The Photobook Ecosystem

Searching for Sustainable Approaches

Edited by Tamsin Green

Panelists

Catriona Gourlay, NAL, Victoria & Albert Museum, (London, UK)

Lewis Chaplin, Loose Joints (Marseille, France)

Paul John, Jan van Eyck Academie & Brooklyn Art Book Fair (the Netherlands; USA)

Tamsin Green, manual.editions & SPP network (London, UK)

Moderated by 

Amelie Schuele, FOAM (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Daria Tuminas, FOTODOK (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Supported by University of Westminster (Green Fund) and RPS Documentary Group.

SPP network and 10x10 Photobooks hosted an online conversation on 26 April 2022 titled The Photobook Ecosystem: Searching for Sustainable Approaches. This article shares key quotes and case studies that relate to the themes of the discussion. The full recording of the talk is available here

What does sustainability mean for the photobook community? The materials used to make books such as paper, printing inks and packaging all use valuable resources and industrial processes that create waste and are potentially harmful to the planet. As a creative field with links to many different disciplines, photobook publishing is well positioned to innovate and challenge publishing industry norms to forge a more sustainable future.

When the SPP network began in 2021, one of the few research resources available on sustainable photobook publishing was the article Is a Book Worth a Tree?, YET Issue 12 (2020). This article was co-written by Daria Tuminas and Amelie Schuele, and consisted of interviews with people operating within the photobook ecosystem, from photographers and publishers, to printers and paper suppliers. We invited Daria and Amelie to moderate a follow-up conversation to see what new threads could be uncovered in the design, making, distribution, display and consumption of the photobook. This became the first event in our now annual Earth Day talk series. 

I. Printing

Lewis Chaplin (LC): I always physically go and oversee our books being produced and you are witnessing before your very eyes a significant amount of paper being used and trashed. This is because an offset printing machine has to be run in order to get up to the number of revolutions and have the plates distributing the ink onto the rollers and onto the paper in a sufficient way. You can’t just press the button, the sheet comes out, you’re ready to go. Any responsible printer has a very efficient supply chain of that printed paper being immediately recycled and going back into becoming other paper. All of the printers that we work with use soy, water based inks. Oil based ink, despite having a kind of allure that’s quite seductive to photography especially, is not a good idea at all. If you are working at a smaller scale, digital is a very important and interesting idea. Over the last 15 years or so the quality of digital printing has started to catch up in a way where on certain publications or certain types of imagery, at least speaking about photography, the quality can be indistinguishable.

Paul John (PJ): The risograph was developed as an alternative to offset printing. It was meant to be a way for mid-size corporations to not necessarily have less of a global impact, but have an economic impact where they could achieve this quality of printing and run 1,000 to 10,000 copies. You are also making a much smaller carbon footprint by using the stencil technology [as an alternative to metal plates used in offset printing] which makes one plate for one colour and you can run it many times. It’s the same as CMYK processes. Risograph, since about the 1980s, switched from oil based inks to soy based, and then recently to rice bran. So they’ve always been conscientious of the kinds of inks they’re using.

Bruises - Samara Scott (Loose Joints: 2017), image © Loose Joints

Recorder - Miranda Lichtenstein (Loose Joints: 2021), image © Loose Joints

II. Materials

Tamsin Green (TG): The SPP network has been looking into different types of papers, as part of our collation of an online resource list. It has been especially interesting to learn about papers which are not made from trees, instead utilising fast growing plants, agricultural and post-consumer waste. But there’s always trade-offs – is it better to use recycled paper, or one made from agricultural waste, that’s imported from Europe to England, or to use an FSC-certified virgin-fibre paper that was made here in the UK? There is no singular right answer to this question, but through talking with different people in the supply chain, and using reources such as the Environmental Paper Network’s EcoPaper Database, we can start to understand how to navigate these trade-offs on an individual book basis.

PJ: Here at the Jan van Eyck Academy it’s almost like living in a fairy land because we have a nature and materials research lab where they have already developed alternative materials. There’s a future materials bank that was produced here with two artists. So there’s already this investigation into what we are using and what alternative biodegradable materials might replace these harmful plastics, or how we can better use what we have to hand here.

