Judging InFocus Self-Published Photobooks at the Phoenix Museum of Art

I spent a very long day yesterday at the Phoenix Museum of Art. I was helping to judge the second triennial InFocus Juried Exhibition of Self-Published Photobooks at the Phoenix Art Museum with my fellow jurors Mary Virginia Swanson, Becky Senf, Ray Carns, Larissa Leclair, Christian Waguespack, and Emily Weirich. There apparently weren't quite as many submissions as last time but there were still almost 200, so it was an impressive job to get through that many photobooks and give them the full attention that they deserved. 

The show is based on an exhibition mounted in 2012 in Cleveland called DIY:Photographers & Books, which was the brainchild of Barbara Tannenbaum, Curator of Photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art. A link to the show is here. Some of the same people in that show submitted books to this current juried exhibition. Mishka Henner, at that time an almost unknown, had four books in that show. He is now internationally known and will be the keynote speaker at our regional SPE Conference coming up this week in Tucson.

Here are some photos of the large room where about eight tables were set up full of submissions. The first shot was as we arrived and started to discuss the procedure for reviewing the books.














One of the things I immediately noticed was the very high level of finish on most of the books and the fact that at least 60 or 70 percent of the books were hard cover, not something one associates with print-on-demand self-published books.































The jurying went right up to 6:00 o'clock when the Museum was to kick us all out. I am looking forward to the release of the final tally of the scores to see which titles made it in. I certainly had my top 20, but the final list may be as high as 100. However the total maximum acceptance number hasn't been determined yet.

The show will open in November and stay up until April, 2017.