The link to the conference is here. There is still time to attend, though the discount on the hotel ends on October 18th, so you should act soon.
I am on the planning committee for this conference and we have been working on it for a year and a half. We are very excited to have the dynamic Mishka Henner as keynote speaker. As far as we know it is the first time that a regional SPE conference has flown in a speaker from Europe. I have six of his artists' photobooks and I love his work. His bio description says "Mishka Henner is among a new generation redefining the role of photography in the internet age. Since 2010, he has embraced print-on-demand publishing as a means to distribute his work and ideas. In 2013 he was awarded the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Art." He is represented by the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York.
A part of my duties on the planning committee was to put together a panel during Saturday afternoon on "Cross-currents in Photobook Publishing." The panel will be moderated by possibly the best person in the world to host a panel on publishing photobooks, Mary Virginia Swanson of M.V. Swanson & Associates, also known personally as Swanee.
It is an interesting and eclectic group of panelists and we represent four distinctly different viewpoints on how to get photobooks published:
Deirdre Visser, who is a curator of the arts at the Bay Area California Institute of Integral Studies, spearheads Chroma, a non-profit publisher that strives to "promote pluralism in the arts, to support artists in the creation of new work, and to foster dynamic and critical dialogues within and across communities that propose integrative approaches to the urgent questions we collectively face.." and "also interested in non-traditional approaches to cultural production and cultivating collaborative relationships with communities."
Mike Slack is an L.A.-based "indie" photobook publisher, who co-founded and co-publishes under the imprint The Ice Plant. He has also published photobooks in collaboration with J&L Books. They are distributed by Artbook-DAP.
Alejandro Cartagena is a Monterrey, MX based photographer who has gained much notoriety in the last few years in the photobook world. He self-publishes books like his very well-known Carpoolers and Rivers of Power. We both lectured (as did Deirdre) this summer at the VSW Biennial Photo-Bookwork Symposium in Rochester, NY. He will also be speaking on the day before the SPE conference opens for the VASE Lecture Series (not part of the conference), on Thursday (November 3rd) evening at 5:00 pm, at the Center for Creative Photography Auditorium in Tucson.
I round out the panel, also representing self-published books, but under the Spaceheater Editions title. My books are usually in much more limited editions, are signed-and-numbered, and many of my books tend to cross over more into the artists' book world, even though almost all of them are photo-based. I will be giving out a new, just revised, version of my Photography Book to Photobookwork Graphic Continuum chart, which most likely will irritate and possibly confuse many of the attendees.
There will be a number of other events at this two-day SPE conference but I am focusing here on ones that relate to my interest in artists' books and photobookworks.