Catriona Gourlay (CG): We collect contemporary books, but we also have everything going right back to mediaeval manuscripts. Often the fragility of books throughout that period is not linear. With the mediaeval manuscripts a lot of them are on parchment which is quite a durable material in itself. The 19th century publications on the other hand are printed on quite cheap paper that goes brittle and cracks after a while. A lot of the recycled materials have a shorter lifespan because they often have unknown content. But I don’t think that should necessarily put museums off acquiring them. I think that we might just have to come to accept that sustainable materials are the aesthetic of this moment. Just as I talked about the 19th Century books being more fragile than the mediaeval manuscripts on parchment, it’s not a given that materials have got better and lasted longer over time.

LC: In the back of every single book that we make is the information of every paper we use, the binder, the printer, the typefaces, literally the ingredients and recipe of how you could make that book again. Information that people can reference, learn and understand from. Because I always found it very cynical that most publishers guard and keep all of this information to themselves as if it isn’t useful to help share knowledge about how people make stuff or where they do things.

Scale & Substance - Tamsin Green (manual.editions: 2022), Image © manual.editions

III. Distribution

LC: I think it’s interesting now that we are coming out of this pandemic moment to think about where the books are actually purchased. What’s the point of sale? Lots of publishers like us actually had a pretty bumper year with Covid-19 because suddenly a huge amount of our sales went online, which means we get all the money, great. We get one hundred percent of the sale when we sell a book. However, what is the environmental impact of us sending individually 20 orders to people in New York who might otherwise have bought those 20 books from Dashwood or from Mast or from Printed Matter? In which case those books would have gone in one box through one supply chain, one set of warehouses and distribution hubs. I’m very keen at this point now to really encourage a move back to bookshops. We try to offer really preferential terms to bookshops to try and encourage them to have more of our stuff, to have free shipping, good rates. To really make people actually go back to that mode.

TG: Having made the decision to make small editions of my books, it’s important to think creatively about how to share them with an audience. One copy of each manual.editions book is available to borrow through our online library, and I’m also actively seeking to place these books in physical public libraries where they can reach a wider audience.

PJ: In publishing and thinking about distribution most of our books were under a run of 200. Most of our distribution was direct through book fairs, travelling to them, and also carrying these books around. Through that experience we reflected on doing book fairs and what the impact of it was. From there we decided to develop a very strange and different type of book fair. A fair that didn’t ask vendors to pay to be a part of it but would rather compensate vendors in case they didn’t earn a certain income. A fair that would guarantee an income for these participants valuing a different type of labour. That’s also what Endless Editions was meant to do, to illuminate this process of what a book involves, how much paper is used, how much time is involved in the production of it, and how much care is required.

can we and should we eliminate single-use plastic in the wrapping of books? should we use a bioplastic alternative? or paper? or something else? if we do use a bioplastic how will people know what to do with it?

Case Study: Shrink Wrap

In the Talk Q&A there was a heated discussion about the use of shrink wrap and bioplastic alternatives for wrapping books so we have picked this up and added a few further thoughts...

Challenges/Learnings

  • Many books are wrapped by the printers/ binders prior to shipping to the publishers/ distributors. Some are offering bioplastic alternatives to single-use plastics, and some of these products are certified to ‘OK compost’ and EN 13432 standards
  • Some bookshops and distributors require books to be plastic shrink wrapped for protection and will not accept bioplastic or other material alternatives
  • Compostable bioplastics placed in a home compost environment are not breaking down even after several years

'Compostable' could mean industrially or in a home compost environment - This information needs to be communicated to the consumer to help them manage the bioplastic at end of life according to the certification.

Certifications

TUV Austria : The EU bioplastic OK certifications are granted for compostable, biodegradable and biobased products. They indicate whether a product is home or industrially biodegradable or compostable. ‘OK HOME compostable’ means something will break down within 1 year in a home compost environment.

