VSW Biennial Photo-Bookwork Symposium in Rochester, New York

I'll be presenting a talk at the Visual Studies Workshop Biennial Photo-Bookwork Symposium, at 31 Prince St. in Rochester, NY. It takes place June 23rd through 25th, 2016. If you haven't experienced upstate New York or Rochester in summer, it is one of the nicest places to be in the US this time of year. This is the fourth one in the series: the first took place in 2010. I went to the first two, which were terrific, but sadly missed the third, two years ago, due to the fact that Karen and I were teaching at the University of Arizona's summer program in Orvieto, Italy.

The Visual Studies Workshop, a ground-breaking graduate program started by Nathan and Joan Lyons, is my grad school MFA alma mater via SUNY Buffalo. I think the VSW Photo-Bookwork Symposium, launched by Director Tate Shaw, is one of the best conferences that I have attended. And we have been to a lot, in fact two or three conferences a year for the past 30 years. I wish that more traditional artists' book people would come to them and get exposed to what's going on in the photo part of the artists' book world. Alas, many practitioners, curators, and collectors from the main stream of the artists' books world really are in the dark about what is going on in the photobook realm, and there are lots of exciting things happening.

I'll be talking about the spectrum of photobooks, from traditional photography books to "photobookworks" which are the closest to artists' books but use photo imagery. I spent a couple of weeks working on a large graphic continuum chart that shows the spectrum and tries to deconstruct it. I will be posting it here after my presentation. If you are interested, please check back here in about a week and I will have it up. If I am really ambitious and there seems to be any interest in it, I might record my talk and post it on my vimeo page and provide a link here to it.