In this course, students leveraged their commercial and documentary photography skills, Intuition-informed experimentation, and desire to create experimental photobooks and photozines. 

The goal was to increase students’ familiarity with paper, with folding, book formats and layouts, with binding—staple, sews, wire-o—and with experimenting and playing with and pushing the boundaries of their and my expectations. The book is a highly mutable format for displaying photographs, and it is my hope that this course has pushed students to look and think more critically when viewing and evaluating photobooks, and to think more deeply about how they can create engaging and innovative publications of their own.

Over six weeks, students were introduced to new bindings and formats, each building on the next. They were encouraged to develop each book concept and plan, using a dummy, or practice book, so that they could test out their planned form and content, paper, folding, and binding structures. Most book designers and producers will make many dummies before arriving at a final design, form, and structure. The final three weeks of the course allowed each student time to develop a concept and bring it to completion.

In the first class, students learned how to fold paper and construct an 8-page book using a single sheet of paper. In the second class, everyone brought in images of New York City to create a collaborative, collaged photozine titled Not Your City. From there, students learned to sew a pamphlet binding and to create a double pamphlet structure called a dos-a-dos binding. The last binding that students explored was the wire-o binding, allowing for the incorporation of unique paper stock, inconsistent sheet sizes, and related experimentation. To help push students to not treat photobooks as precious, each student was given a photobook to transform into something else by tearing, cutting, and/or gluing pages, removing pages, drawing on them, and altering the book cover, end papers, etc., only limited by their imagination. For each assigned book project, students often came up with new and innovative forms, contents, and bindings—many of which I had not seen before in a classroom setting. These processes and resulting book projects were thrilling for everyone to make and to see. The course was a great success, and we look forward to providing similar options in the future.

Tony White

Scholar-in-Residence, Photobooks & Artists’ Books