Wednesday, April 23, 2008

THIS OLD TEXAS PLACE 43


With this entry, my "This Old Texas Place" series comes to an end. I was only shooting for six days and have now posted 42 images I thought were worth looking seeing. Whenever I have a body of work compiled such as TOTP, I like to make a small book of the work. No, not "publish on demand" (POD) books, but labor intensive, time consuming handmade books. I design and lay them out in Photoshop, print them with my ink jet printer, sew the pages together, and glue on a cover. They look somewhat like you might get from Blurb.....except they are far better printed. Material cost is about the same as a Blurb publication, and from what I hear (I've never done a Blurb book myself) from friends, just about as time consuming. But unlike POD books, the layout can be anything I can think of that will support the idea of the image collection. I get to design it all. I don't have to follow pre-formed template layouts, etc. And since I choose my materials very carefully, my books are fully archival. Above is the cover for the collection of images presented on this blog as TOTP. I decided to call it "Road Sides" because everyone of the images is made on the side of the road probably no further than 20 feet from my parked vehicle. BTW, these book maquettes are not for sale, so don't ask. I would have to price them in the neighborhood of $400-500 each mostly because of the time it take to produce one. Their primary purpose is promotion of the work to collections, galleries, museums, and grant applications. It a very nice way to show someone what I do. Easy to pack several of these books for showing my work while I'm traveling.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I enjoyed the various pictures that make up this book, showing a side of Texas that I see often from the saddle of my bike.

Reminds me a bit of the current trip that Timothy Briner is making, to all the Boonville's he can find http://www.boonvilleusa.com/

Thanks for sharing them.

Anonymous said...

Hi Frank:

Looking through these all again, this is a very strong cohesive body of work. Bravo! Since you have already done most of the work to produce the artist's book, it would probably be a snap (and about an afternoon's time) to ALSO make a blurb book out of it. Many, I think, would like to have one.

Best,
DSR
www.davidsrosen.net

Unknown said...

also possibly worth mentioning, after re-reading this, that most POD companies, like blurb, have a full bleed image only option, so if you can produce a JPEG of what you want each page to look like, you can lay it out any way you like too.

Anonymous said...

Hey Frank!

Congratulations on an awesome series...I truly enjoyed checking every day for a new image and have been recommending it to all my classmates...

Can't wait to see what you have planned next!

Hope all is well.


--Ryan

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)