Most of you will be reading this on an electronic screen, as opposed to a paper page. The phosphor dots will flash by and be gone as soon as you close the page...though I hope that they thoughts they will stimulate will continue to circulate for a while longer. That's the wonder and horror of the digital age.
You can also use the screen to view not only your own images ( provided the hard drive is still going...) but those of the rest of the world. Instagram will do that for you, as well as all the vast fields of viewing available with a Google search. Look as hard as you like - you'll never run out of images to see. Your eyes will blear long before the pictures stop coming.
But.
But there are times when the vast flow of novelty is not a help. Times when you want to see what you have seen before, and want time to study it. Time to think about it...and then to go look again. Time to reach for a book...
I know - I maintain a photographic library. Big picture books bought at Boffins Bookstore or Mainly Books or Elizabeth's. Books bought from Reader's Feast or Kinokuniya or Abbey Books in the eastern states. Books bought at our local Workshop Camera Club camera swapmeets. Some have been remarkably cheap, and some painfully expensive, but they have all helped me to see and create - far beyond what the electronic screen can do.
You see, not everything that you'd like to know...or fear to see...makes it into that vast Googlatorium on your computer. You may be able to call up 34,000 pictures of kittens and/or the HINDENBURG, but looking for that one thing you saw in 1974 outside of Adelaide is going to draw a blank. If you were lucky and someone took a picture of it, you would have to be Lotto-winner luckier if they put it onto the net. No kitten - no show. If there is never a chance of money changing hands, the hands won't be interested.
On the other hand, the business of writing, printing, and selling actual books means that more money is needed and more effort to please or educate is made. Publishers may still try to rob you at book-point, but they have to more heavily armed intellectually than with mere random holiday snaps or student street photos. If you're gonna pay, you want something to pay for. And with a bit of luck, you get more.
You also get to see it for a longer time - and at your own pace. It is not crowded off your mind by the next 4 second coloured flash on a screen. If you are old enough to drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and join the army, you have a longer attention span than the people for whom the sound byte and screen grab are intended. You can see, think, and savour. You may never be able to do as well, but you are able to appreciate the quality that has been done.
All this said, buy a book. Buy a monograph if you want the work of one person, or an anthology for a wider spread. Expect to pay the price for the paper and the binding. Look for something that looks good and feels good - you are allowed to enjoy it in more than one way...and allowed to go back to it and enjoy it again and again.
If you are adventurous, and inspired, and flush with cash...make a book yourself. Individual books and limited runs are the specialty of the Blurb, Apple, and other presses. They have mechanisms that can put your pictures and thoughts on paper in a way that makes them more valuable than you've ever thought. At the very least, with your very own supply of slim volumes - images, poetry, philosphy, etc. - you will be in an excellent position to prop up a short kitchen table leg.
Note: This has nothing whatever to do with old technical manuals or specification books. They are a whole 'nother realm of published work. One for the very
special people amongst us. And they do walk amongst us.
