Essay

My collection of photobooks, graphic novels, and zines tells a story of my growth as an artist. The various themes and formal strategies that characterize these books, every one of which is an artwork unto itself, have influenced my photography practice greatly; I have collected books that inspire me, and that act as roadmaps for my own work. But perhaps more importantly, each object in the collection references or commemorates other works, exhibitions, institutions, mentors and friends, classes, and communities. I collect books in order to have a physical representation of this web that makes up my world of photography and art.

My collection represents a toolbox that I’ve gathered of themes and formal strategies for my own practice, which is largely one of photography and zine- and book-making. This collection surveys the development of my genre interests in street photography, portraiture, and archival images. I’ve purchased books out of an interest in individual pictures within them, especially exhibition catalogs such as Harry Callahan and Masculinities. I’ve also added books to my collection out of an interest in the way that images are sequenced and presented within them: formal and thematic resonances across spreads and page turns in A House Without a Roof, repetition and difference in Stems, storytelling and use of text in The Notion of Family. The question of sequencing becomes particularly relevant in the genre of comics as well, from panel to panel and page to page. I was a voracious reader of comics long before I began making photographs, and with the help of Understanding Comics, one of my favorite works in my collection, I have been able to see more clearly the impact that comics and graphic novels have had on my photography practice. Now, I see the truest portrait of my practice in the combination of my collections of comics, zines, and photobooks.

I have been building my collection since age fourteen, and it tells a story of my growth as both an artist and a collector. These photobooks hold accumulating memories of exhibitions (Sugimoto’s Portraits, Amigxs Vol. 2, The Notion of Family, The Valley, trains vol. 5), artist talks (On The Frontlines, First Flight), and classes (American Places, Time Paintings), and I often add works to my collection as ways of keeping these experiences—and the lessons and communities that I’ve gathered from them—close.  I can also see my growth in the change in my collecting methods over the years. When I first began collecting art books, they were by artists that I admired from afar, usually chosen and gifted to me by adults in my life who could afford them (almost always, my parents). As I’ve grown and become more independent, my methods of collecting have changed; I am choosing items to add to my collection, and frequenting DIY and used bookstores that I am passionate about supporting. These include Printed Matter, Mercer Street Books, and The Strand in New York City and Brattle Book Shop, Raven Used Books, and Rodney’s Bookstore in Cambridge/ Boston. These days, the giants of photography that used to seem so far away are feeling more and more like regular people, sitting across from me at a table at the annual Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair (see entry: $16 from Joy). Perhaps the most important way I can trace this growth lies in a growing sub-collection of works by artists I have relationships with (In Transit, Every Monkey is a Gazelle in Its Mothers Eyes, Last Light, A House Without a Roof, Temple of the Self, Kavana, Time Paintings, Liner Notes, trains vol. 5). In every case, these are also books and zines that hold up as works I admire, and that have influenced my own. Having community around my practice keeps me grounded in the intention of making work as a way of connecting with others. Collecting my friends’ work is an intimate way to celebrate our relationships, and to support their artistic practices.

It feels fitting to begin my bibliography with Vivian Maier—a woman who died in anonymity, and whose publications are all posthumous, edited and published by people she never knew—and to end with a self-published zine by Alex Nelson, a young female photographer and a mentor to me. I received Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found as a gift from my parents at around the same time as my dad gave me the Pentax MX film camera he had used in college, and my love of photographs and art books have grown in parallel since then. I made my first zine when I was 16 (see entry: Time Paintings) and made several others before I graduated high school, mostly keeping them to myself. Now, with support from Alex Nelson I am working towards my own book project (see entry: Liner Notes). As I look toward publishing my work, I am particularly inspired by my subcollection of self-published works, and by the small publishers that are represented in my collection that aim to support emerging artists, such as Booklyn and Kris Graves Projects

Notes

 Photobooks are somewhat contradictory art objects. On one hand, they are able to bring fine art into the homes of people who can’t visit museums or collect prints—they are premised upon the idea of making fine art photography accessible. However, they are often far above-budget for a student, and far more expensive than many other types of books, with a new copy of a contemporary photobook typically costing $50 at minimum. Making photobooks is quite expensive, too. As I’ve begun to ask friends and mentors about the process, I’ve learned that unless you have a book deal with a major publisher, such as Aperture or MACK, publishing a photobook is a complicated process that can easily leave an emerging artist in debt.

