The Book as Child of the Internet by Frank Cost

The Book as Child of the Internet

Frank Cost

Fossil Press Rochester, New York

The Book as Child of the Internet Copyright ÂŠ 2007 Fossil Press and Frank Cost. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical or electronic means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Published by Fossil Press 100 Parkwood Avenue Rochester, New York 14620 email: pcost@frontiernet.net Illustration and design by Frank Cost ISBN 978-0-9770986-4-4

For my father Emil on the occasion of his 80th birthday

Tpyo

here, that’s good! Now I can stop worrying and start having fun. I might even start to make typographic errors on porpoise. No, I will try to exercise as much discipline as possible without letting it dampen my spirit. I want to tell you the story about a lifelong pursuit that has led to this book, but I don’t want the book to get in my way. So damn the typos and full stream ahead! The idea for this book grew out of a series of presentations that I have been giving over the past few years on the subject of emerging Internetbased systems for book publishing. In the fall of 2004 I made a presentation at the “Getting Into Print” symposium sponsored by the Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The title of my presentation was “I Publish, Therefore I Am.” Some of the ideas from that presentation found their way into my 2005 book entitled The New Medium of Print: Material Communication in the Internet Age. Because of that book I was invited to make presentations at conferences and venues in the U.S. as well as in England, Brazil, India, and for various audiences assembled by companies like Xerox, Kodak, HP, and others that are making the digital book publishing revolution possible with their new technologies. A little more than a year ago, in January of 2006, I was trying to come up with a new presentation for a Xerox customer meeting when a series of steps led me to a project that has taken up most of my leisure time and resulted in the publication of nearly twenty new books during the past year. Since embarking on this project, I have had the opportunity to talk about it with many audiences and with my students and colleagues at RIT. As I have done so the project evolved to the point where I began to feel the need to describe it in a book of its own. But to stay faithful to the spirit of the project, I did not want to spend a year of hard labor writing this book. So what you have in your hands is the product of about six days of work. I hope you enjoy it! Frank Cost March 13, 2007 Rochester, New York

vii

The Book as Child of the Internet

I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember how it began, but by the time I was seven or eight years old I had acquired a love of paper and the making of marks on paper and the folding and binding of paper into books that has grown stronger with each passing year. I have sometimes thought this love to be a kind of unhealthy obsession. It may have started with my first ballpoint pen, a red Bic medium point that I obtained when I began the second grade, and which remains the only disposable pen I have ever used continuously until the ink ran out completely. I remember near the end of its life, filling pages of blank notebook paper with red scribbles trying to hasten its expiration. I would completely cover one side of the paper with ink, and then turn the paper over and use it like carbon paper to transfer the next round of scribbles to a fresh sheet. By the time I was finished with a sheet it would have so much ink on it that it would be sticky. The ink would inevitably make its way onto my hands and clothes and would not wash off. I discovered that the pen would impress a groove into the paper, and into the sheets underneath, and that the paper would gain another dimension that could be felt and heard. The sound of a heavily drawn-on piece of writing paper folded and flexed between the fingers still brings me great pleasure.

Sometime around my ninth or tenth birthday, I received a red-barreled Parker 45 fountain pen as a gift, and my sensual relationship with paper and ink went into hyperdrive. The sclerotic ballpoint with its anemic gelatinous ink and sticky blobs every third word was no match for the elegant fountain pen from which dense black ink flowed onto the paper without resistance. I was to endure many years of difficulty in school as the only member of my class with a fountain pen. However, it was more likely the gray attachĂŠ case that I obtained the summer before entering the seventh grade that sealed my fate with the bullies.

The ballpoint pen induces graphic constipation.

The fountain pen encourages the free flow of graphic juices.

Little did I know at the time that the fountain pen was a high-tech improvement over the original ink pen cut from a goose quill. Some of the desks in our grade school classrooms bore the vestigial evidence of earlier days when students used simple steel-pointed pens. Circular cutouts near the front edge of the desks had been used to hold pots of black ink. Many stories of naughty boys and innocent girls with long braided pigtails have been told about those days of inkpots and steel pens. But by the time I began to experiment with steel pens and India ink, they no longer served as common tools of everyday life, but were used exclusively for drawing.

