2024 06 04

Bare trees at Starved Rock, Illinois — Massively compressed jpg for the sake of your bandwidth. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

This video below entered my life over the weekend and I’m really glad it did, though my bank account took a hit as a result.

Alec Soth discusses two photobooks and how words relate to their pictures within. Tim Davis’ I’m Looking Through You and Gilles Peress’ Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.

Tim’s book is incredible and has been in heavy rotation lately at the studio, however, Alec’s video sort of rudely reminded me that my habit of fully avoiding words in photobooks is something I need to address. Even as someone who fancies myself a wanna-be writer and values good writing above maybe even photography itself, my instinct is to completely cut out the words. Perhaps it’s because my brain goes first to the words and then to the images, which minimizes the visual impact. Or perhaps it’s because they typically don’t serve a valid purpose in most photobooks and I’m forcing my brain to connect solely with the images without changing their meaning. But that’s not really my choice to make! Books are put together with much work and consideration, and if the artist put the words in the book, I shouldn’t ignore them. Now, I’m excited to get my ass back to the studio and head straight for Tim’s book to take in the words he put into it to compliment the images I have already consumed.

Gilles’ book is set to arrive today. This is an insanely deep photobook project spanning 1,000 pages of images and an accompanying book with another nearly 1,000 pages of words and images. Plus it comes with a tote bag to contain everything! Normally, hearing about a project like this, I’d get super curious and then see the $456 price tag (marked down from $750 on amazon), then immediately move along to other distractions in order to turn my mind to different things; But this time Alec did such a great job talking about this book and how good it is, I mustered the courage to plop down the money and have it delivered.

Lately, I’ve been “listening to the universe when it tells me something.” This is a bit of a new approach to how I might normally operate and I’m not yet quite sure how it will play out. It’s a long-term process, afterall, but I do strongly think these small everyday decisions I am making now will compound into something bigger and more meaningful a decade from now. I bring this up because this video was the second time in a week I’d encountered a photographer whose opinion I trust mentioning this expensive book. Typically, I’d tune it out, as I’m quite stressed about money these days, however, I’m listening to the universe and the universe wants me to spend $500 purchasing this photo book.

I’ll let you know in a decade whether or not it paid off.

-Clayton