Evaluating and Refining Your Concept
Well done. After batting around thoughts with friends and colleagues, you’ve hit upon a great idea. Perhaps you’ve been working on it for the last twenty years, or perhaps it came to you in a fitful dream last night. It doesn’t matter. Before you go any further, let’s take a good hard look at whether or not it’s a great book idea. The Big Idea The single most troublesome area for photographers is defining the concept of the book. A great book, as with a great photography project, is well-conceived and has a clearly defined subject. Donna Wingate, a bibliophile who currently works with book packager Marquand Books of Seattle and formerly headed D.A.P.’s (Distributed Art Publishers) publishing program, perfectly sums up the situation: Emerging artists are faced with greater challenges. They have to compete for bookstore shelf space with recognized names (and, indeed, some living legends) who are producing vital bodies of work that are published with important museum exhibitions and the support system of their galleries and other cultural institutions. What really stands out when it comes to emerging talent is a project that can answer the simple question, “What is this book about?” This, then, is the fundamental question to ask oneself as a photographer. What is your project about? Taking into account things like subject matter, timeliness, and the current status of one’s career will ultimately influence what sort of book you decide to pursue for publication. The “big idea” of a book can take any infinite number of forms, and can be broad or narrow. One recent example is Andrew Zuckerman’s newest book, Bird
30 — The Nuts and Bolts of the Publishing World
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Andrew Zuckerman, Bird (Chronicle Books, 2009)
(Chronicle Books, 2009), which takes a very straightforward and beloved subject matter—birds from around the world—and creates a catalog of species with stunning photographs that appeal to a very broad audience. Zuckerman is a talented studio photographer, and, along with his previous title, Creature (Chronicle Books, 2007), his books have brought him a certain measure of fame, but the birds themselves are the main draw and selling point for a subject-driven book like this. A more narrowly defined (and deceptively titled book) is Martin Parr’s Mexico (Chris Boot, 2006). While the title of the book is the name of the country, the book contains a very particular view of tourism and economics as seen in border towns of the U.S./Mexico border. The photographs are all shot in Parr’s signature hyper-saturated style, and while the title indicates a broad subject, it is in fact Parr’s photographic vision and take on the crass side of globalization that is more properly the subject of the book. Even with Parr’s international reputation within the fine-art-photography community, sales of Mexico would have been well under 5,000 copies, while the broad public appeal of birds will guarantee that Zuckerman’s Bird will sell ten times as many copies. Who Is Your Audience? Defining the audience for your book is nearly as important as producing the work itself. Many aspiring photographers make the mistake of assuming their book or project has a huge potential audience: “everyone who loves photography,” or “all dog owners,” or “anyone who travels.” For the most part, broad generalizations like this are not true. Most readers, like most art and photography connoisseurs, have
31 — Evaluating and Refining Your Concept
Martin Parr, Mexico (Aperture, 2006)
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particular tastes, which means that you must define a core audience to whom you can tailor and target your book. Sometimes, the way other industries market to their audiences can provide clues for how to identify and market to your own community. If your project is subject-driven, start building a library of other books about this same subject. Researching magazine sales and online groups devoted to the subject matter is another great way to determine the potential size of an audience. While there is no hard-and-fast rule on how large a potential audience for a particular title needs to be, there is some common thinking that we have discovered in talking with publishers from around the world. In the world of art- and photography-book publishing, most publishers see three thousand copies as the upper limit of a book’s potential market, and the range of quantities varies widely and depends on various factors, including cross-marketing potential, name recognition of the photographer, and supporting activities, such as exhibitions or corporate sponsorship. In truth, small fine-art publishers will print as few as five hundred to a thousand copies of a book, while the larger houses search for titles that have a potential audience of eight to ten thousand copies or more. The particular artistic vision of one artist—Lee Friedlander, for example—may have a very limited audience, whereas a universal theme rendered through easily accessible photographs—like Andrew Zuckerman’s Bird—may sell upwards of fifty thousand books. S, M, L, XL Book Projects Some photography projects make great magazine articles but don’t have enough depth to sustain an entire book, whereas some seemingly narrow magazine
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Paul Fusco, RFK Funeral Train (Umbrage Editions/Magnum Photos, 2000)
articles end up filling the pages of a book perfectly; other photography projects are overly ambitious, bordering on encyclopedic in length. Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing a very narrow but deep subject—vernacular domestic and industrial architecture such as blast furnaces and suburban German homes—for over fifty years. They have published many books from this overarching project, and each book focuses on a small slice of the larger project. Considering how to organize and categorize your project at the start, as well as visualizing the end at the early stages, is paramount to the success of a book. Writing a summary or a brief outline of an intended photography project can often help you to realize the depth and breadth of the project, and to help approach it systematically. Sometimes a project is strictly limited simply by circumstance. Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train (Umbrage Editions/Magnum Photos, 2000) is a perfect example of such a project. The photographer rode on the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s body from New York City to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. in 1968, making photographs of the mourners who gathered beside the railroad tracks along the length of the journey. At the other end of the spectrum is the career-long photographic project of husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher. Taking increasingly obsolete industrial architecture as their subject, they have applied a rigorous intellectual and formalist aesthetic to their photographic practice, producing a body of work that continued until Bernd’s death in 2007. From this vast body of work of an equally extensive subject have come numerous, diligently edited books that focus on specific aspects of their oeuvre.
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| Abell, Sam Abell: The Photographic Life
| Selection of contemporary collectible photo books: Michael Schmelling, The Plan (J&L Books, 2009) Daido Moriyama, Remix (Edition Kamel Mennour, 2004) Wendell Steavenson, Georgian Spring, A Magnum Journal (Chris Boot Ltd., 2009) opposite page: Hiroshi Sugimoto, In Praise of Shadows (Korinsha, 1999) Geert Van Kesteren, Baghdad Calling (episode publishers, 2008) Esko Männikkö, Naarashauki, The Female Pike (self-published, 2000) Martin Parr, Martin Parr in India 1984–2009 (Photoink, 2010)