Photobook Practice Group Info Session
Join us April 6th @ 7 pm for Photobook Practice Groups Info Session, meet the facilitators and ask questions. Info sessions are designed to help you choose the group that best fits your creative practice. Info session attendees will be given early access passes to practice group registration.
Practice groups are collaborative, meet weekly, and give participants the opportunity to learn from one another by practicing together and sharing work for supporting feedback.
Practice groups are open to everyone. A non-refundable donation in any amount is encouraged and gratefully accepted. Donations support both the facilitator and the Six Feet Photography Project. Currently, practice groups do not have any additional funding and your contributions are deeply appreciated.
Upcoming Practice Groups Part I:
Sequencing and Narratives with Erik Mace
Explore how small changes in how you sequence your work can impact your narratives and their emotional tension. We’ll consider the influence of sequencing choices, the pauses between images, and the associations that develop through those choices. If you’re new to image sequencing or an image maker who would like to work through a specific project, this group will help you think about how multiple images communicate in relation to themselves. Whether you’re interested in photo series, books, or digital formats, you’ll have the opportunity to test out and discuss sequence variations with the group.
Participants should either come with an in-progress project or be interested in starting a new project based on an existing set of photos. The goal by the end of the practice group is for each participant to have a final sequence of images to use for a book project.
Pictures Plus with Eric William Carroll
Should a photo book just contain photographs? What happens when moving image, text, and ephemera are brought into the mix? What about other sensorial experiences such as audio, smell, and touch? At what point does it cease to be a photo book?
Pictures Plus encourages its participants to think broadly about their potential photo book projects by including a variety of non-photographic material in order to heighten the impact of their work. We’ll begin by looking at a series of books by photographers who’ve pushed the boundaries of the medium with their inclusiveness of all media. Through creative prompts and group discussions we’ll test out a variety of photographic and non-photographic combinations. The goal by the end of the practice group is that each participant will have a working digital draft of their experimental photo book to share.
Upcoming Practice Groups Part II:
The Hands-on Maquette with Eric William Carroll
Creating a photobook with your own hands can be a labor of love and a technically frustrating experience. This collaborative practice group will focus on the production of a hand-made photobook using a combination of traditional and non-traditional approaches. We’ll begin by deconstructing the book format and opening up the process to include experimental, DIY and DIT (do it together) approaches.
This practice group is appropriate for anyone curious about the hand-made photobook, regardless of whether or not you’ve made a book before. If you’re interested in creating a photobook maquette that preserves the artist’s hand, this group is for you.
Over the eight weeks we’ll work together on finding a form appropriate for your project and troubleshoot and adapt as the inevitable hurdles present themselves. Participants should have a sequenced project ready to work with and ideally have access to a laser or inkjet printer. Familiarity with Photoshop is a plus, but not necessary.
Self-Publishing a Photobook with Erik Mace
Self-publishing a photobook can be a beautifully liberating experience for a photographer. Taking complete control of our narratives; using design to fully immerse our readers; being able to experience a physical set of images like no other form — three of the many reasons the book has endured in our digital age.
Whether the book making process has felt overwhelming, or this will be your tenth book, this practice group will be rich with discussion, best practices, and collective feedback on your book project.
Over our 8 weeks together, we’ll explore the basics of book design, typography, and production, as well as work through the mechanics of putting a book together for printing through one of the many on demand printers available. Participants should come prepared with a final sequence of work. Experience and/or access to design software such as Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher will be helpful, but we’ll be sure to consider other tools and methods as well, to accommodate all participants at their experience level.
By the end of the session, each participant will have a final PDF or printed maquette of their photobook, ready for the world!
Erik Mace is a photographer and designer who splits his time between Asheville, NC and Brooklyn, NY. His work is focused on memory and introspection, exploring personal history through photography and adjacent media. Eriks projects begin a specific memory from childhood, growing into broader discussions of identity and American life, observing the past to seek understanding of the present. He has self-published multiple photo books — most recently Tokens, which examines catalog culture and the bittersweet delight of consumption.
Eric William Carroll’s work on photography, science, and nature explores the differences in how we experience, represent, and organize the world. Through his photographs, installations, and performances, Carroll creates visual and emotional connections that span enormous distances in space and time. At the heart of his practice is a genuine sense of curiosity that questions traditional binary relationships.
Carroll’s work has been shown widely and has been included in exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Aperture Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Pier 24 Photography, among others. Carroll has participated in residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Rayko Photo Center and the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary, and was the winner of the 2012 Baum Award for Emerging Photographers. Born and raised in the Midwest, Carroll currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.