INFOCUS - self-published photobooks at the Phoenix Art Museum

 

Harvey Benge - UN-SOLVED and NOT FOOD

In August 2016, INFOCUS at the Phoenix Art Museum called photographers internationally to submit their photobooks to the second triennial Juried Exhibition of Self-Published Photobooks. The purpose of the exhibition was to explore the range of ways that artists were using newly available commercial technologies in order to express themselves. A jury of eight industry professionals reviewed 179 submissions and selected 111 books for the exhibition.

These books hail from all over the United States and 12 countries on five continents, including Australia, Russia, Chile, Norway, The Netherlands, England, Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Italy.
Selected books showcase a wide range of printing technologies, including offset lithography, digital inkjet printing, letterpress, laser printing, and photocopying. In some cases, self-publishing artists worked with boutique operations like Conveyor Arts in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Edition One Books in Berkeley, California; in others, they worked with print-on-demand online publishing platforms like Blurb, MagCloud, MyPublisher, and Shutterfly.
Books were requested on any subject including retrospective, project-based, souvenir albums, fictional narrative, exhibition catalogues, poetic, biographical, or children’s books, and welcomed collaborative or collective books in addition to those by a single author. They found that in a well-crafted book, the artist considers every element of the book’s design, and uses each to enhance the finished product. Among the selections are noteworthy selection of paper weight and surface; cover material; printing method and reproduction quality; font style, color and size; text placement and justification (centered, aligned to the right or left); end-paper and title page design; binding (spiral bound, hard bound, paperback); size and placement of the images; sequence of the images; and inclusion (or exclusion) of and placement of the caption information.
 All submissions were created between 2014 and the present, representing some of the best examples of self-publishing from the last three years.

I was pleased to be included (along with friends Lydia Panas and Mark Power) in the show with two of my bookworks: UN-SOLVED PUZZLES RE-MAIN and NOT FOOD OR SEX.

The exhibition runs until April 9, 2017. You can see a full list of the artists and books included HERE. 

Lydia Panas - Falling From Grace (selection of images)

Mark Power - Destroying The Laboratory...