Demystifying the Photo Book with Joyce Tenneson

Upcoming workshop at The New Orleans Photography Workshops

Demystifying the Photo Book with Joyce Tenneson, October 21-23

Many photographers have bodies of work they would like to see published, as well as interesting ideas for book projects they would like to expand. This course is intended to give students the editing, sequencing, and design skills, to take their own book project from start to finish.

Students will have one-on-one guidance with Joyce, who will help them edit and sequence their images into a strong body of work, ready for production. Other essential components of the book design process, such as effectively incorporating text with images, will be covered.

This is a dynamic workshop that familiarizes participants with design and layout possibilities, encourages them to explore the relationship between images, and gives the photographer an overview of the steps involved in producing a successful book project from a body of work.

This is Joyce's second workshop at the NOPW.

Complete information at neworleansworkshops.com/artists/joyce/photobook.html

Larry Sultan, The Valley

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Larry Sultan / The Valley

Published by Scalo

Since 1988, Larry Sultan has returned time and again to photograph on porn sets in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley--the Silicon(e) Valley of the porn industry. But The Valley is by no means a documentary on porn filmmaking. Rather, it is a dense series of pictures of middle-class homes invaded by the porn industry.
Sultan's lens focuses on pedestrian details--a piece of half-eaten pie, dirty linens in a heap, "actors" taking a break--that offer clues to a bizarre other-world. The lush and intricate images adroitly play with artifice and reality, adding up to rich, elliptical narratives that circle around the concepts of "home" and "desire." These images of homes and gardens, porn actors and film crews, studio and location shootings are an ambiguous meditation on suburbia and its trappings, family and transgression, loss and desire, the utopias and dystopias of middle-class lifestyle.
The Valley and its many-layered photographs outline the complexity of domestic life at the beginning of the 21st century, opening up new perspectives for photography through its innovative combination of staged and documentary photographs.

In 1998, an English magazine asked me to go on a porn set. I flew down to Burbank Airport with my wife, and we went to the house they'd given me the address of. It was a dentist's house on Van Alden. That name had all kinds of connotations when I was in high school. Because the Valley is so haunted for me by the ghosts of childhood, all of these street names have Proustian connotations. All I have to do is to say: Havenhurst, Van Alden, Vineta, Dubois, and a flood of associations comes back to me. [...] After the first five minutes of the strangeness of it all, I started to look around, going to the bedrooms, wandering through the house. It felt like a permission to go into a house in L.A. and to imagine how someone would live their life in this house. I made the pictures for the magazine. I left and thought, "This is it, this is what I have to do." --Larry Sultan

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Alec Soth, From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Alec Soth / From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

Published by The Walker Art Center

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography, whose compelling images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes. Featuring more than 100 of the artist's photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist's working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works. Novelist Geoff Dyer's "Riverrun"--a meditation on Soth's series Sleeping by the Mississippi--and August Kleinzahler's poem "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work. Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist's book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America's suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants. This full-color publication includes a complete exhibition history, bibliography and interview with the artist by Bartholomew Ryan.

Alec Soth was born in 1969 and raised in Minnesota, where he continues to live and work. He has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation (1999, 2004) and Jerome Foundation (2001), was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography and was short-listed for the highly prestigious Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published Niagara (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogota (2007) and The Last Days of W (2008). He is a member of Magnum Photos.

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

A Beginner's Workshop on Photo Book Publishing, with Melanie McWhorter | December 12-13 2011

Upcoming workshop at The New Orleans Photography Workshops

A Beginner's Workshop on Photo Book Publishing, with Melanie McWhorter

This two-day workshop covers the evolution of a photography book from its inception as an idea, to a finished product. Intended for photographers with little or no experience in publishing, A Beginner's Workshop on Photo Book Publishing is an interactive, dynamic workshop that enables participants to fine tune their ideas and become familiar with design, layout and essential publishing processes. When completed, participants will be able to make decisions about publishing their work and envision all of the steps involved in producing their project from start to finish.

The workshop begins by familiarizing with basic book design elements and book publishing vocabulary, and expands into topics including making a basic budget and conceiving ideas for fundraising, branding and marketing to your audience, contacting publishers or printers, knowing the roles and jobs involved in publishing your photobook and deciding whether to work with a publisher or self-publish, and then, traditionally or with print-on-demand.

Melanie covers the basic components of financing, as well as the essentials of distribution ranging from such easily overlooked matters as storage, to the finer points of what is required to get the book on to the dealers' shelves. This workshop is the perfect publishing overview for photographers of all levels.

Placed immediately following the 2011 PhotoNOLA portfolio review week end, the timing of this workshop is designed for photographers also interested in attending the many events and exhibitions that take place during New Orleans' annual celebration of photography.

Tuition: $395 | Materials fee: $25

Melanie McWhorter has been the manager of the photo-eye's Book Division for over 10 years and curates exhibitions of local photographers in photo-eye Bookstore. She is a regular contributor to the online magazines Fraction Magazine and photo-eye maintains her own photo-related blog, melaniephotoblog.com and is co-founder of Finite Foto which focuses on photography in New Mexico.

