Notes from the darkroom.
#21: on books
Books shaped the photographer I wanted to become.
Before I knew what my own work would look like, I learnt through the pages of others. I looked at their frames, at what they included and left out, at how one photograph followed another. I studied them as possibilities.
In those early years, I was a young reporter pulling long days and chasing the next assignment to make ends meet. Money was tight and the next job was never guaranteed.
Books always stayed in the budget, though. Non‑negotiable.
The place I kept returning to was a small independent art-book store run by a couple who lived for books. You could feel it in the way they spoke about them, handled them, chose what went on the shelves. I spent hours there, mostly talking and listening.
They paid attention to what I was doing, even when I barely knew how to talk about my own work. At some point, they offered to hang a few of my prints. That stayed with me.
At that age, when most of the energy goes into finding the next job and trying to convince people that what you do is worth paying for, somebody simply taking the work seriously goes a long way. They did.
One day, the images on the wall changed.
They were photographs I knew well, taken from a newly published book by someone I deeply admired. We talked about the pictures, about the book, about what it takes to build a body of work over time. The owners smiled and told me they knew the photographer well.
Friends, actually. The man lived nearby.
They handed me his number.
I took a little time before calling. I had spent years looking at his photographs. Admiring someone from the safe distance of a printed page was one thing. Calling him and introducing myself as a photographer was something else.
Eventually, I did.
We ended up sharing darkroom sessions and improvised lunches. I listened more than I spoke. He looked at my work, gave advice, passed on contacts. We spent time together and I learnt. That meant the world.
Through him, I met people I simply couldn’t have reached before. The profession felt a little less distant afterwards.
All of that started with a book.
I kept working. Assignments came, work got published, people noticed.
For a while, I think I assumed a book would eventually come with the territory. You work, you publish, you keep taking photographs over the years and, at some point, somebody puts covers around them.
How naïve.
I came close once —a famous writer’s project— but it went to a Magnum photographer. Fair enough; I’ll take the compliment anyway. Being Plan B doesn't get you a book, though.
Still, getting that close kept the idea alive. The book remained somewhere ahead, one of those things I had imagined for so long that I no longer really questioned whether it would actually happen.
A couple of decades later came wildlife.
This time I had the material —years of it— and even the means to fund a modest edition. For once, lack of photographs or money wasn't the problem. Making the book was.
Selecting it. Structuring it. Sequencing years of work. Sitting in front of layout software for months making decisions I cared deeply about with very little desire to do it all myself. And I never found the right person to carry that part of the project with me.
I could probably have forced it through. Produced something. Put my name on the cover and finally ticked the box.
I didn't want the book badly enough to make the wrong one. So that one didn't happen either.
By then, the irony wasn't lost on me. When I was young and desperately wanted a book, I didn't have one. Years later, when I had enough work to fill one several times over, I still didn't make it.
Now I’m deep into another project, one that feels nothing like the previous ones. And the question has come back.
America. Exposed, unposed.
Having a book of my own doesn’t represent some milestone I need to reach anymore. I think that disappeared somewhere along the way. But more and more, I can see how this project could become one.
Not simply because there will eventually be a lot of photographs. No, I’m also starting to see relationships between pictures made months and thousands of miles apart. Some sit naturally together. Others disturb one another in ways I like. Certain notes belong beside an image; others would kill it stone dead. There are things I want to say and things I very deliberately don't.
I’m already thinking about all of that, even though there are states I haven’t photographed yet and I may read some of these relationships differently a year from now.
There is the website, of course.
It does exactly what I need it to do. When I meet someone and they ask what I'm doing, I can show them. They can see where I've been, understand enough of the project to know why I'm there, perhaps follow along afterwards.
It can grow as the project grows. A state gets added. More photographs appear. Another story. Another piece of the whole.
For now, that is the point. It is a tool for the project while it is happening. I have never seen it as the finished form.
The book is different.
Its pace feels closer to the way I work on the project, but more importantly, it makes me commit to a sequence.
When I pick up a photography book, I begin more or less where the photographer wants me to begin. I can stop, go backwards, close it and come back later, but the sequence is already there. This picture before that one. This spread. This pause. This page turn.
With my own book, I would have to make those decisions.
What comes first. What sits opposite what. When words enter and when they stay out. Whether an image needs space around it or another photograph pressing against it. Something seen twenty pages earlier can return without being repeated. A weak image can damage a strong one. Two ordinary pictures can suddenly become interesting because of what happens between them.
Those were some of the choices I studied in other photographers' books when I was young. I just wasn't the one making them.
Thirty-some years later, I catch myself thinking about page turns while much of the work still doesn't exist.
That is probably premature.
I rather like that.
I still have a lot of photographs to take.
Further thinking?
