This year’s winner of Blurb’s ‘Photography Book Now, an annual prize for self-published books is Italian photographer Valerio Spada for his Gomorrah Girl, a photographic exploration of the murder of 14 year-old Annalisa Durante in 2004, a young adolescent girl involved in “the land of Camorrah”, (the Naples Mafia.) You can of course read more about it on Blurb’s site, and there is a feature about the prize on Time, and the ‘lightbox’ there shows more of what looks like a truly amazing book, along with some images of this years other PBN prizewinning books.
Perhaps the first thing that struck me – apart from the quality of the work – was that this book was not and could not have been produced on Blurb. This is an open competition – for which Blurb deserves praise – and any self-published book by professionals or amateurs can be entered. But Spada’s book has a complexity which adds interest that goes beyond what is possible with Blurb. The book combines and binds together Spada’s own documentary pictures interleaved with a smaller book of pictures he was allowed to take of police photographs from their investigations of the case. I’ve not been particularly impressed by all of the earlier winning books in the various categories of this prize, now in its fourth year, but this looks a very worthy winner. Perhaps it means that word has now really got round that the $25,000 prize (courtesy of HP Indigo Digital Press) is really worth winning.
Although I’ve now completed six books on Blurb (and helped friends in the production of a number of others) I’ve not entered any of them for PBN, largely because I’ve not thought any of them was the right type of book to have a chance in the competition, either for the overall prize or any of the categories. Many books that are worth publishing are never going to win prizes.
My latest book, now eagerly awaited from the printers, has seen me struggling with several of the limitations of Blurb’s free publishing software, BookSmart. In particular, printing double page spreads is very much a gamble, and the only solution I can find is to take an educated guess on the amount of overlap of the two halves needed and send it for printing, then wait the week or two until your book comes back, make adjustments and repeat until you are happy and the book can then be released. Blurb’s help suggests you avoid important detail in the region of the gutter, but I think all of the detail in my pictures is important! The forums have some more common-sense approaches (although as always there are people, always American, who see no problem and I suspect have no important detail anywhere in their pictures) but no real solution. Depending on exactly where the image is in the book and the type of binding you seem to need to allow around 1/8″ to 1/4″ of overlap.
I’ve never much liked having images that run across the gutter, but my latest book – for a show opening shortly – the pictures are panoramic images of gardens, and some have a aspect ratios that really need to use the 20×8″ of a double-page 10×8″ spread. Others are close to square, where I’ve used a fairly extreme vertical angle of view as well as horizontal, and fit a single page without problems. But more about this in a week or two when the show should open.