Publishers Note: For many years I have enjoyed the LensWork Magazine published by Brooks Jensen. Many of you I know are aware of LensWork and if you aren’t I strongly suggest you visit the LensWork website. This is one photo publication I anxiously await each month. I now receive the digital edition and keep all the editions on my iPad. I find LensWork a place for reflection and inspiration. Brooks has now come up with a new idea, a book publication project and I wanted to share it with our readers. Enjoy Brooks article and give some serious thought to entering some of your images.
We’re launching a new book publication project unlike any other we’ve ever seen. This book will feature the work of our readers — like you! perhaps you! — printed with the quality you’ve come to expect from us. This promises to be an important and substantial survey of the LensWork community, subscribers as well as non-subscribers.
For some years now, I’ve had two independent ideas rolling around in opposite corners of my brain, neither of them fully developed nor coming to fruition. Recently, they bumped into each other and an exciting LensWork book idea was born. The two ideas are micro-portfolios and a juried publication.
Idea #1 — Small Projects
You are all familiar with the Japanese form of poetry called the haiku — micro-sized poems that are restricted to just 17 syllables. Are you familiar with a similar concept in fiction writing called the six-word story? Background: Supposedly, Ernest Hemingway (who was famous for his brief and compact writing style) was offered a wager that he couldn’t write a story in just six words. “Easy,” he said, and immediately offered up the following:
Baby Shoes For Sale Never Worn
From this, an entire genre of writing was born which can be seen at a very entertaining website, www.sixwordstories.net.
I love the core idea of both the haiku and the six-word story: an art form of exceedingly compact style that both challenges us as producers, and as readers engages our visual imagination. Well, if this is a good idea for written art forms, why not for photographic ones, too?
Since the beginning of photography, the multiple-image project has been a part of our medium. Most famously, the “photo-essay” was a staple of such publications as the long-defunct Life and Look magazines. Of course, here at LensWork, we have a 23-year history of publishing multiple-image projects. We studiously avoid the more common photographic phenomenon we refer to as “greatest hits” photography.
Yes, but …
There is a world of difference between a LensWork portfolio of 12-20 images and a compact project that fits in half a dozen.
More to the point, you would be amazed how many absolutely wonderful portfolios we review and ultimately reject for LensWork because after the first half-dozen amazing images the project begins to repeat and/or devolve to secondary images.
We’ve noticed this for years and it has been a thorn in our selection process. Quite simply, we see so much wonderful work that is just too short for the portfolio format of LensWork!
In fact, this is so common that for years I’ve wondered why: Is there something inherent in photography that lends itself naturally to a deeper exploration than is possible in one image, but fully satisfied in just a few additional ones? I’ve been exploring this in my personal project I call Kokoro — small bodies of work each encapsulating a single subject or idea. (see www.brooksjensenarts.com). I publish them as PDFs, but they could just as easily be gathered together in book form. Perhaps I will, someday.
So what if there were, just to pick a number, a six-image presentation format for photography? Well first, there is an inherent problem in a six-image presentation: Where does one show it? It’s too many images for a “greatest hits” presentation — either framed above the fireplace or published in single-image magazines; it’s too short to be a book or even for publication as a portfolio in LensWork. To make matters worse, for LensWork we typically require 30-40 images in a submission so we have some editorial flexibility. Such a volume of work can be very intimidating for many photographers.
Elsewhere I’ve written about a similar problem with the fiction genre known as the short story. In essence, the format you and I now know as the short story simply didn’t exist until the magazine business became ubiquitous. Without a medium for publication, there was no outlet for an author to find an audience for a short piece of fiction — so it literally didn’t exist. Instead, writers wrote for the medium that could find an audience: long-form fiction which could easily be published as books. With the invention of the magazine business (roughly the mid-1800s), short fiction had a home and a new genre of writing and storytelling was popularized.
Similarly, where does the photographic project of a few images find a publication home? Simply said, without a vehicle for publication, the small, micro-project struggles to find its audience.
So, why not create a vehicle for such projects — a book of short … um … what shall we call these? I’m struggling for a name that defines them clearly:
• Micro-project (too brewery-sounding)
• Mini-portfolios? (too Austin Powers)
• Photo-essay? (too W. Eugene Smith)
• Short story? (too O. Henry)
• Sketches? (too Charles Dickens)
• Photographic sketch? (too Photoshop)
Perhaps a look at the content might help.