EN 13432: The EU certification tests compostability through industrial processes. It does not test products for home compostability.

Alternative Materials

Check out our RESOURCE LIST under PACKAGING for suggestions of alternatives to single-use plastic.

IV. Collection & Display

CG: When any book enters the V&A collection it’ll be catalogued on the library system and placed in storage. Once it’s on the library catalogue the book can then be requested by the public to view in the National Art Library reading rooms. Being a library within a museum means that our books are also shared through museum exhibitions and displays as well as loans to other institutions. This of course means that our collections can be seen by huge audiences across the world. But this level of activity also means that we incur an environmental impact. Our increased carbon footprint for one; travelling objects and their mounts, travelling staff. Sometimes we send curators to oversee the installation of objects although that has reduced since the pandemic. We now do a lot of online installation appointments over video call. But I think it is something that needs to be discussed with other institutions that are similar, but not the same as us, so smaller institutions and other types of libraries. Talking about issues like lending objects is one of the main areas where we could make a lot of progress and it needs a big push to make it happen.

TG: I’ve been thinking a lot about the by-products of a book making practice and how different parts of the process can be reused in other forms. For a recent exhibition I reused the print-proof copies of two books, elements of the process that would typically be discarded. By remaking these books into wall-mounted sculptures they could have a kind of second life. In doing this I also wanted to expose the material properties of paper; letting the printed pages respond to their environment through curling and creasing.

CG: One issue that we have struggled with for a long time is the display of books. To display books in museum cases we create bespoke cradles. This is because books are quite complicated objects so they have to be supported. The cradles that we use to support them have to be bespoke and made to fit. But unfortunately one of the materials that is most commonly used in museum cradles is perspex. I think one of the draws of the perspex cradles, and why so many museums use them, is that the aesthetic of them doesn’t interfere too much with the design of the display. However for a recent V&A touring exhibition, Life after Plastic, there was a big push to create mounts that were made of materials other than plastic for displaying the objects.

Case Study: Life after Plastics - Vitra Design Museum
(V&A: 2022)

The museum conventions around displaying books as if they’re almost floating within a display case is something that we need to re-frame and re-think to address sustainability. This V&A project sought to develop an alternative to bespoke perspex cradles for a travelling exhibition.*

The alternative book cradle was made from recycled mount board, and covered in textile using EVA glue. Making the mountboard cradles durable for transportation meant covering them in a coated textile, which was not recycled and is not recyclable. The glue required to attach the textile to the board had to be an EVA glue, which is the conservation equivalent of PVA glue. The starch paste that would have been a more sustainable option was not strong enough to hold the textile to the board.

3D printing could allow for cradles to be made in a more environmentally friendly way in future. Reducing transportation by printing the cradles in the location where the books are being displayed.

*Life after Plastics, The Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 26.03–04.09.2022

Image © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

V. What is the role of community?

PJ: For me community is everything. There was a really great essay by David Josselit and Enzo Camacho, In Praise of the Small. I think as we develop community, we find the people that fulfil the role of globalisation in the spreading of knowledge, the internet also helps with this. But at least for me, I feel like I was more interested in between small and big. Brian Lamotte also talks about this kind of DIY zine culture which I’m more affiliated with. I should say that I’m not a commercial publisher, but it is an ethos. It’s this idea that we can keep this together and we can share this together and together is always better. Maybe that’s why I find people in the risograph community so much more endearing than the rest of the art world because we all have this shared misery, or the shared suffering, of running these machines and operating them and collating pages. We see all of the labour that goes into making a book and working with the artists, so we are not competitive against each other. We are more willing to share and support each other, and this is evidenced in these small communities. We used to have a Slack group and now there’s a Discord group and there are many Facebook groups where people from all over the world, all skill levels, all levels of career, communicate their fears, frustrations, questions, desires, and there’s this shared resource there.

