You might remember that I told you about the new addition to the household, a senior male black cat. Well, after a few short days, he and the other male cat have become fast friends. If you know anything about cats, that’s a bit of a miracle, given that such introductions — if they even work out (male cats are enormously territorial) — typically take a while. But I’m not complaining.

Meanwhile, the senior male black cat is now called Larry (the shelter had called him Rocky). Cats don’t react to their names anyway, and a few occasions of mistakenly calling him Larry convinced everyone that that was in fact his name.

You might remember that I previously told you about the Steidl woes, meaning the publisher’s struggles with/over money. After I sent out that earlier email in which I mentioned this, Kinga Owczennikow kindly sent me the link to this Art Journal article (thank you, Kinga!).

This might be the most detailed account you can find, and it goes way beyond the rather superficial, laudatory treatment of the publisher that you might have seen elsewhere: “The Art Journal spoke to a number of industry insiders who wished to remain anonymous”. I was a little bit surprised to see what people had to say, given that to me this seemed obvious. But if you remain anonymous, it’s easier to go on the record:

“The publishing programme may simply have grown too large.” There were enormous catalogues, long publication delays, “too many Juergen Teller books” and “no obvious commercial discipline over print runs”.

It might just be the case that a publishing house that wants to survive cannot put its sole focus on print quality (and that’s not even going to address the question whether every book needs to be printed in the exact same overbearing fashion).

I wish Steidl well, though, because unlike many other people I do not believe that there are too many photobooks. The market is not too small because there are too many books. The market is too small because photographers and publishers make almost no efforts to reach out beyond photoland.

Anyway, looking around the burned-out shells of the internet the other day I found a video about Kikuji Kawada and The Map. This offers you not only Kawada himself talking about the process, you also get to see Kohei Sugiura, a pioneering Japanese book designer, speak (everything is subtitled). I think this is worth your time.

For what it’s worth, I’m not at all sold on Joshua Chang’s claim that the abstract-pictures-only first volume of the dummy is very insightful and/or interesting. I mean the real value of The Map is exactly in how it interweaves the abstract and more realist photographs.

Jessica Simmons-Reid published a long article, relating Sophie Calle’s work to Hervé Guibert’s. The two artists knew each other very well, and it’s a very good read.

Lastly, over the past few months I have been thinking about making photography and the process of showing or disseminating it more enjoyable for myself. At the same time, I have been enjoying the process of writing these emails, so I thought that I might start sending out actual physical letters. In part this is because I personally actually enjoy getting stuff in the mail.

I’m thinking that if you sign up, paying a little money for materials, shipping, and tea consumed during the process (something like $10 or so per letter), every two months you’ll get a letter in the mail that comes with a little print*** and maybe something else. I don’t know what the “something else” might be, but I’m thinking that this would vary.

Typically, I tend to overthink things. So in order to force my hand (so to speak), I already ordered paper to print on plus a set of rigid mailers (so things can’t be destroyed in the mail quite so easily).

I’m going to soft launch the whole thing, meaning that if this is something that interests you, send me an email (you can simply respond here). Eventually, there will be a little website (but this overthinker has not attended to that, yet).

*** “little print” — something around a tiny little bit smaller than A5 (the envelopes I bought are 6.25 x 8.25 inches). It’ll be printed on Epson Premium Presentation Paper Matte, and it’ll be something either from one of my past projects/books/publications or maybe something current.

If this interests you and/or if you have any questions, please be in touch. I want to get this started relatively soon (meaning ideally the first batch will go out some time in September).

And that’s it for today. Thank you for reading!

— Jörg