Small bodies of work tend fall into a number of styles or categories, the most common of which are these:
• Exploring a common subject
• Exploring an interesting place
• Exploring an idea or concept
• Personal diary, exposition
• Narrative story, often over time
• Extended portrait
There, of course, are other possibilities, but these are the most common.
I’ll bet every one of you reading this has at least a few small projects of images that fit one of the above categories and can be a perfect fit for presentation of half-a-dozen images you’d like to have seen as a group.
And I should add, these are not diptychs, triptychs, or grids, i.e., multiple images intended to be seen as a visual singularity in the same field of view or picture frame.
I see these small projects as a visual cousin to the haiku or six-word story — a compact expression of a single nature, possibly a story, definitely a theme, held together stylistically, and making a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Tight, distilled to the essentials, impactful, deeper than what is possible with a single image.
I still don’t know what to call them, but I see them in the work of almost every photographer.
Which brings me to the second idea that has been rolling around in my brain …
Idea #2 — Juried Publication
Juried events are fairly common in photography — in the form of magazine contests, gallery exhibitions, and even state fairs! We’ve always avoided that type of thing here, but in some sense, LensWork itself is “juried” — i.e., not everyone who submits work for review can be published. We do our best to bring you the best of what we see — and to some degree you subscribe to LensWork because you value our editorial process. That’s the nature of anthology publications.
We are firmly and unshakably committed to an open submission policy for LensWork itself. We never have, nor ever will, require a “submission fee” for LensWork as so many other magazines do.
However, if the resulting publication is an independent book, a fee-based, juried submission process does make sense. It’s sort of like a “kickstarter campaign” for a community book project — a way to both fund the project and get the books out into the world.
A book publication has other advantages too, especially compared to the average “magazine contest.” For example: the best possible printing, paper, and binding; cleaner layout and design without the clutter of advertising; and a life far longer than the 30-day cycle of a typical magazine, with a place of respect on bookshelves and libraries in homes and institutions.
Now Accepting Submissions
So, that’s what we are announcing now and putting into motion — a book publishing project that will give life to small projects of six images, selected from entries, funded by entry fees, printed with the museum-book quality you’ve come to expect from LensWork Publishing, including both black-and-white and color work.
First, everyone who enters will receive a copy of the finished book later this year — in August 2016.
Projects must be 6 images exactly (an arbitrary, but inflexible number that LensWork places on these projects a haiku-like structure).
• Each project will be presented in a 6-page spread in the finished book
• A project title is recommended
• Other optional components are at the photographer’s discretion — subtitle, a sentence or paragraph of introductory text, image titles or captions, poem, etc.
• Each project will include contact information for the photographer (e.g., email, website, Facebook)
Examples
In my Editor’s Comments in LensWork #117, I introduced my Kokoro project — a digital publication produced as a sort of personal, monthly magazine of my work. There is a backstory to this project that I didn’t mention. In my Road Show seminars of the last few years, I routinely proposed that we all already have enough images in our archives to keep us busy finishing projects for the rest of our lives. We might, I challenged them, simply mine more deeply our own image archives for projects — or possible projects — that lay hidden there. Deciding to test my own proposal and challenge myself with this idea, I started Kokoro a year ago. As I write this, I’ve now completed 62 small multiple-image presentations, none of which involved anything other than mining my own archives.
As I stated earlier, I know that every one of you reading this has at least one project that you’ve completed (or could complete!) that fits this type of six-image presentation. If you think not, I challenge you to review your archives. It may require a small shift of perspective away from the stand-alone image to assemble a presentation of exactly six images, but isn’t that a part of the creative process, too?
As examples, possibly as inspiration — hopefully as motivation — we are presenting three samples of six-image micro-projects (derived from my Kokoro work) on the following pages. You can use these examples to see the layout we envision for the finished book as well as examples of different types of projects that might apply to your work.
By the way, we’re calling this new LensWork community book publication:
Six-image Projects from LensWork Readers
All of us are on our own creative path, but we do share some things in common: recurring themes in our own work; fascination with some certain subject we photograph repeatedly; a “gathering” mentality that is the basis for image-making and keeping in our archives; the sense that our years of photography is a sort of personal diary of our creative life. All of this is the foundation for the completion of ever-so-many projects.
We’re excited to publish the best of your projects in book form, knowing they will be seen and preserved in book collections around the world.
Entry instructions for Seeing in SIXES
Brooks Jensen
February 2016
Author
Elevate Your Vision
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