First of all, I would like to thank each and everyone of you who supported my work and purchased a copy of the book. It might not be much to you, but it means a lot to me.
Second, if you’re one of the few people I met in person and told about this project in the past few months, please know that your feedback has helped a lot in completing this project, and I also want to thank you.
“Either way” is available on shop.fffred.com.
The object
One of the few things I knew is that I wanted to make a “classic” photography book. In my mind, classic meant “something not out of the ordinary” when it comes to the formal elements of the book, as an object. I wanted it to be very as simple as possible, with “as little design as possible”, without anything getting in the way of the pictures. I just wanted it to read as a classic photography book.
I tried a few variations that included annotations (locations, dates, name of the subjects, name of the events…), and even a fairly long introduction/foreword, but quickly decided against both. Providing more context felt like adding noise. This is how I ended up with this version, that doesn’t contain any extra information, outside of the pictures.
Theme and style
The theme was decided by the body of work itself. The only decision I made was to limit the selection geographically (Paris and its surroundings), which was itself limiting the timeframe (between the day I moved in, until the day I moved out of the city). Within these limits, everything else was up for discussion.
I didn’t count the exact number, but my collection contains thousands of pictures shot on film, with different cameras, on different film stocks, developed by different labs. It is inconsistent in that sense, but luckily for me, very consistent in terms of style and equipment: everything was mostly captured with fairly similar compact point and shoot cameras. Different models from different brands, but all within the same style. So the style of photography was pretty much set in stone ten years ago, I didn’t get to pick it for this book.
The only further style decision I made was to turn the entire book black and white, for visual unity and consistency. I think it would still have been consistent with an alternance of color and monochrome (the true split is probably like 60/40 in favor of color), but I just felt more comfortable with going with black and white for the entire book.
Sequencing and story
I actually read a few photography books and watched a few movies to help me with this one. The questions I had in mind were:
Does this picture add to the story, or is it a distraction?
What’s the story within this single frame?
Do these two pictures together tell a story?
Does adding this other one next to it help the story?
Should these two appear early, or late in the book?
Somewhere in my working files, there’s a different draft of this book, containing the exact same selection of pictures, in a different order, and with different pairings. I don’t know what to make of it, but I like that it’s sitting there. I haven’t looked at it since the day I exported the final file sent to the print company.
I find it really hard to put words on what makes the sequencing “feel right”. I tried my best to find a balance between “not telling a linear and explicit story” (which I definitely didn’t want) and “suggest that story, without using any words” (which I definitely wanted, but found very difficult to do).
I also thought about what someone told me about sequencing in movies: “Think about all the movies you’ve watched but didn’t fully understand. There are visual and narrative gaps, and your mind just makes stuff up out of these gaps, and that’s totally fine.”
Timing
I’m just going to paste a bit I wrote in a conversation I’ve recently had, about concept and direction:
it literally took me over ten years to work on and publish this first book. is the direction "right"? is the concept "strong enough"? i have no idea. could i keep working on it for a few more months to refine it and make it better? probably. but if i keep thinking this way i'll probably never release it. right now i just feel confident enough to put it out there in the world, and that's enough. i still have doubts, but these doubts are at their lowest level since i took these pictures, ten years ago. not sure if that makes sense, but that's how i feel about it.
Project management
Back in september last year, I could already tell that this project would take months, and not weeks. My target date for release was “next spring” when I was discussing about this project with people. In my mind, this was impossible to complete before the end of 2023.
At a large commercial scale, making books actually involves a lot of different people and functions: artists, art directors, editors, graphic designers, production managers, publishing, sales, finance, marketing... At a small scale, you basically have to do a little bit of everything on your own. And be the project manager. And this takes time.
Setting up a simple online store and everything technical that goes with it (like creating a subdomain and redirect to shopify? what?) also goes under project management. This was new to me.
Unit economics 101
I didn’t know what it actually cost to produce a book, until I worked on this project. I wouldn’t say that figuring it out is difficult (maybe because I just love a good spreadsheet), but I now have a better understanding of all the small compromises and decisions that need to happen, before anyone can get a book physically in their hands.
All I tried to do was just keep it all manageable on my own, and put the project in a position where it had a shot at breaking even. Not as a single binary metric of success, but just as a realistically attainable outcome. Artistic vision and financial viability are often perceived as two polar opposites, but it was important to me that they met in the middle.
From what I’ve researched, keeping it as small as possible and doing it all on my own was the only viable option. I have this newly formed opinion that it is close to impossible to make a living out of any printed thing. I’m not thinking about what projects can be like for bestseller artists, but about how hard it actually is for the other 99% who aren’t.
A critical look at my past work
This one has to be the main learning from this whole experience, only because of the concept of the project. Selecting and curating pictures taken over a decade ago allowed me to look at an entire body of work very differently, almost as if I didn’t take these pictures myself. I know this sounds weird but this working relationship between me and the younger me was - unexpectedly - what took the most space in my mind, when I was trying to put this book together.
And you know what? I can confidently say to the younger version of myself he was actually not bad. Probably a better photographer than he thought he was, despite him hating this label. There are some pictures in this book that I know I just wouldn’t be capable of capturing, today.
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The short version of it all is that I’m just proud.
I made a book.
The air feels a little lighter.