Melanie has been interviewed about photography in numerous print and online publications including PDN, The Picture Show, Santa Fe's THE magazine; has judged the prestigious photography competitions Women Photojournalists of Washington's Annual Exhibition and Fotografia: Fotofestival di Roma's Book Prize; and has reviewed portfolios at Fotografia, Photolucida, Review Santa Fe and PhotoNOLA.

Recently her own photography was exhibited in Sweet Escape at Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg, FL; Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe and in Fraction Magazine. She resides with her family in Santa Fe, NM.

Complete information at neworleansworkshops.com/artists/melanie

Robert Frank: Peru

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Robert Frank: Peru

Published by Steidl

In March 1949, Robert Frank mailed a birthday gift to his mother in Switzerland: A maquette of a series of photographs he had made during a visit to Peru between June and December of the previous year. Frank assembled an identical book for himself, and these two maquettes now reside in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

A few of the images are well known in Frank's oeuvre, but until now very few people have seen the entire series--which, in 1949, already displayed the hallmark of Frank's distinctive image-sequencing. Peru also exhibits an ease and flexibility that Frank himself confirms: "I was very free with the camera. I didn't think of what would be the correct thing to do; I did what I felt good doing. I was like an action painter." Using a hand-held 35mm Leica camera, Frank documented the country's massive vistas, weathered faces, manual labor and dusty roads stretching to the horizon with a spontaneity of motion that propels the viewer into the midst of the scenery. For the first time, and under the direction of Frank himself, this book presents the complete sequence of images. Peru is a work of major significance in both the artist's history and the history of photography.

Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Ed Ruscha Photographer

New photobook at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Ed Ruscha's relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent. The world-class painter--and author of a 1972 New York Times article called "I'm Not Really a Photographer"--has been known to refer to his work in this second medium as a "hobby", despite considerable, persistent critical interest. Whether he likes it or not, the small albums of plainly-shot, snapshot-sized images he produced in the 1960s and 70s, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, intrigued his contemporaries and earned him an unshakable reputation. How? His subject matter was neither purely documentary nor solely artistic, in fact it was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from the car-dominated western landscape. That rebellious material, along with his serial presentation, made for a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with Beat Generation overtones. The combination attracted artists and critics both, especially while serial logic was prominent in Pop art and Minimalism, and then retained that interest later as serial work became prominent in Conceptual art. Critics have remained attentive for decades, and Ruscha's influence remains apparent in new work in Europe and North America.

Ed Ruscha, Photographer departs from earlier collections to explore how these images--and all of Ruscha's work in disciplines including painting, drawing, printmaking and photography--are guided and shaped by a single vision.

Complete list of photobooks at the NOPW library.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Hiroshi Sugimoto

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's "Boden Sea" for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: "I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist," he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, "Lightning Fields" (2006) and "Photogenic Drawings" (2007).

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.

Nina Berman: Purple Hearts - Back from Iraq

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

A Purple Heart is the token honor given to soldiers for their wounds. It makes them heroes. It is the title that Nina Berman has given to her photographs of American soldiers gravely wounded in the Iraq war, who have returned home to face life away from the waving flags and heroic send-offs. The images are accompanied by first-person interviews with the soldiers, who discuss their lives, reasons for enlisting, and experience in Iraq. They provide a glimpse into the myths of warfare as glorious spectacle through the minds of young men desperate to believe in the righteousness of their actions.

One soldier explains that he always wanted to be a hero. He thought the military would be fun--he would jump out of planes. He never imagined it could be ugly until he saw Saving Private Ryan. He is now a cripple, doped up all day on pain medications, flat broke, with one kid and another on the way. Another soldier describes how he called a recruiting station after watching an MTV-style commercial for the Army on TV. An immigrant from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury. It's a fair trade in his mind: a leg for an American passport.

Berman's photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorial page writer, and Tim Origer, a Vietnam veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet offensive and returned at age 19, an amputee. Essays by Verlyn Klinkenborg and Tim Origer. Paperback, 8 x 8 in. / 176 pgs / 100 color.

Nina Berman: Homeland

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Nina Berman was one of the first photographers in the US to turn her lens towards her own country, whilst all eyes were on Iraq. She was awarded international prizes in photojournalism from World Press Photo (2005, 2007) and DAYS Japan (2005) for her work on young American veterans coming back from war, widely exhibited and published in the book Purple Hearts - Back from Iraq. In Homeland Berman is an American again looking at America. A product of seven years work, with images from across the country, Berman gives us a peek into the bizarre manifestations of the homeland security state and the ideologies that have reshaped post 9-11 America.

Released to coincide with the US Presidential election of 2008, Nina Berman in Homeland has captured further the unsettling and surreal in her own country over recent years. She has witnessed the rise of the super churches, and photographed military demos, recruitment centres and air fairs where you are never too young to have your own gun. Happy families step through suburbs clutching anti-nuke pills. Small town police train to hunt Al-Qaeda. Military goats perform in 'War On Terror' scripts. And beneath it all stands the image of a warrior Jesus inspiring megachurch millions toward the end times.

