Katherine Carlson Photography: Researched Books

As I’d been sick when this was happening, I looked into books I already owned to find some inspiration for The Book. I’ve got a decently wide array of photo books, so I had selected several to act as models.

1.) Sante, Luc. Evidence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. Print.

This book is a compilation of early crime scene photographs from 1910-1920 that the author discovered had been rescued from a massive purge of the NYPD’s archives in the ‘60s. Despite the rescue of the photographic plates, many had been neglected and largely all of the corresponding files/documentation was lost. Sante compiled the most compelling images and all available information regarding them into this book, presenting the plates one to a page, with a plate number to correspond to the back of the book.

The use of plate numbers appealed to me, as these were all originally ambrotypes, so it relates materialistically to my project. Beyond that, I could see myself using plate identification if I were to eventually have an index of full-plate thumbnails. I felt that the minimalism to the page was important to not detract from the subject matter, and I would likely use a similar approach with little to no text on each page. The way the book is broken up into components that allow the viewer increasing amounts of contextual information is practical for my purposes, as well; it worked in his favor to allow the reader to experience the horror of the photos before finding out the details that remain about the crime.

2.) Busse, Dietmar, and Tom Breidenbach. Flower Album. New York: PowerHouse, 2003. Print.

In the book, Busse ‘tries on’ different imagined flowers, using his body as a canvas; he also does simpler arrangements of decomposed and recomposed plant specimens. Like the last book, Busse’s book uses highly minimal text on the photo pages, which I think is highly effective in allowing the reader to become absorbed in the images without getting distracted by unnecessary reading.

Also like the last book, there is an image index with specific species information for the plants used in each image, corresponding with page numbers and each piece’s title. The images themselves on the page were what caught my eye, though- all the images are full bleeds, allowing the image to sprawl across the page. I felt, more so than with Sante’s book, that I could be totally immersed in the pictures I was viewing. While with Sante’s found photographs the graphic nature really needed a border to contain them (to keep them from getting too close to us!) I think that my own work really needs the entirety of the page.

3.) Libbrecht, Kenneth George. The Little Book of Snowflakes. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur, 2004. Print.

This tiny book isn’t exactly an art book per se… more like one of those bargain books you’d get at Barnes & Noble. That being said, though, it’s got an abundance of different formats in the book that each work a little differently depending on the corresponding text and/or images. If I want to end up covering details from my plates, or provide a plate index, I think the grid format used on several of the pages could work really well, providing enough information without allowing anything to be too decipherable.

To get to the root of why I chose this book, I kept closing and opening it until I realized that I was smitten with the square format. I’m a sucker for symmetry. The plate details could work really well as large panoramas (landscape 8x10, for example) but I think that the 2:1 ratio should work well. This book appears to be the same size as the smallest square option through the Lightroom interface for Blurb.