TG: For me the role of this community is really about being curious and finding answers to things that aren’t necessarily out there and easy to find. Together learning and sharing as we’re going and being really open about what we don’t know, what we want to know, and how we can help each other along. I think especially with ecological sustainability there’s a strong need to share locally. What might be the best paper or the best printers to print a certain type of work here in London wouldn’t be the same as somewhere else in Europe or somewhere else in the world. So there’s very much a need to share these kinds of resources locally, but then there’s also a lot about the conversations which are global and common to everybody. So it’s also important to have a more connected and wider network which talks about how these subjects or threads connect us together.

LC: My involvement or engagement with book making comes originally from a place of zine making and organising book fairs in London. That being where I discovered an interest and where Sarah and I joined to begin making projects together as Loose Joints. So the need to share is obviously inherent with being a publisher.. Where I’m sitting right now, over there is a partition wall and anybody can walk into our office effectively, four days a week and start asking questions, and they do. This is also a city where the familiarity with independent and photography publishing is not there, we’re the first place really doing this. So you actually have a lot of very interesting conversations with people about the nuts and bolts of how we produce these things. I’m obviously also deeply excited about book fairs happening again. These are meeting points and coming together points, not just for the public seeing what we do, but for other publishers to exchange what’s going on. Because a lot of stuff is happening at the moment.

CG: There are sustainability reps from departments across the museum who meet regularly, not just to discuss things like exhibitions and loans, but to discuss wider issues like how to deal with waste from the cafe, where we source prints from in the museum shop. But then there are more informal groups as well. Our book conservators, for example, speak to book conservators in other institutions. But speaking to artists is a really interesting one as well and something that we could perhaps do more of. Often it’s the smaller informal groups that are the most exciting, they are what Tamsin and Paul were talking about, these safe spaces to talk about the issues and to be open about the complexities of the subject and the compromises that we’re having to make. Balancing the quality and longevity of the books with what we can achieve in the museum in terms of output, whilst still keeping to sustainable standards.

PJ: Sustainability is not only about our ecological impact, but it’s about creating opportunities for people who don’t have voices in this current environment and empowering them in a way that might allow them to have these privileged positions to think about these very challenging questions. But until we’re at that point, we have to do the best that we can.

Case Study: Brooklyn Art Book Fair

New York (2017-)

BKABF started as a “what-if” and has become an inspiration that a book fair can support its vendors, rather than burdening them with the costs of production. The fair first began in 2017 with a desire to make the artworld more accessible by providing free tables to all vendors and redistributing surplus fundraising to those who need it most. The fair has created non-competitive spaces for independent publishers and artists to flourish, while also providing much needed support in a field that is not necessarily lucrative.

The book fair set out to create a community and distribution opportunities for those who didn’t have them. The number of participants was restricted for each fair, and the intention was never to grow to hundreds of publishers.

  • 40 to 45 vendors
  • No fee to participate
  • Fee given to publishers who made less than $200 to $300 to pay for their transportation and costs of participating, as a way of valuing different forms of labour within the community

Guiding Questions

How do we keep the book fair impactful to the vendors without having it become too overwhelming for the public? 

How do we make the book fair have as large an impact as possible for as many people as possible?

Image © Daniel Wang

VI. Accountability - Should a book be an orange?

LC: It is very important that publishing feels accessible to all. We are at a place where we’ve been able to develop our business and think about these things now and reflect on them. We certainly weren’t when we were just desperate to make books of all of the artists whose work we thought was fundamentally important to have out in the world. You don’t want to create a kind of barrier by saying there’s a level of sustainability or a level of commitment or disclosure that needs to be necessary about the material objects that you produce and ship because for a future generation of would-be publishers, self-publishers, designers, these sorts of things could also come across as effectively being a form of gate keeping. I would love to be able to have more accountability on my end in terms of when people do ask me, and it doesn’t happen very often.

