The Lucent Logbook

I tell you about my first photographic book. Publishing books and brochures was not an unknown sphere for me, but when I planned to publish a purely photographic book, which meant special visual language and layout and format etc, I needed to learn about it. So, in 2003 I went to the Toscana Photographic Workshop (very inspiring place!) to attend the class of David Alan Harvey entitled “Creating a Photographic Book”. David is a very talented person and what he is doing nowadays with the Burn Magazin, inspiring the aspiring photographers, is estimable. Unfortunately he did not like my pictures, and therefore found very little time to deal with me. In exchange I thought that his approach to a book creation was a bit simplified. It was mostly about editing the sequence, while the format and design issues were left out. But I needed more, because I think a book is not a slideshow, it is not that linear, one can enter a book from any page. Anyway, it was his first class about book making, and I am sure next years it was more varying.

I suppose it was David who suggested me to photograph in the Bar Centrale, at the central square of San Quirico. He probably noticed me spending time there. When shooting, I had white wine mixed with water (never did it before or later, but I had to stay in working condition), and was sitting there long hours. The table napkins in the bar were of thick brown paper, and there I got my eureca: I would make the REAL book, the TANGIBLE one, out of materials available in the bar! The Friday morning before the final show of the workshop I worked mostly with box cardboard, napkins, glue and scissors. And edited my prints into this book. I hope David was happy to see that somebody followed literally the topic of his class.  This nice remembrance is now on my bookshelf among other photographic literature. After my return from Italy I made also a little web-page about this funny book.