Making: Books workshop
This year, we’ve got two book sessions with Kellie, the first one we made books by hade, creating a A5 size stich archive and experimenting paper folding. In the second session, we went through the highlight of zine culture and making A5 zine with selected theme by putting collected materials, such as images, texts, and diagrams.
A saddle stitch binding is a simple but effective binding method in which folded sheets are bound with staples such as catalogues. Brochures and pamphlets. A variation on saddle stitch binding is Square Back binding which takes staple bound documents and gives them a squared spine. This means thicker documents look more professional and lie flatter.
The workshop would apply to book-making, it might inspire us, the idea of paper, binding way, paper revolution. It is important to know where publishing situated itself, and the history. Focusing where general photo publishing in contemporary discipline. The book has the long history based as curator spaces, but it’s ever changed, we have seen the documentary photographer in raised of book in the early 20th century, when editorial format of in appropriate for documentary work in gallery, we see books exploring monographs of photographer works, monograph is something much more a kind of retrospective, monographing body of someone’s life practice. Photobook has moved considerably from that, they no longer just a piece of documentation, you would see all kind of experimental photo books from photo fashion to photo narratives. All kinds of format experimental approaching to making books, it’s a curator space, its opened for experimentation and its playful format.
The highlight of zine culture:
Because the technical issue, pre-digital software, home scanner, it would easy to copy by yourself. Zine is a small circulation, it’s low fi and about the sub culture. Take punk for example, it was fashion around and zine came up as subculture movement. The artist Jamie Reid mentioned, ‘We are holding visual culture, we are taking form visual culture, we are taking from newspapers and found imagery, we are cutting them out, sticking them ot making our line. ‘Using that visual, the astatic is pull out one from another, visual language of punk astatic is all tied up together, is all belong together and feed to other.’ we could see how zine got influenced from him.
Early zine culture, you don’t have to be creator. At the present, is blog. Such a fashion blog, but it doesn’t mean they are fashion quality or fashion stylist, they steal images from other website, trying re-appropriate and they put small piece of DIY texts on what they think. So the blog is the modern day zone. Now we refer to zine culture is something like small scale production, the way they find themselves. Because when you make your book, you tend to make small scale publication as coming around and two or three copies, you could see there is no editor, no publication. Modern day zine-liked culture is an artist book. Now we’ve seen zine culture in majority bookstores because zine is desirable and cool, there is massive audience with zine-liked culture, interesting is the size is A5, because is half-fold by A4. In 19th century, there was no A3 copy, only A4 copy. No meant to restrict it but is the general format. Art illustrators are engaged in this format, how small publication popular for illustrators and graduate students, something they are high production value and low-cost., technical change to make it easier to produce high quality on reproduction now.
Fanzine: pointing out some issues which media don’t pick it up, so people go to social media, blogs, self-published to get their voice out, like single topic acceptation. Recognizing how zine culture has changed the results to the technology and suddenly to see this production level of value. So photocopy is gone and now come digital printing and desktop publishing. Is the place you playing out, format and form, people collect zine is somebody’s view, somebody’s vision.
The workshops we’ve got are useful as fundamental learning of book history and its culture, which I think it would be used as inspiration if I would like to make a book as final delivery. There are lots of consideration of making book. The main consideration is would it work well with images. That’s why before making book, it is required to do repetition of experiments to make sure it fits correctly, but also we would get inspired through the process.
I think I need to do more book experiments because it's interesting for me and I am fascinated in the making proves, not only applying on InDesign, but also when making a dummy, the sensation of creating stuff, folding them, whole process attracts me a lot which make me really hungry on exploring more about the world of book.
Reference
Ripe Digital - Finishing - Binding
