinema attendance, e-books would kill
paper books etc, etc, and as you say doesn't really work that way...
the old media get shaken up a little and have to re-evaluate what they
are doing... 

And Thames & Hudson publish some popular culture (street art, street
fashion. music graphics and so on), but it is an area that I see
growing for us...
  

    

Johanna, Adam, Andrew, et al -- this has been a great conversation! These
past two weeks have gone by so fast, and I want to thank all of you for
joining us. It's been a real pleasure. 

Though our virtual spotlight has turned to a new discussion, this topic
will remain open for further comments. I understand that you have busy 
lives, and I realize you may not be able to stick around indefinitely,
but please know that you're welcome to stay and talk some more if you can.

I have one small question I'd like to throw out here, just in case one
of you has time to respond:

Are you considering doing another book with the same focus? Is there a
possibility of having a series of books -- Best of fotolog, 2006;
Best of fotolog, 2007 -- I'd think there would still be so much material
to publish, and a seemingly endless stream of new material added to the
pile. 

I hope so; anyway. Good luck, and best wishes!
  

    
Thanks for coming by!  I was pleased to see mentions of the conversation
elsewhere around the net, too.  Nice job everybody!