I think what I loved most about a steel pen and India ink was the binary quality of the line. Unlike the hated ballpoint pen that made a line of uniform width but variable density, the steel pen could be used to make a line that varied in width from a hairline to a gaping slash, from the slightest whisper to a scream and everything in between. And I discovered that I could express a whole range of emotions just by drawing simple lines. The lines were uniformly black, so they could be photocopied without losing any of their character. Both the India ink and the ideas expressed with it on fine smooth sheets of archival drawing paper seemed indelible.

I made these drawings almost thirty years ago, and although they have been reproduced using a series of complex digital operations from scanning through print, they still retain almost all of their original meaning. The images that you see on this page are nearly indistinguishable from the originals when viewed from a normal reading distance. If you take a magnifier to them, you will clearly see that the lines are the product of a digital reproduction process. But this does not significantly weaken or distort the message. On the next few pages Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll show you some other drawings from my youth that have also weathered the digital revolution well.

For many years the only way I could reproduce color drawings was to photograph them with a film camera and then make a color photo print. The meaning of this drawing would be lost without color. So the combination of color scanning and digital color printing has liberated this and other color drawings from the obscurity of my desk drawer.

I still love the clarity of pen drawing with black ink on white paper more than any other graphic art form. But, as with all arts, it requires a quiet space where ideas can germinate and large uninterrupted blocks of time are available for the execution. Both of these became increasingly difficult to secure as I headed into the mad rush of professional life. In the last few years of my youth my drawings became increasingly introspective, reflecting the frustrations that came with the loss of freedom. It has been nearly three decades since I wandered away from the drawing board in pursuit of food.

About the same time I began writing with my first fountain pen, I received another gift that established a second mode of graphic expression in my life. My first camera was a Kodak Starmite roll-film camera that was a 1960s version of the simple Kodak Brownie box camera that had launched the revolution in snapshot photography at the beginning of the century. I remember being disappointed in the camera because of its rather clunky styling. Compared to my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s camera, an elegant streamlined Kodak Pony 135, my camera looked like a Greyhound bus next to an E-type Jaguar.

My first camera: a clunky Kodak Brownie Starmite.

My fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s camera: a sleek Kodak Pony 135.

Me (on the left) coveting my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s camera while clutching the leather case. My brother Jim (right) ended up with the camera. Emil (center) did not care either way.

Fortunately, my relationship with my brother Jim, strained for years by his unjust inheritance of the camera that I alone had wanted so badly as a child, has been saved by Ebay. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a duplicate of my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s camera in excellent condition selling for less than three dollars with only eleven seconds to go on the auction. When I saw this, I immediately called my brother to start the process of reconciliation and healing.

This is my most cherished personal photograph, taken by my mother with my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kodak camera in 1968. The glider is a full-size replica that my father (in the white shirt) made of an original 1896 design by Octave Chanute, one of the American pioneers of aviation and a teacher of the Wright brothers. I was the test pilot.

In the sixth grade I was introduced by my teacher to the concept of a pinhole camera and challenged to make my own camera from materials I could find at home. My camera was a modified cigar box wrapped in black cloth electrical tape. On one side I cut a square hole, covered it with a piece of aluminum foil and pricked a tiny hole into it with a sewing needle. To load the camera with film, I used a light-tight changing bag. Inside the changing bag were a reel of film in a metal can, a pair of scissors, a tape dispenser, and the empty pinhole camera. To prepare the camera you had to reach into the changing bag, remove the reel of film from the metal can, cut a short piece of film from the reel with the scissors, and then use the tape to attach the piece of film to the inside of the camera opposite the pinhole. A small piece of electrical tape covered the pinhole. The camera was closed up and removed from the changing bag. The challenge then was to find a suitable subject to photograph, secure the camera against a solid surface so that it would not move around, and then try to estimate the proper period of time to uncover the pinhole to make a good exposure. My first successful photograph with the pinhole camera was an image of something that I did not at first recognize on the developed film. Running diagonally across an otherwise transparent background was a long black structure that looked like a geometrically stylized centipede. It took me quite a while before I realized that my camera had recorded an image of one of the overhead fluorescent light fixtures. It was at that instant that I understood how light from the visible world streaming through a small opening could strike a light-sensitive surface and cause a change to occur that could be rendered visible through chemical processing.

