Technical Photo Book Donation, copyright 2017 Douglas Stockdale
I am running out of library space, plain and simple. My shelves are over-run and it is time to make some decisions as to what is going to go versus stay. Thus the low-hanging fruit to dispose of are all of my out-of-date how-to and technical photo books.
My first decision was to donate or attempt to sell these beauties. A quick check on Ebay confirmed my suspicions; these are probably worth a buck a piece, at best. The second part of the equation was the amount of time it would take to prepare these for sale, then administrate the sale if it occurred, all the while paying the various fees to Ebay, etc for the pleasure of this task VERSUS spending that same amount of time on one of my many artistic projects.
One nice thing about being in Southern California, there are plenty of City Colleges (two-year schools), Art Schools, Universities with an art emphasis that include photography all within an hours drive or two. These books are not destined for the college library, but for a photo department’s internal resource center. I had considered the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA), a arts emphasis high school were my granddaughter attends, but their photo department is really focused on film & video, not still photography.
I also am interested in aligning with a two or four year college that in addition to providing instruction on photograph, both commercial and fine art, also includes analog film and has a darkroom. Even though this book donation is more focused on digital, I have a few other books and various art/photo magazines in the wings.
Thus I am going to meet up with Jason Reimer next Saturday at the Medium Festival in San Diego and donate the books above for the San Diego City College (SDCC) photo department. At the moment I am also evaluating Orange Coast College which has a pretty good photographic program and extensive analog photograph teaching. Another alternative is Long Beach City College where I provided a couple of one-day workshops.
I am also interested to find out which of these has a book design and development course or program, which so far I don’t find on their program lists. That may take me to Otis College of Art & Design in LA.
Cheers!
Singular Images 
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