TG: Everyone doing a bit is collectively better than a couple of people doing everything really perfectly. The SPP network has sought to share existing knowledge through – collating a resource list* of papers and printers (which is open source), sharing case studies of photobooks to encourage transparency about how books are made. We also have an online meet-up about once a month where we have open discussions and we invite speakers from different sectors of the photobook sphere. Past speakers have included Hannah Fletcher from the Sustainable Darkroom Project, Paul Hewit from the B-Corp certified Generation Press printers and Eliza Kavangha from the Publishers Association. Eliza talked to us about a carbon calculator that they’re developing for books. We are also organising events like this, which we co-organised with 10x10 Photobooks where we are seeking to create discussion and openness with a much broader audience.


You can find out more about how these participants addressed sustainability in the making of individual books in the Case Studies: Trinity - Oliver Raymond Barker (Loose Joints: 2021), this is how the earth must see itself - Tamsin Green (manual.editions: 2021) and Recorder - Miranda Lichtenstein (Loose Joints: 2021)

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about the moderators

Daria Tuminas is an independent curator. Since 2019, she regularly curates for FOTODOK. Between 2017 and 2019, she headed Unseen Book Market at Unseen Amsterdam. Tuminas obtained a master’s in folklore and mythology at Saint Petersburg State University, and a master’s in film and photographic studies at Leiden University. She has organized a number of exhibitions and projects in relation to photobooks and regularly contributes texts about photobooks to various media including guest editor of The Photobook Review #12 (Aperture, 2017); a chapter on Eastern European photobooks in How We See: Photobooks by Women (10×10 Photobooks, 2018); and in 2020 Tuminas co-wrote “Is a Book Worth a Tree?” for YET issue 12.
www.dariatuminas.com

Amelie Schüle is curator and head of public practice at FOAM Amsterdam. Special projects include the solo show Double Portrait by Cemre Yesil at project space MAQAM and Foam Talks, a monthly podcast focussing on contemporary photography and visual culture. From 2018 until 2020, she was a curator at Unseen Amsterdam. Before this, she worked for several years in different commercial galleries in Switzerland including Christophe Guye Galerie and Hauser & Wirth. She obtained a Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies at the Zurich School of the Arts. Schüle co-wrote “Is a Book Worth a Tree?” for YETissue 12.

about the panelists

Loose Joints is an independent publishing house founded by Sarah Piegay Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014 and based between Marseille and London. Collaborating with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form, Loose Joints circulates new visual perspectives through a dedicated list seeking to elevate underrepresented voices in photographic discourse, and a holistic approach to publishing from start to finish with all design, editing and production done in-house. Loose Joints also operates independently as a design studio, working across publishing and the arts. In 2021 Loose Joints also founded Ensemble: a space dedicated to books, editions and photography in the heart of Marseille.
www.loosejoints.biz

Paul John is an artist who works in abstract photography. Publishing and bookmaking are at the core of his artistic work. Education, dissemination of skills, and cultivating a community are elements of that practice. Working at the intersection of printmaking and institution building, John is the co-founder and former director of Endless Editions (based out of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City), a publishing and curatorial initiative founded in 2014 with a mission to produce and disseminate books or prints by underrepresented and emerging artists. In 2017 Endless Editions co-produced the first ever Brooklyn Art Book Fair and has been the sole organizer since. BKABF is a free event for both vendors and the public. John is currently the coordinator of the Printing and Publishing Lab at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL.
www.thinkingaboutmyfavoritetree.com

Catriona Gourlay studied Fine Art in Edinburgh and worked as a Research Resources Assistant at the National Galleries of Scotland before becoming Assistant Curator in the National Art Library at the V&A in 2015. Her recent V&A display, Landscape and Language in Artists’ Books, explored how artists since the 1960s have used thought-provoking combinations of word and image to respond to landscape or evoke imaginary places.

Tamsin Green is an English visual artist and architect. In 2021 she established manual.editions to explore environmentally conscious approaches to book making. Through her search for more sustainable practices the Sustainable Photobook Publishing (SPP) Network was born. Green has published two handmade small edition books: Born of the Purest Parents (self-published, 2018) and this is how the earth must see itself; A walk with Natural Features (manual.editions, 2021). These books are in public collections, including the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate. Her books are also available to borrow within the UK via the manual.editions library.
www.tammidori.com

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