Around the same time we received a home darkroom set from my father as a holiday gift, and I was able to see the magic of development happen in the tray for the first time. From that moment until now I have practised photography as a medium of communication about things that I have witnessed in the material world. I do not think of my photography as art because it does not come from within me in the way that a pen drawing does. But it has allowed me to express my regard for things in the world that no art could.

The product of the darkroom was a print that never seemed to want to lie flat. This is because the print surface shrinks a little more than the underlying support when the print dries. To this day photographic prints, even when they are made from digital images, are curly. For a century or more people have been collecting these little curly prints and pasting them into family albums or throwing them into drawers. Many of the photographs that I made during my darkroom years were intended for print reproduction. This meant that a technician would re-photograph or scan my original to create the tooling for the printing process. I had little knowledge of how this all worked, nor any sense of control over the outcome.

In my quest to learn how to exercise the photographic process to achieve the visual results I wanted, I collected many books about the subject. My favorites were the Ansel Adams series on basic photography, not because of their content, which I found difficult to follow, but because of their form. They were bound in black cloth with silver foil embossing, printed on glossy coated paper and bound together in sewn signatures. The thing I loved most about them was the way they combined photographs and text on the same page. The page spread above is from the third book in the Adams series, The Print. The reproductions of famous Ansel Adams photographs in the books were nowhere near as beautiful as the originals, but their packaging in book form made up for this shortcoming in my mind. Unlike a print on a gallery wall, I could take these in my hand and fall asleep with them on the couch.

For a brief time I toyed with the idea of combining my two loves of drawing and photography. But after I finished this drawing I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think of what to do next. So I moved on.

The book has been around in its current form for a long time. The modern age of the book begins with a Venetian publisher/ printer named Aldus Manutius who is credited with making the first really usable books at the end of the fifteenth century. They were usable in the sense that they were small enough to carry around, and were printed in vernacular Italian using beautiful, highly readable typefaces designed for him by a man named Francesco Griffo. I took the photograph below of one of Aldusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most famous books, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, in the Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology. This book was published at the very end of the fifteenth century. While I was in the Cary Library, I photographed books produced in each of the following six centuries to illustrate the continuity of the form over time. The last example shown is my 2005 book, The New Medium of Print, published by the Cary Graphic Arts Press.

15th Century 30

16th Century

17th Century 31

18th Century

19th Century 32

20th Century

21st Century 33

Books have been • Persistent over centuries • Static • Linear • Technology-free to read • “Instant-on” • Archival • Universal

Books have NOT been • Easy to produce • Spontaneous • Automatic • Ephemeral • Personal • Private

? 36

What would happen if books could take on some or all of these non-traditional attributes?

In 1987 my wife Patty’s parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. We were both teaching at the time at Rochester Institute of Technology, and we had regular access to laboratories full of graphic arts equipment that we could use for experimentation. Patty collected snapshots and formal portraits from her siblings and relatives, and spent several weeks making halftone reproductions of them with a big commercial process camera. She then contact printed these halftones onto photographic paper. She wrote captions and set the type using a Compugraphic Mark IV typesetting machine. The output from this machine was also in the form of photographic paper. She then laid out each page by hand using a drawing table and T-square to align everything. She used one-point black plastic ruling tape to outline the edges of each photograph. She imposed the images in two-page spreads and reproduced them on heavy white cotton bond paper in reduced size on a Xerox copier. I gathered and folded the page spreads and sewed them into 16-page signatures. I then bound the signatures into finished books using hand-made marbled paper and linen book cloth. We made a total of six books. With the completion of the project came a realization about the power of a book to mask certain weaknesses of its individual components. The image quality in this book was poor by any comparison to commercial products then or now. But the overall presentation was so elegant and “book-like” that people didn’t make the comparison. They suspended their disbelief and accepted the book as a book, like any other. After this experience, I lost all interest in discussions of image quality, especially the kind of angels-on-the-head-of-apin discussions that we are famous for having in the halls of academia.

