PHOTO books today | Symposium II

Creating, Publishing, Selling, Collecting: Why and How

Keynote Lecture: Friday, February 3rd, 2017  7:30 pm  

Symposium: Saturday, February 4th, 2017    9:00am- 5:30pm

Early Registration:   $90.00 general, $45.00 students with ID

Lunch included

Location:                                                                                                                               
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street   San Francisco, CA

Topics will include:

• Why a Book?

Thinking through the process. 

What makes a compelling (and collectible) photo book?

· Building the photo book

Print on Demand. High-end, crafted editions. Collaboration.

Services for hire.

· Finding and connecting with the audience

How to get your book noticed. 

Dealers. Distributors. Libraries. Private collectors.

· Photo-based artists’ books

Book-thinking beyond the monograph.  

DIY options.

· The advantages and limitations of digital technology

Electronic tools. 

The virtues of materiality.

Presenter Bios

Peter Bogardus is a photographer and book artist who works in New York City. His books are made by hand, employing photographic images printed from copper photogravure plates juxtaposed with text printed from metal type, or wood blocks. He endeavors to receive inspiration from Africa through the lens of a large-format camera, and from the resonance of human encounter, resulting in Touba New York, about Sufism from Senegal, Seventeen Trees,taking notable trees as a springboard, and Hulu Selam,a trilogy about different aspects of spiritual life in Ethiopia, among others. His work has been widely exhibited and is held in many prominent collections.

Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican, born in 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. Using the book form as his main medium Alejandro looks to create montages and stories that expand the narrative of these issues. Hiswork has been published internationally in magazines such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, View, the Guardian, le Monde, Stern, PDN, the New Yorker, the Independent, Monocle and Wallpaper among others.

Luis Delgado’s photographic work integrates narrative and sequential still images to create idea-driven content that answers what cannot be answered and to answer what cannot be questioned. His work has evolved from documentary to a more personal style using humor, and constructed images which reflects his Mexican origins and his European humanist education, with an American quest for the new. Publishing under his own imprint, Malulu Editions, his prints and artist books have been widely exhibited and are held by many museums, institutions and private collectors.

John DeMerritt has operated an independent custom bindery in Emeryville, CA, since 1995. Clients include Aperture Foundation, Apple Computer, Richard Barnes, Electric Works, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, Fraenkel Gallery, Michael Light, David Maisel, Richard Misrach, Stanford University, and William Wiley. With his wife, Nora Pauwels, he has recently launched an imprint specializing in photo books, DeMerritt/Pauwels Editions.

David Freund earned an MFA in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. Currently he is Professor Emeritus of Photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he chaired its Visual Arts program for twenty years. His photographs created for a National Endowment for the Arts grant showed gas station environments in 47 states. His work has been exhibited at Light Gallery in New York, MoMA P.S. 1, and the George Eastman House. Among collections with his work are the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. He is presently on the Board of Directors of the Ephemera Society of America. Freund is represented by the Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California.

Jeff Gunderson has been the Librarian and Archivist at the Anne Bremer Memorial Library of the San Francisco Art Institute since 1981. Gunderson is the author of the title essay for The Moment of Seeing: Minor White and the California School of Fine Arts, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006).  His introductory essay to Black Power/Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch was published in September, 2012 by the Pirkle Jones Trust. He is currently working on a collection of essays about open water swimming. 

Sangyon Joo is Director of Datz Press and the Datz Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea. Her work is focused primarily on fine art photography, promoting cross-cultural exchange between Korea and the United States. She received her BFA from Seoul National University and MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Currently, she lives and works both in Seoul and New York.

Ken Light is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley. For more than 45 years he has worked as a freelance documentary photographer, focusing on social issues. His work has been published in nine books, including, What’s Going On?, Coal Hollow, Delta Time, To The Promised Land, With These Hands, Texas Death Row and Valley of Shadows and Dreams. He is the author of Witness in Our Time: Lives of Working Documentary Photographers, now in its second edition.

Clifton Meador is Chair of the Department of Art at Appalachian State University. Meador is an artist whose work combines photography, writing, printmaking, and design to explore how history, narrative, and place shape the space of the book. He has been the recipient of many grants and fellowships, most notably two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, and a Fulbright Scholar Award to the Republic of Georgia. His work is featured in many collections including the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Yale Art of the Book collection.

Dana Smith is a multimedia artist practicing photography and digital printing in the context of fine art prints, painting and artist publications. She received her MFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992, and in 2004 started a fine art digital press, Dana Dana Dana Limited Editions, in San Francisco’s Mission district. Her work is in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions worldwide.

Jacqueline Thurston is an artist, writer, and Professor Emerita at San Jose State University. She is twice the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and was a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt. Thurston's photographs are in major national and international museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Library of Congress; the International Museum of Photography; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Cantor Museum; the Bibliotheque Nationale, France; and the Bibliotheque Alexandria, Egypt.

Adrian Octavius Walker’s self-published book My Lens, Our Ferguson (2015), a documentation of the Ferguson, MO protests, was shortlisted for a 2015 Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook award. Images from that book were featured in a solo exhibition last year at the University of Alabama and in five group exhibitions internationally. Originally from St. Louis, Walker moved to Oakland in 2016, where he works as an editor for the art and technology company VSCO.

Marshall Weber is co-founder of Booklyn, an educational non-profit that publishes and distributes artworks and produces exhibitions internationally. A prolific artist and prominent authority on artists’ books and artists’ photo books, he has lectured and curated exhibitions throughout the world and has represented the work of hundreds of artists and photographers. Along the way he has initiated collaborative artworks and events with many artists, including Xu Bing, Michael Kempson, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, and Stephen Dupont. He received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981.

Stephen Woodall is Collections Specialist at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he is heading a project to create greater public and scholarly engagement with the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books, including digital augmentation of books in the collection. From 2008-2014 he was director of Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts, and from 1996-2008 artistic director at the San Francisco Center for the Book. He has served for several years on the board of PhotoAlliance. 

This program has been scheduled to lead into the Codex Foundation's 6th Biennial International Book Fair at Craneway Pavilion, Richmond, CA, Feb. 5-8

Views from the 2015 Photo Books Symposium I :

Support also comes from our affiliate partner the San Francisco Art Institute.