A few years ago I was inspired to help Fatu, my granddaughter, celebrate her sixteenth birthday by putting together a photo book with pages of photos for each of her sixteen years. Kind of a print version of Quinceañera plus one or a Sweet Sixteen. I had thousands of photos of her from which to choose. I used an online photobook service to design and print the book. I repeated the process for her eighteenth birthday and again to celebrate her graduation from high school with a book focused on her senior year. All these were 11″ x 14″ landscape full color. I put together a smaller format book (8″ x 8″) recording her momentous commencing as a high school graduation greeting card and as a send off for her as she was preparing to move to Los Angeles to train for a career as a commercial dancer. This process, remarkably time consuming and tedious given the design methods of online print services, was for me hugely rewarding.

Art Album 2023. Photos & Essays (2023). A 180-page 8.5″x11″ format publication including a few occasional writings and a couple hundred photos (most filling a full page) that I created during 2023.

On Reflection. After having the opportunity to travel in Norway and in Sweden in the summer and fall of 2018, adding a couple-day stopover in Iceland on both trips, I wanted to reflect on my experience traveling by combining some careful writing with some selected photographs. Unfortunately I was at that time still aware of only the popular photobook printers with their clumsy design system and expensive printing. Still I made two versions, one 11″ x 14″ and one 8″ x 8″ of a book I titled On Reflection: Vignettes and Images (2019). LARGE SMALL

On Photography. Concurrent with this last process I wrote a collection of life stories that I wanted to publish in a more traditional book format. I discovered that there are printers that print any number of copies for a reasonable price. The design was my own which I did using a word processor and needed supply only a PDF of the whole book. I was thrilled by the results. Although this book and a couple of travel journal books that followed were largely print, they included a few photos of deceased relatives and special moments in my own history.

I discovered that one of these printers offered many types of printing and binding so that I could design my own book, include as many photos as I wanted, in most any size, including glossy hard covers and excellent binding. This potential inspired the idea to write and print a series of books in 8 1/2″ x 11″ landscape format on topics of interest that combined my writing as well as my photo images. I set forth to do a series called “Aesthetic of Impossibles” and, since I had been doing much reading and thinking on making pictures I immediately decided that On Photography would be the first volume of the series. The essays offer my views on the wonders of photography–from philosophical to practical topics–especially as they exemplify my idea of “aesthetic of impossibles.”

On Photography is comprised of twenty-one essays and a couple dozen full page photos. For this book I limited the size of the text to a single two column print page that would appear on the left when the book is open facing a full page color photo on the right. BOOK

On Moving: A Biological and Philosophical Account of Human Distinctiveness (2022), the second volume in the Aesthetic of Impossibles Series, retains the same overall size and design, but the text comprised of thirty-one essays reaching the length of a traditional book. My photos are placed on available left-side pages facing the first page of each essay located on the right. BOOK

Photo Albums: As I focus more on my own picture making i find myself with the dilemma of having lots of images that I’d enjoy sharing with a few others. My abiding sense of human value is that we should make beauty and inspiration for others as much as we can. I don’t claim my pictures are inspiring or even the finest of images, yet I work long and carefully to make them and some have indicated some joy in seeing them. Yet how to share them? After considering a range of options, I have decided that to use the same 8 1/2″ x 11″ landscape format and periodically (perhaps annually) privately publish a collection of images with each being 8″ x “10 (stretched to the paper’s edge) with hard covers would be pleasing, at least to me. Web images are lovely, yet they do not match a printed image for richness of color and fineness of detail. I have also realized that to have this general idea about how to share them gives me direction, inspiration, and incentive for my daily photo work. Photo Art Album 2022 PDF