A decade after we produced the 50th wedding anniversary book, a new generation of digital imaging and printing technology had come into existence. RIT built a new laboratory for experimenting with a number of first generation digital color printing presses. One of these presses was a roll-fed machine made by a Belgian company called Xeikon. None of this would have mattered if it were not possible to convert my photographs into digital files. Fortunately the 1990s were years that brought wondrous developments on the digital imaging front. I was able to digitize my 35mm film images using the Kodak Photo CD process, a technology aimed at first at the consumer market, but later adapted to the needs of commercial users. It also became possible to easily scan and digitize photographic prints. In 1998 I produced a small edition of 20 books of a collection of photographs of my three children, using a combination of these new technologies, and then bound the printed pages using the same methods employed to finish the anniversary book ten years earlier. The photographs spanned a period of twelve years roughly corresponding to the first twelve years of my first childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life. I spent the better part of the summer of 1998 preparing the digital files and assembling the book using Quark on a slow computer with way too little memory. I then spent a few days in the printing laboratory trying to get the file through the digital front end of the Xeikon press so that we could print it. The quantity of the image data was just beyond the Xeikonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capability, so I had to engineer a number of work-arounds to get the file ready for print. By the time I had the printed book blocks in hand, I was exhausted. I managed to hand bind five copies before running out of summer. The remaining unbound copies sat in my closet for nine years before I paid the money to have them bound by a local commercial binder.

In the summer of 2001 I decided to produce a small edition of 100 copies of a book of photographs that I had collected over several previous years of volunteering as a photographer for the Hochstein Music School in Rochester, New York. As a counterpoint to the kinds of images that regularly appeared in official publications of the school, such as the brochure above, the photographs in Hochstein Music School: Between Performances showed the less formal side of life at the school. I printed the book on a desktop laser printer on my dining room table. I had the covers printed commercially and sent the covers and book blocks to a commercial bindery that specialized in short runs for binding and finishing.

The book was the first official publication of a new private press that Patty and I established that summer. The mission of Fossil Press is to â&#x20AC;&#x153;produce documentary work that will gain value with the passing of time.â&#x20AC;? The logo incorporates a photograph taken by Patty of me lying fossil-like on the floor of our kitchen.

By taking control of the printing, and by outsourcing the binding and finishing, the job of publishing a small edition of a book was reduced to a few weeks of labor. The Hochstein book straddled the divide between film and digital photography. Most of the photographs were produced on film. But a handful were the products of early two- and three-megapixel digital cameras that were the high-end devices at the turn of the millennium. The only evidence of their digital origin is the almost infinite depth of field compared to the film images. The unit cost for each book was somewhere around eight dollars. This included the paper, toner, cover printing, and binding, and even though this was a small edition of only 100 copies, we had several boxes of books to store before we could sell them. (I still have a few left after almost six years, in case youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re interested in buying a copy.) When this book was finished I could begin to see a clear set of trends from the 1987 publication of the wedding anniversary book to the 2001 publication of this one. The amount of labor required to produce a book, and the amount of time covered by the content were both decreasing. But it still took the better part of a summer vacation to publish a single book. This would soon change dramatically.

At the end of the summer of 2003 I published an album of photographs from that season, and I did the same thing at the end of the summer of 2004, using a similar approach to the Hochstein book, but in editions of a dozen or so books. By the summer of 2005 I had run out of time and energy. But then along came the revolution . . .

. . . which I am not going to talk about except to tell you to go look at some Web sites. Instead Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to concentrate on telling you about what I have been doing with these kinds of services for the past year or so.

Lulu.com is a publishing service that offers a number of standardized book formats in both soft and hard cover, black-andwhite or full color. The cost to publish a book on Lulu is zero. All you need to publish a book is the ability to create a set of PDF or Microsoft files, and an Internet connection. If your book has a lot of big pictures in it, you will need a broadband connection. Two other services worth looking at are Blurb.com and Lightningsource.com. With the exception of Lightning Source, most of these companies are start-ups and the market is changing on an almost monthly basis. So maybe thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all I will say about them now. This restraint will spare me the need to revise this part of the book too often.

Lightningsource.com

Blurb.com

January 8, 2006

It was a snowy Sunday afternoon in Rochester, and I was struggling with a request I had received from Xerox for a â&#x20AC;&#x153;headshotâ&#x20AC;? of myself that they could use in a promotional piece about an upcoming customer event at which I was to be the after-dinner speaker. My problem was that I had been using the same headshot of myself for more than five years, and I had come to really hate it.

