00: here we go

Rainy, 8-degree weather. A warm Doutor in Shizuoka, Japan. Just wolfed down a tuna melt and a cup of hot English tea, now writing this first post to flag off the start of this project and this new year.

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This is my 11th year working as a photographer. To mark this bizarre milestone, I have recklessly decided to write a book.

So. Welcome to issue 00 of this pop-up newsletter, where I'm documenting my journey as I try to write and publish a photobook that's also a book about photography.

I'll be sharing the actual essays as they get written and behind-the-scenes things like journal entries, notes, photos I might include in the book, progress updates, work-in-progress design drafts, visits to the printer (I'm thinking optimistically and very far into the future now!) etc. Basically, an insider's point-in-view to writing and publishing a book from scratch.

I'll write and publish here once a week until the book is done. It seems doable but is actually quite ambitious, so death-by-humiliation via this newsletter and your disappointment whenever I don't publish anything is very welcome and will help a lot, thank you very much in advance.

Sign up as a subscriber and you'll get access to the full archive of everything that's been published before and everything that's still to come, with all new issues delivered straight to your inbox. You will also be able to comment on posts here and be part of a community of people who love geeky things like this. Yeah!

What else? Oh. Please say hello to me via the comments!

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Draft:

Being a photographer-writer.

“Fifteen years ago, I stopped being a writer and became a photographer.
On a sweltering New York August day, I was writing about winter in Japan. Writers, it seemed, didn’t have to go to the places they wrote about.

I became a photographer because photographers did have to be where they wanted to take pictures, or at least their cameras did.”

— Charles Harbutt

I want to do the opposite. I want to be a writer because writers don't have to be anywhere specific. I could be writing this in my bed or in a place far away from home. I could even be writing this in my head. It doesn't matter. Unlike Charles Harbutt, I actually enjoy writing about winter in Japan on a sweltering New York August day.

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In my mind, photographs and words belong together, like some Frankensteinian life-form that has no name yet.

An example of words and photographs belonging together - Marvin Heiferman's Instagram account (@whywelook).

Marvin's beloved husband Maurice died from Covid in 2020. Devastated, Marvin started taking pictures of the things he saw around him that reminded him of Maurice. Paired with short captions, his Instagram posts became an outlet for grief and "a parallel story about photography, love, death, memory and politics".

"Look at the pictures on Instagram and you'll learn some things about Maurice and me. Read the captions that accompany the photographs and you'll learn a little bit more, background information that sometimes describes or hints at things that are sometimes tricky to picture. But nothing you see there will fully communicate Maurice's intellect, his sweetness, both how critical and supportive he could be, how perceptive, and how funny he was."

I'm going to write an essay about Maurice and Marvin - about words and photographs belonging together, but also about Maurice and Marvin belonging together - for the book, and the deep emotional impact Marvin's spontaneous Instagram project has had on thousands of people around the world, and I plan to share the draft with you guys via the newsletter next week.

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So that's it for a first post.

Starting a project is hard. Sustaining it is harder. And seeing it to the end is the hardest. This newsletter is my strategy to help me do all three. Let's hope it works.

Ending this issue with a quote by my favorite photographer and philosopher, even though he says:

"I don't have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities."
— Saul Leiter

See you guys next week. =)