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.