The photograph was dated. It reflected a much earlier, and less intelligent, version of me. My hair was too long. My tie was too wide and too flowery. My shirt was too purple. My Adamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apple was too bulgy. And the picture was slightly blurry. . . . This was not the image of myself that I wished to show to the world anymore! But what to do? I rifled through my hard disk looking for alternatives. There had to be a more acceptable picture of myself that I could send to the PR people at Xerox! But all I could find were even worse pictures.

It soon became clear that none of these headshots cropped out of random snapshots on my hard drive would work. I was going to have to settle for the default photo that I hated . . . unless . . . 53

Why not shoot my own self-portrait?! I could set up my digital camera on a tripod and make my own headshot! I had an old Nikon Coolpix camera with a swiveling monitor that would allow me to see myself as I took the picture. What could be so difficult about that?

It soon became clear that this plan was not going to work. But by the time I gave up on the idea, I was beginning to have too much fun. I spent the next hour or so taking hundreds of pictures of myself. In the days of film, this simple act would have been a demonstration of utter irresponsibility with the household finances, and might have encouraged my family to call an ambulance. But, thankfully, digital photographs are free!*

*That is, once you have paid for the camera!

Well that was certainly fun! I thought at first that I would transfer the files to my hard drive and eventually convert them into little â&#x20AC;&#x153;emoticonsâ&#x20AC;? that I could use in correspondence, especially with my students. Rather than respond to their requests for extensions on assignment deadlines or special favors, I would just send them the appropriate faces.

But then I had an idea that solved both the problem of what to do about the headshot I hated and what I would say in my after-dinner presentation to the Xerox customer group. I would take this collection of pictures of myself and, using a template for another book that we had just published a few weeks before, I would create a new book of pictures of myself, and I would complete the book that same day! I titled the book Facing Myself.

To publish the book I created two PDF files. One file was for the cover of the book, and the other was for the book block. I uploaded these two files to the Lulu.com Web site. When you publish a book with Lulu, you can price the book however you want. The production cost for this 144 page blackand-white book was $7.41. I priced the book at $40. So my royalty on each copy sold is $40.00 – $7.41 = $32.59. Lulu takes a percentage of the royalty, leaving me with $26.07 for every book sold. The site allows customers to leave comments. Here’s one of the comments about Facing Myself that appeared shortly after I published the book: What is the real point to your book and how will your book help other people in life? Self-improvement is meant to help others get pass [sic] the pain in their life that they are struggling with. Pictures of yourself only gratifies yourself and has no real meaning to anyone else but you. Please take this book off the shelf and rethink what message you are really trying to send.

I think the writer reacted to Facing Myself in this way because I classified the book as a self-help book and not as humor. I hope the writer got the help he or she was seeking at the time. Too bad my book wasn’t given more of a chance.

Facing Myself was conceived, produced, and published on the afternoon of January 8, 2006. By the evening it was available for online purchase by anyone in the world who knew that it existed. I purchased two copies before I went to bed that night. As far as I know, there is only one other person in the world who has purchased the book independently. All other purchases have been because I have made it required reading for some of the classes and seminars that I teach. This may seem like a form of corruption, but I really do believe that the book can help people live better lives and be better people. So call me a dreamer. Anyway, the most important thing that the book taught me was that it is now possible for a book to go from concept to finished product available for purchase worldwide in a matter of only a few hours. A month after I published Facing Myself, I was in the city of Chennai in southern India with a trade delegation sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department. My purpose in being there was to make a presentation about new directions in book publishing at a conference for the Indian printing and publishing industry. I am not sure what the audience of Indian printers and publishers thought of Facing Myself, but they treated me very well nonetheless. After the conference, I was riding in the back of a taxi down one of the main roads south of the city center. I set my digital camera to shoot at five frames per second continuously and captured a sequence of 110 frames out the window. I thought that I would assemble the images in Windows Movie Maker to make a short jerky clip of a typical drive in Chennai. But when I returned to my hotel room and transferred the sequence of images to my computer, I was stunned by how much detail there was to see in the 110 frames that I had captured. And that was when the idea for Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai came to me.

