Why You Should Make a Book EVERY Year
I remember being in a wonderful little book store in La Jolla one summer’s day. There were shelves after shelves of photography books. Monographs, portfolios, personal albums, anthologies… just about every sort of photography book a photographer could make.
I wanted to have a book of my images. I just had to figure out a way to do it.
A couple of years afterward, my photo/design firm was given a contract to do the editing and design for a commemorative book for US Swimming. The photographer’s name was Heinz Kluetmeier, and he was known as one of the top shooters in the sport of swimming.
It was an opportunity to make a book from beginning to end and I threw myself into the gig. Even flying to NY to meet with the publisher and the printer liaison. The book was going to be printed in S Korea, but I was unable to travel that far for a press check. (Damn)
And it was going to cost a lot of money.
A lot. Of money.
(I am working on a book of my love of the west. Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah is my focus. It will be published this summer.)
I wondered if I would ever have enough to make a book of my own. It wouldn’t make sense to spend that much money.
30 years later it is so damned simple and inexpensive that it doesn’t make sense to NOT make a book.
And when you decide to make a book several cool things happen to you and your photography.
For one thing, it forces you to look at your work with a very close and focused eye. You now are looking for elements that can relate to each other. You are seeking design and context and structure and POV and so much more in the images you may have never looked at in that way.
That is a great exercise in itself. To really SEE your work with an intent to do something with it instead of just shooting it to have.
You learn about storytelling, visual flow, relationships between images, and how they can be used to present a body of work that is more than the single image could be.
You can also find that you have some ways to go to make great images. You may find that you really do have a mish-mash collection of random images; sunset, tree, kitty, street photo, portrait, vacation shot, bowl of fruit on the porch….
Not really book-worthy.
I say the hell with it and make it anyway.
Because you will learn. You will immerse yourself in the work and you will develop better shooting skills as a result of understanding what you needed to do to make a coherent set of images.
When you struggle to edit down 1000 images to a collection fo 50 or 60 it is one of the most exhilarating, exciting, soul-sucking, terror fraught things you will ever do. Riding the rollercoaster of “this works, to this sucks in about .04 seconds will wake you up and make you think.
Think about what you do.
Think about why you do it.
Why do you make photographs? It is not easy to answer when we are looking at a screen of images we liked so much a few hours ago and now simply cannot figure out how drunk we must have been to shoot that crap.
20 minutes later we love that shot again.
Process.
Embrace it… the process is a deliberate action that will lead to greater insight into the questions above.
What you do and why you do it start to become clearer and clearer.
(As an aside, this is how you discover your style. Looking back and finding the images that you love the most. The ones you are prepared to defend, the ones you will fight the demons from a thousand hells to preserve… those are the ones that begin to define your style. Embrace the process and the outcome will be guaranteed to be a win.)
Making a book is not something to be done in an evening either. It is a time consuming process.
It should be. It should be as deliberately created as any single image you have ever worked on.
Maybe even more.
And that makes you think about your work in a progression of deliberate choices.
I always say you own your photograph.
And now you own your book. Every single page of it.
Deciding on presentation; will it have a border, will it be full-bleed, will it be small with a very large border…so many choices that are made based on other choices being made at the same moment.
What a great way to learn about your own photography.
When you are out in the field or the studio shooting, the knowledge you learned from making that book will be hanging around your head like a wreath of glowing visual self-awareness.
You will see more in front of you than you did before you made the book.
You will make images more deliberately than you did before you made the book.
You will make find images in more places you never looked than before you made the book.
So go ahead and do it.
There are so many great book printers out there and you should be able to make a hardcover book for under $100.
Put it on your coffee table, or in a prominent place on your bookshelf.
It’s yours.
It is a real artifact derived from your creativity.
And it feels goooood!
Looking for more resources? Check out “Minimal Viable Brand for Photographers” – a free workshop for you to make sure you have all you need before heading out into the world of commercial photography.