All Those Photobooks You Make . . .

People often say to me, You sure make a lot of photobooks. What’s up with that?

I get it, sometimes it can feel odd even to me, as if I’m churning out too much work. Yet I believe all of my photobooks are as strong and tightly edited as they can be, and all are singular expressions. So what gives?

For one, I take a lot of photos. As I’ve said above, I’m always out with my camera, and always hawk-eyed for photos to snap. I also like to keep busy, need to do work each day. It’s part of the calling of being a photographer, close to the basis of the work, its essence.

When I was first getting going as a novelist John Irving told me about his daily practice. He said that he had to do something each day to “redeem the day”—to make it a day worth living, to quiet regrets. For him (and for me back then) it was doing a good day’s work at the typewriter. 

Irving went on to say that if the work had gone poorly or unproductively, he could redeem the day by making a good meal … but it had to be something. Hard, intense work in hopes of blessing each day, sanctifying it, or at least sealing off the always present existential dread .

Then there’s Bernard Malamud. As I mentioned, I worked for him in the final years of his life. He’s the writer about whom Philip Roth, as he set down to his own long, monkish days at the typewriter, always said to himself: “Malamud has already been at it for two hours.” 

That was the serious novelist’s task: long days, every day, at the typewriter or computer, that always lonely lift into blankness, with mere words as stepping stones. Lost to the work. In your core needing to do the work.

Turns out I bring that same need to my photo taking. A day with one good photo can redeem it; and more good photos that day are only further blessings. And hard, driven work is the whole deal.

So I keep snapping away. 

I also love to make photobooks, it’s so joyful and fun after the steep, near-impossible push of writing novels, and I revel in it. Hence, a lot of photobooks get made.

Then there’s Ari Maricopolous. Not my very favorite photographer, but certainly a productive one and in one way an inspiration. 

When I was just getting going with my own work Maricopolous was in the middle of a project with Dashwood Books called Anyway. The idea was to put out a new zinelike volume each week. Yep, every single week. Books most often full of free-associating street shots or photos lightly autobiographical. Some books are themed, by colors or subject. Others simply hang together. A lot of sidewalks, a lot of graffiti, a lot of friends, even a few girlie magazines. And each one works on its own terms, with its own strengths. 

A book a week. No time to stop, probably not much time to think … and the work all the better for it. A full  year, at the end of which Maricopolous had fifty-two books, all collected in a nice cardboard box.

I loved the idea of this project, wished I had a similar task. So not only did I subscribe to the Anyway series, but in my own way I set out to do something similar. Thus my series of Angel Parade books, and then all the other ones I’ve made. 

Too many of them? I certainly don’t think so. 

For me they’re simply enough.