The book took only a few hours to produce and publish, and its contents had come into existence in less than half a minute. When considered in the context of the story I have been telling, the book marks an extreme limit that can best be seen by studying the following table: BOOK

TIME TO PRODUCE

1987 Anniversary book 1998 RGE photo book 2001 Hochstein Music School 2006 Facing Myself 2006 Chennai

TIME SPAN COVERED

6 months 2 months 1 month 8 hours 4 hours

a lifetime 12 years 5 years 1 hour 22 seconds

Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai was the first in a series of similar books produced over the next year depicting extended moments in the form of sequences of connected photographs.

A sequence taken during the curtain call of a production of My Fair Lady at McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, New York. The sequence starts with the entrance of the two leads, and ends when the lights go down about 20 seconds later. We put this book in the annual fund-raising auction for the school where it became the object of a bidding contest. Little did the bidders know that the book was also available directly from Lulu.com for about twenty-five dollars.

McQuaid High School held its 2006 commencement ceremony at the Eastman Theatre on the evening of Sunday June 11. I shot this sequence holding my camera high above my head and plowing through the mass of exuberant graduates shortly after they had emerged from the theatre onto the street. This year the graduation celebration shared the street with another large and spirited crowd participating in the Rochester International Jazz Festival, thus compounding the excitement. This level of excitement can only be sustained for a few minutes before gravity begins to slowly reassert itself. I made a few more passes through the crowd after this one, but the climax had already passed.

Gus, under some coercion from me, hugged his sister Elaine after a theatre performance. This is the one and only time in recent years that I have witnessed him show such affection for his little sister. I captured the extended moment in a sequence of photographs and published this book the following morning.

Elaine sat in a chair near the window one day while she negotiated with me and her mother for a ride to the mall. I happened to have my camera and was able to capture about sixty frames before the negotiation ended. Rather than choose a few frames to print, I put all of them into this book.

Instead of yelling at Elaine to clean her room one Saturday morning in the spring of 2006, I decided to wait until she left the house so that I could get into the room and photograph it in great detail. The collection of photographs has since become a classic in the literature of teen psychology.

And I’m happy to announce that you can buy your own copy of Elaine’s Room from Lulu.com for only $30!

On January 8, 2007, I wanted to do something special to celebrate the one year anniversary of Facing Myself. I decided to set up the camera and shoot a new series of self-portraits for a commemorative sequel. The sequel has not done any better on the market than the original. But Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve reprinted the front cover and introduction on the next two pages, just in case you may be looking for a novel gift for that certain someone.

Introduction

ne year ago today, January 8, 2006, the first edition of Facing Myself was conceived, produced, and published during the afternoon and evening of that single day. Since then the book has won accolades from critics and fans on four continents (North and South America, Europe and Asia). The book was intended to dramatize the capabilities of automated digital print production systems connected to the Internet. It also inaugurated a series of new books all produced and published in a matter of hours using these marvelous new technologies. As a result of this work, I have been able to expand the reach of my photography in ways that I never would have imagined possible just a few short years ago. Books have always until now been the product of sustained hard work over long periods of time. So the content of books was not something to be settled upon lightly. The grueling amount of work required to produce a book would not tolerate a frivolous intent of author or publisher. Fortunately, we live in an age when creating and publishing a book takes about as much time as it used to take to make the first good photographic print in the darkroom. So I can afford to experiment. If the book fails, I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cry for long, only having invested a half dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in it. (The most time-consuming part of the entire process is writing this brief introduction.) Digital technologies have liberated me from the prison of the single frame. If you study this entire book page by page, you will acquire a much stronger impression of the subject than any one single frame could possibly reveal. (And after finishing the book you may wish that you had been spared even that.) Still, I hope you are pleased enough with this book to hold onto it and maybe pass it on to your beneficiaries as one of your cherished possessions when you die. Moreover, I hope you will find inspiration in it to see new possibilities for print in the Internet age and perhaps even to do your own book when you have a little free time. Frank Cost January 8, 2007 Rochester, New York

Lessons

Learned

Electronic Display

• Compresses time and space • “Surfing” When I gave people access to the contents of Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai as a PDF file viewable on the computer, I observed an interesting phenomenon. Nobody took the time to study any of the individual frames. They instinctively used the page-down key to speed through the book as though it were a film clip. Later I decided that I would make it easier for people to surf the book by making a video clip and uploading it to YouTube. If you go there and search for the title, you can watch it now.

