In the past, I have worked with photographers whose projects involved a lot of very different elements, both photographically and conceptually. While many complex projects are complex because their makers are unable to decide which of the less important aspects they can trim, some projects are in fact complex.
Complex work poses a challenge when you want to create a book. Very heterogeneous imagery often does not lend itself easily to being condensed into a single book: a viewer who knows nothing about what they might encounter might get overwhelmed or confused. Book design can help alleviate this problem only to some extent. In the end, you almost always need added text.
My suggestion for photographers has always been to think about a catalogue. In nine out of ten cases, that suggestion was roundly rejected by the photographers I worked with. Photography catalogues appear to have a really bad reputation in part because most of them are, well, terrible.
In a nutshell, a catalogue is a collection of material under an umbrella. In the world of photography, that umbrella is usually provided by the topic at hand.
What makes so many catalogues bad is the approach taken: an expensive coffee-table book with an assortment of essays that were written by and for insiders (whether art historians, curators, or any other in-group). The writing isn’t bad per se; it’s just that it’s unreadable for people who are not immersed in whatever jargon and conventions the writers take for granted.
In the hands of a gifted bookmaker/publisher, it’s not very difficult to turn this approach around and, instead, produce a book that showcases the work it contains in the best possible fashion. The book then not only helps viewers understand how the heterogeneous imagery relates to one another, it also helps them understand how what looks so different is in fact related to the same underlying topic or idea.
A recent catalogue that piqued my interest is With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me by Yan Wang Preston. The publisher, The Eriskay Connection, has a history of creating very engaging books that as objects are a pleasure to look at (the books are always very nicely designed and produced).
As the book’s title makes clear, there is a plethora of ideas behind the complex set of images contained inside. It all starts out from, you guessed it, the rhododendron plant. Even though the plant can now be found in Great Britain, it arrived there from elsewhere. It shares these qualities with many other global transplants, whether they’re plants or people such as the photographer herself, born in China and now residing in the UK.
There is a particular plant that forms what I see as the emotional core of the book, a bush that when seen from one particular direction is heart-shaped. Wang Preston took photographs of this bush for an entire year.
In addition, the artist created a number of pieces based on the plant, whether by using a camera trap (that would take pictures of whatever creature would appear in front of it) or by working with the plant directly, taking pieces and turning them into pieces of art.
In addition, there is material from botanical and other archives, resulting in that large number of heterogeneous images that turn creating a book into such a challenge.
Whoever decided to use the seasons as a device to organize the work had a really good idea (there are three editors listed besides the publisher’s team). Organizing heterogeneous material provides structure for a viewer who otherwise might be overwhelmed.
It’s good to remember that any photobook maker, regardless of what type of book they’re making, has one major role: to guide a viewer through their book in a fashion that is not too loose and not too tight. If it’s too loose, the viewer will get lost. If it’s too tight, a viewer’s imagination will get restricted in a fashion that they might say “this is not for me”.
The book itself features pages of different lengths for the seasons. It’s a very basic device, which I find very appealing because it’s simple, and at least to me it looks really nice.
That all said, I think the long and somewhat convoluted title hints at the book’s shortcoming. It attempts to cram way too many things into the book. And maybe that could have worked if the essays were more engaging. This reader, though, finds their academic nature mostly off-putting.
For me, the work’s emotional core and the beauty of a lot of the imagery simply gets lost in the verbiage and in the decision to cram as much material as possible into the book. While I understand the drive to express as much as possible with a book, I do think that more is not always more.
If as a book maker you are unable to stand back from what you have how to see what matters most how do you expect a viewer to discover it?
Then again, possibly this book was not made for people like me. If that were the case, as seems likely, that’s a perfectly good decision to make. From what I see in this book, I’m thinking that academics working in botany might get a lot out of the book. And other practitioners working in more academic fields of photography might as well.
As always, as a reader you will need to come to your own conclusions. If you’re working on something incredibly complex, you still want to look at this book. For sure, this is not your boring boilerplate catalogue, and a lot of the decisions used to show its materials are really smart.
With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me; images by Yan Wang Preston; essays/interviews by Emma Nicolson, Alan Elliott, Bergit Arends, Matthew Gandy, Monty Adkins, Michael Pritchard, Liam Devlin, Yan Wang Preston, and Cosima Towneley; 320 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2025
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