untitled (working title: Bluewater Shore) copyright 2014 Douglas Stockdale
At the beginning of the year I like to think about what I might accomplish for the coming year, with this being more of a bunch of loose-goosey planing objectives. Having worked in corporate for tooo many years, I know how rigid and constricting a plan can get. As an artist, I think that having some objectives is actually a good thing, e.g. to ensure that I try some new things and explore some wild ideas. Allow myself to listen to the faint whispering of my creative muse.
One of the fun things that evolved last year was my first artist photobook Pine Lake. All in all, I am very satisfied with this artist photobook and I had kinda realized that if this worked out well enough (translation: I sold some), that I would do at least one more, if not two. Truth is I did more than just selling some, as about all of the Edition is gone. The response to the Pine Lake book has been delightful!
Even while developing Pine Lake, I was already planning for a second book in this series that investigates memory, family, relationships, nostalgia and loss. Similar to Pine Lake, this will be another semi-fictional short story with this one based on a young woman and her girlfriends going on a holiday to the shore set in the late 1940’s using “found” anonymous photographs that perchance were residing in my family’s old photo albums.
This second artist photobook will also incorporate some lessons learned from self-publishing Pine Lake. I will elaborate on those changes in the coming weeks as I finish the design and publishing as I am still tweaking some of these changes. Nevertheless I do plan to have the actual stiff cover book about the same size as Pine Lake, what I am unsure of at this time is to also include the outer custom frame. I also want to increase the edition size in order to have copies available to send to reviewers, something that I was unable to do with Pine Lake. So this book will be similar but yet different.
For now, I am working on creating my book dummy and to my initial point above, my objective is to have a book dummy to carry around with me at photo l.a. that starts on January 17 – 19 at the LA Mart. In this case, my book dummy is not to share with any publishers but rather I have a number of friends who I usually meet up with at photo l.a. and I want to bounce this project off their creative skulls. And the best way to obtain great feedback is to have a book dummy that they can play with.
So enough of this, I need to get back to printing the test images :- D
Cheers!
Singular Images 