• Expands time and space • “Deep sea diving” The printed book invites the reader to slow down and study the images. My next-door neighbor is originally from the south of India near Chennai. When I showed him Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai, he spent more than twenty-two minutes looking through it before asking whether he could borrow it for a while. I realized that the print medium allows me to expand time and space for my reader, whereas electronic media lend themselves to the compression of time and space. It’s important to choose the right medium.

Then

In the days of the darkroom, it often took several hours to produce the first finished print from a negative. This is because there was rarely a direct mapping from the densities on the film negative to the desired tones in the final print. Thus each print required that the light from the enlarger be controlled by â&#x20AC;&#x153;dodging and burningâ&#x20AC;? using a variety of techniques. For some images this required the fabrication of cardboard masks to allow more or less light to strike some areas of the print. So each print presented a unique set of engineering problems to be solved. The end product was a single print. The manipulations had to be repeated for each subsequent print.

Now

I can program my digital camera to produce print-ready files that can be automatically dropped into pre-designed templates. Single frames can still be dodged and burned electronically, but I have found that when images are part of a sequence, the legibility of each image is improved by the context of the surrounding images. All but one of the sequence books I have made have required no manipulation of the digital images once they have been captured. The exception is a book of images that I purposely stylized for a specific graphic effect. Most of these books take me about the same amount of time to make as it once took to make a typical first good print from a film negative in the darkroom.

Then

Time to generate content: Lifetime

Now

Time to generate content: Seconds

Then

Decisive Moment Henri Cartier-Bresson coined this term and it has become the underlying aesthetic of much single-frame photography ever since. Here’s how he described it: “Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture—except for just one thing that seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of view. You follow his progress through the viewfinder. You wait and wait, and then finally you press the button—and you depart with the feeling (though you don’t know why) that you’ve really got something. Later, to substantiate this, you can take a print of this picture, trace on it the geometric figures which come up under analysis, and you’ll observe that, if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.” (CartierBresson, The Decisive Moment, Simon and Shuster 1952)

Now

Extended Moment The series of books that started with Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai has liberated me from the tyranny of the decisive moment. I describe this in Moment of Graduation as follows: â&#x20AC;&#x153;There are all kinds of ways to depict an event like this photographically. In years past I would have photographed a collection of disjointed moments. I like this collection better because all of these images are connected to one another. I used a digital camera shooting continuously at three frames per second. I set the shutter speed slow enough to indicate some motion without being too blurry. Working at this speed and without premeditation it is largely by chance that these images came into being. A few of the frames might actually work as stand-alone photographs. But the context provided by the surrounding images increases the value of each individual frame. Some of the frames would have little solo value, but serve well as transitional images and therefore find their true value and purpose in the company of the others.â&#x20AC;?

Concluding Thoughts For centuries we have lived in a world where books were difficult to produce and expensive to publish. This restricted our thinking about what books could be. After so much time living in a little box, it is hard to imagine that there are any other possibilities. But with the publication of Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai, I realized that I had discovered another corner in a much larger space, and that this corner was where new ideas about books could germinate. The traditional book demanded that its content have a certain gravity and importance before it would make itself available as a medium of presentation. The new book, pro-

duced with digital content-creation tools, the Internet, and automated digital printing processes, opens itself for all kinds of new uses, most of which remain undreamed of at the time of this writing. But as ephemeral or whimsical as many of the books I have been producing during the past year are, they are still books that will go onto the shelf and remain accessible for decades and perhaps even centuries to come. I am happy to know that some day, long after I have departed this world, one of my children or grandchildren, or perhaps even a completely unrelated future person, will find one of these books and briefly resurrect my love for the subject while slowly paging through it.

About the Author Frank Cost is a professor in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology where he also serves as associate dean. The RIT College of Imaging Arts & Sciences offers a wide range of superb academic programs in art, craft, design, print media, new media, photography, and film & animation, and is the coolest place to work in North America. He is co-director of the Printing Industry Center at RIT, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Center. His research focuses on the impact of digital technology and digital culture on print communications. He advises technology manufacturers seeking to understand the real needs of the industry. If you enjoyed reading this book, check out his other recent book, The New Medium of Print: Material Communication in the Internet Age, published by the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press. You can contact him for his most recent headshot at frank.cost@rit.edu.

We are a private press in Rochester, New York, devoted to producing documentary work that will gain value with the passing of time.

email: pcost@frontiernet.net