For every photobook in this collection, there are probably fifteen that I borrowed from a library, or looked through at a bookstore and returned to the shelf—and many of those have been just as important to my practice as the photobooks I own. My desire to collect photobooks grew out of my experience of devouring stacks of them at libraries. In a few bibliography entries, I list some of these related books that are not in my collection. Often these books form a breadcrumb trail of influences and relationships, each one leading me to the next. I am endlessly grateful to the NYU Bobst Library, the New York Public Library, the Harvard Libraries (and the BorrowDirect system), and the Cambridge Public Library for bringing the highly inaccessible world of photobooks to my fingertips.

The three parts of my bibliography offer three solutions (aside from the one I just mentioned) to the problem of the steep cost of a brand new photobook or art book. Together, these solutions have shaped my collection.

Part I of my bibliography consists almost entirely of books I received as gifts. I am grateful to my parents for encouraging my passion for photography and photobooks since it began. Part I is also comprised of books that are connected to my experiences with photography in high school: taking classes at the International Center of Photography (ICP)—where I first found a community of image-makers—and meeting my first mentors. At the time, I was most interested in the genre of street photography. Garry Winogrand was a particularly important book in shaping that interest. This section also includes two works I received as gifts from close friends of mine who have influenced my art practice through their own artwork and our rich conversations.

  Part II of my bibliography represents books that I was able to buy for myself as I took a more serious interest in both photography and book collecting—the last few in this section (Masculinities, A House Without A Roof, The Notion of Family) were purchased with funds I was granted to work on a photography project last summer by the Harvard College Research Program. I spent my grant funds on books that I knew I would want to continue to refer to and that were closely tied to the project I was working on. Most of the books in Part II, though, are used and purchased inperson. I have learned over the past several years that if you are looking to build a diverse collection of contemporary photobooks, you will rarely find used bookstores to be helpful resources. Used bookstores offer portals to an earlier era, when photography and book-making were far less accessible and popular than they are today. Finding a work by a photographer I love at a used bookstore feels like spotting an old friend in a crowd. I keep turning to used bookstores in the hopes of arriving at this feeling, as I did when purchasing Harry Callahan, Stems, and Sugimoto’s Portraits. Sometimes though, I am surprised in used bookstores by the ways that a book I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered can inspire me—this was the case with Morath’s Portraits.

Part III offers a third collecting method: finding modestly constructed, affordable art books. This section is also largely made up of works by artists that I consider mentors or friends. Some of these works were gifted to me by the artists (In Transit, Every Monkey is a Gazelle in its Mother’s Eyes, Last Light, Time Paintings, and Liner Notes), and the others were affordably priced. Many of the books in this section represent community to me, whether it’s my community at ICP, or the New York Art Book Fair, or a broader community around the intersection of queerness and photography. Particularly important to me right now is Kavana, a book that anchors a community that I am just beginning to build, around the intersection of Judaism and photography.

I’ll conclude with a few more notes on my bibliography. Overall, the bibliography is sequenced autobiographically, not alphabetically or chronologically (though it tends to align roughly with the order in which I acquired the works). The three parts of the bibliography do not represent mutually exclusive categories—there are some entries that could fit into more than one, in which case I placed them where I felt they would add the most to the narrative flow. In the case of my collections of zines and of graphic novels, I included the highlights here (there are about 15 items each in my collections of zines and graphic novels, and 4-5 of each are included here). In selecting highlights, I tried to choose works that have had very different and meaningful impacts on my growth as an artist, with attention to the stories of how they arrived in my collection. I did not include my full collections of zines or graphic novels because I wanted to give primacy to my photobook collection, as it is the medium I am currently working in. Additionally, there are several books of photography theory in my broader collection that have been important to my art practice, but I have opted not to include them here because it is important to me that every entry in the bibliography is not just a book, but a work of visual art as well.