Lately, I have been thinking about stepping beyond the boundaries of this Fleurieuscapes blog that doesn't really go anywhere. I have been thinking along the lines of having another solo exhibition, or of producing a photobook. I have enough material, and my thinking has been that the book is primary and the exhibition is secondary, in that the latter could be used to launch the photo book.
Judging from my experience with the previous Fleurieuscapes exhibition, exhibitions with framed prints are expensive, they have a short existence, and they are quickly forgotten. Few are the memories of them. So it doesn't really add up. However, an exhibition could be used as a platform to launch a photo book, thereby making the latter known to the public at the opening. Distribution is the really big problem with photobooks and launching the book at the opening night of the exhibition would help.
If so, then it is really becomes a question of how to organize the material in a photobook. It needs to have an idea to distinquish it from all the other photobooks being produced. The one that I have toyed with in the past a topological thinking is the idea of place--that is, my experiences of being in a place that is the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. In Heideggerian language to be is to be in place. So it is being -at-home-in-a place.
Photography, after all, is a way of collecting experiences, whilst the book is a way of moving photography away from the white walls of the art gallery. In this case a photography of a limited situatedness of existence in a place that is a series of events or processes in an open region .
Maybe the photo book could be organized in terms of a letter to various friends about my experiences on the various daily poodlewalks in the place that I dwell in? 'Dwell in' in the sense of belonging and the happenings in this place. A photography of where things--seaweed, salt, rocks-- are presencing in this place where I dwell with the poodles.
Rather than a book, it could be a series of 4-5 small photo journals based around the poodlewalks. These 4-5 photo journals would consist of good quality prints that are hand bound, and then housed in a handmade box. Each photo journal or book would have a different subject matter-----seaweed, rocks, trees, abstractions, country roads, clouds, architecture etc. Or this subject matter be mixed up in one book that is organized around a theme-eg.,the ephemeral or the transitory. There could be a number of these series of 4-5 small books. The box would be titled poodlewalks 1, 2 , 3 etc.
A more commercial photobook--eg., say one printed by Momento Pro--- would be a selection of 50 mages from these various series with a bit of text. An exhibition would then be a selection of framed prints from these books. So there is a multilayered approach to distribution of the project.
This would begin to open up the Fleurieuscapes work to people outside the art gallery system.