2010-05-05

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #11. February 2010


For a definition of "Dèrive" see here. For the entire ongoing series of detours around the Garibaldi building site see here.

Blurb and an old flame. Part one

It's my turn to get interested in photo books. Frankly I have some doubt, on the ethic side, about the opportunity to participate in the great consumption of natural resources that the photographic allows. Digital, for me, represented a renewed interest in the thing for its seemingly low profile in resource hungriness. But there is a side in which its undeniable that an Art object needs to be an object of desire too. So online books in some ways seem to be a sort of sustainable compromise. The great advantage is that in the end only the strict demanded ones get printed and thanks to the parallel pdf version the option in circulation may not suffer from any restriction.

After having evaluated several services I finally landed to blurb for my first attempts. I'm aware that it may not be the best one. But it seems certainly the most frequented one in photographic realm.

Having made the first step the second one that comes in immediately after is how to do it. As a Humanist with a romantic side, I've always loved well composed and printed books. It is incredible the amount of knowledge involved in a book design, in our era of wysigs it is easy to forget about it. Every thing seems easy and only a matter to test and try. The results, however, are not always so good, as you may easily find out by yourself by looking at several previews available online. Plus I have a personal dismay for the huge amount of time that the test and try practice requires. So I went to a library and bought an old book making manual, just at least have an idea of what was needed and discovered the joys of the material practice of the cut and paste, no not the one you perform with a computer, but the one you make with a ruler and a cutter to build up a model of what you are looking for.

1 comment:

Kent Wiley said...

Be curious to hear what you come up with, Mauro.