Underlying Berman's technicolour images is a sense of fear under the guise of the banal. She sees the growing elements of fanaticism and faith in guns and God, creeping through a cross-section of American society. One asks, are the scenes real, or an elaborate state-sponsored performance art, designed to amuse a public desperately seeking a superhero ending in an age of empire decline?

With an afterword by Michael Shaw, visual critic and creator of Bagnewsnotes.com

Banksy: Wall and Piece

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

The collected works of Britain’s most wanted artist.

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable (except maybe when it’s squatting in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum or Museum of Modern Art.) Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world.

Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough you’ll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and witty comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals.

His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. And now for the first time, he’s putting together the best of his work—old and new—in a fully illustrated color volume.

Banksy, real name unknown, was born in Bristol, England.

Stanley Greene: Black Passport

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

The archetype of the war correspondent is freighted with an outsize heroic mythos to which world-renowned conflict photographer Stanley Greene is no stranger. Black Passport is his autobiographical monograph-cum-scrapbook, and it transports the viewer behind the news as Greene reflects upon his career, oscillating between the relative safety of life in the West and the traumas of wars abroad. This glimpse of the polarities that have comprised Greene's life raises essential questions about the role of the photojournalist, as well as concerns about its repercussions: what motivates someone to willingly confront death and misery? To do work that risks one's life? Is it political engagement, or a sense of commitment to telling difficult stories? Or does being a war photographer simply satisfy a yearning for adventure? Black Passport offers an experience that is both exceptionally personal and ostensibly objective. Built around Greene's narrating monologue, the book's 26 short, nonsequential "scenes" are each illustrated by a portfolio of his work.

Mario Tama: Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Mario Tama's moving body of award-winning pictures documents Hurricane Katrina's shocking disaster and the resilience of recovery, hope, and change.

As a news photographer for Getty Images, Tama's powerful imagery of events like September 11th, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, and the earthquake in Haiti have appeared in major magazines and newspapers internationally. His numerous honors include the prestigious Cliff Edom's New America Award at the NPPA Best of Photojournalism Awards, POY Year International, White House News Photographers Association, NPPA's Best of Photojournalism, UNICEF Photo of the Year, and Care International Award for Humanitarian Reportage. In 2008 Tama was nominated for an Emmy Award for his Coney Island series, and his work on Baghdad's orphans was exhibited at Visa Pour L'Image in Perpignan.

Features an introduction by Anderson Cooper, who joined CNN in 2001 and has anchored Anderson Cooper 360 since 2003. Previously a correspondent for ABC News and Channel One News, his many awards include four Emmys for his comprehensive and impassioned coverage of world events.

Anne Wilkes Tucker: Louis Faurer

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Louis Faurer was one of America's "quiet" photographers. Known for his raw, melancholy, psychologically charged pictures of life on the street, and in particular for evocative shots of 1940s and 1950s Times Square, Faurer frequently drew on the film noir idiom to create memorable images of moviegoers, box-office lines, ushers, and theaters advertising B movies such as Force of Evil, Edge of Doom, and Ace in the Hole.

Much of Faurer's best work, though, is of ordinary activity and people, and he frequently haunted the streets of New York, finding poetry amid the crackle of the city. In an untitled picture taken in 1937 in Philadelphia, the trousers, jacket cuffs, and cane of a seated man are in sharp focus, as are a box of pencils and a sign announcing, "I am totally blind." Hurrying past him are the blurred figures of pedestrians. Other shots such as I am Paralyzed, Daddy Warbucks, and Eddie reveal a rare social awareness.

Faurer also worked as a fashion photographer for nearly thirty years, producing work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Flair, with a particular gift for highlighting his subject's ephemeral grace. He was a lasting influence on Robert Frank and other members of the New York School of photography.

This book, the first to examine Faurer's work in depth and bring it to a modern readership, brings together a great deal of previously unpublished material, as well as images not seen since they originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s.

Philip Toledano: Days with my Father

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Days With My Father is a son's photo journal of his aging father's last years. Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father's severe memory loss. He started a blog on which he posted photographs and accompanying reflections on his father's changing state. Through sometimes sad, often funny, and always loving observations, we follow Toledano as he learns to reconcile the elderly man living in a twilight of half memories with the ambitious and handsome young man he occasionally still glimpses. Days With My Father is an honest and moving reflection about coming to terms with an aging parent.

Jennette Williams: The Bathers

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Jennette Williams's stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease--floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.

To create the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres's Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological associations of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects--homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students. Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that invoke not only canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and reflect on the allure of the female form.

A CDS Book Published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Photography

Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week he was in jail, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights. The photographs and text in this book capture the story of one of the most inspiring periods in America's twentieth century.

Bert Stern: Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting

New monograph at The New Orleans Photography Workshops library

Bert Stern, the famous commercial and fashion photographer of the 60s, was the last to be granted a sitting by Marilyn Monroe six weeks before her tragic death. The three-day session yielded nearly 2,600 pictures—fashion, portrait, and nude studies—of indescribable sensual and human vibrancy, of which no more than 20 were published. And yet these few photographs ineradicably shaped our image of Marilyn Monroe. This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. It is a unique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, and it is the world’s finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe.