Photographers' Sketchbooks

One misconception about working photographers, whether editorial photographers, artists, or difficult to classify contemporary photographers (they do fashion work, but also have gallery exhibits) is that they “just” take photographs. Paul Graham’s “Unreasonable Apple" focuses on the art world’s misunderstanding of vérité photography, "just snapping one’s surroundings." But a similar misunderstanding exists around photography in general. Even with elaborate lighting and models, the photographic artifact is the result of an individual "just" taking a photo. Of course most people can imagine a photographer spending her time editing with Lightroom, sending and collecting on invoices, doing administrative tasks. But until "Photographers’ Sketchbooks" there has been very little documentation of the massive amount of time, the elaborate creative process, that fills out "just" taking photographs.

What the book does is present short chapters on 43 photographers, offering brief insights into their sketchbooks (and whatever other mediums they use to collect/edit/process photos, books and larger projects). The book could be titled “Photographers’ Processes”; there are contact sheets, prints on the floor, screen grabs, binders, Moleskins, antique digital equipment and book dummies/maquettes only a few people ever see.

The design is excellent and manages to transform what could have been bad chaos into great chaos. The book is an artifact that can feel like a flipping through a printed out version of the best Tumblr you’ve seen, yet it’s a reminder of the surprises that offline materials continue to have. Photographers still have a strong desire to handle their images. The printing on matte paper, tight margins and construction of the volume feels like a type of sketchbook itself, so you hold a very substantial sketchbook about sketchbooks. One quibble is the cover design; the neat, dull slices are nothing like the elegant mess inside.

There are two ways to use the book. Page linearly through the photographers, or select a name from the contents. The second approach is to start paging through the book, allow an image to catch your attention and then flip back to the introduction for that photographer and find out more. This is a dense meta-book about book making and editing, and pushes some of the design of Errata Editions books-on-books series forward. It seamlessly switches between offering visual pleasure around close-ups of photo layout, editing and book design materials, but then injects the occasional full-page photograph to punctuate the beginning and end result of all this process.

I know Stephen and Bryan, so I’m not going to enthuse about their essays, but instead compliment them on the one or two paragraph introductions they provide for every photographer. This a crucial ingredient for making good chaos; the succinct introductions offer a uniform voice across artists working with wildly different subject matters and processes.

One of the big achievements of “Photographers’ Sketchbooks” is that it is as inside baseball as it gets for photoland. There is no translation for a wider audience, yet non-photographers and anyone engaged in a creative practice could pick the book up, read a few examples, and stumble upon a process idea for something they are working on. It’s remarkable that each profile offers only slightly more text and photos than the typical 10-photos-3-paragraph profile found online. Whereas those are often a passing glance at the snow dusting a glacier, “Photographers’ Sketchbooks” is a core sample.