PhotoNOLA Photobook Fair
Wednesday, Dec 11, 12-5pm | Free and open to the public
Independent publishers and photographers with recent book releases will present their titles in a day-long book fair. This event offers viewers the chance to peruse a beautiful array of contemporary photobooks & zines, and engage with the artists and publishers who created them. Featuring:
Overlapse
Pine Island Press
Luna Press
UL Press
Cheryl Gerber
R.J. Kern
Tammy Mercure
Eric Kunsman / Booksmart Studio
Linda Troeller
Roxanne Darling
Bill Westheimer / Petey Pie Press
Colleen Mullins
Lisette de Boisblanc
At 2pm Jeff Phillips, of Filter Photo, presents Photozines: Why You Need Them in Your Photographic Practice.
Luna Press
Founded by Josephine Sacabo and Dalt Wonk, Luna Press is dedicated to the publishing of illustrated books — based on Baudelaire’s idea that there are “correspondences” between the arts and that the best and most natural appreciation of a work of art may be a response to it in another. Luna Press’s goal is to emphasize the correspondence between words and images, thereby creating beautiful books. Titles presented will include Inventing Reality: New Orleans Visionary Photography, an anthology with essays by Russell Lord and D. Eric Bookhardt, and their two newest releases: Structures of Reverie by Josephine Sacabo, and Lonely Voyagers by Simon Blake and Dalt Wonk, among others.
Overlapse
Overlapse is an independent visual arts and photobooks imprint based in London UK, founded in 2015 by publisher Tiffany Jones. Subjects and stories address social, cultural, and environmental issues, with themes connected to human experience. Through close collaboration with photographers and artists we create unique, desirable, and beautifully produced books. Titles will include their newest release, The Saxons of Transylvania by Pascual Martínez + Vincent Sáez, Altered Ocean by Mandy Barker, Lviv-God’s Will by Viacheslav Poliakov, Metropole by Lewis Bush, Solastalgia by Marina Vitaglione, The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer by Amani Willett, and more.
Pine Island Press
Pine Island Press is an extra small press, which focuses on producing photography and art publications. Including, Incandescent, a bi-annual zine promoting analog color photography by emerging photographers. Incandescent does not and will not charge submission fees; it was created to provide photographers an opportunity to share their work free of charge. Over the last eight years, Incandescent has featured more than three hundred emerging artists from all over the world. Titles presented will include Good Days Gone Cold Days, by Sarah LaPonte and Helen Jones (2019), Harmony Rats by Robert F. George (2018), Stripes of light by Helen Jones (2017), How Restaurants Work by Sarah Laponte (2019), along with Incandescent Issues Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen.
UL Lafayette Press
The UL Lafayette Press is the world’s largest publisher of Louisiana-related books. In their growing series of photo books, they strive to illuminate an ever more complex cross section of the people and culture of Louisiana. Book signings at their table will be scheduled with Jeremiah Ariaz, for Louisiana Trail Riders (2018), and Tina Freeman, whose new book, Lamentations, was just released.
Eric Kunsman / Booksmart Studio
Eric Kunsman is a photographer and book artist based in Rochester, New York. Eric works at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the Visual Communications Studies Department at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and is an adjunct professor for the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences. He owns Booksmart Studio, a fine art digital printing studio specializing in services for photographers and book artists. Booksmart Studio publishes fine edition books, produced by hand and in collaboration between the studio and the artist. He will share five of his recent publications: Exposing Saints, Fake News, Volume 1, Fake News, Volume 2, Thou Art… Will Give…, and Lenswork #143 which includes work by Eric T. Kunsman and other photographers.
Tammy Mercure
Tammy Mercure is a photographer based in Violet, Louisiana. Her work concerns the rites and rituals of the American South and the relationship one has to the land. She often works in book form starting with a popular monthly zine series using letterpress in 2012. She continues to make books and designed Polo Silk’s “Pop That Thang” in 2017. She has spoken on the subject in many panel discussions, taught a one-day book workshop for PhotoNOLA, and curated three unique book exhibitions at Antenna called the Blue Library. Tammy’s most recent publications are: Sleeping by the Bayou, about the cemeteries of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana ($20), Saints, featuring 78 color photographs representing the tarot cards, in six sections that are long-stitched together ($35), and White Rabbits, a true crime zine with the story of the abandoned pet cemetery in Saint Bernard Parish ($15).
Linda Troeller
Linda Troeller is a photographer based in New York City whose work is focused on health, women, sexuality and community. She will be sharing five publications. Living in the Chelsea Hotel (2015, Schiffer Books) is a photo memoir on the iconic artists’ community and its evolution to restoration that won the International Photo Book Award. Orgasm (2016, Daylight ) is a photography and interview book on women’s sexuality. Spa Journeys (2004, powerHouse Books ) is a photo book with interviews about the latest spa trends. Healing Waters (1998, Aperture) is a vivid exploration of water therapies all over the world, that won first place in the Pictures of the Year. The Erotic Lives of Women (1998, Scalo) was called one of the “gutsiest and imaginative books of the decade” by the New York Times Book Review.
Bill Westheimer / Petey Pie Press
Bill Westheimer is a born experimenter who lives in West Orange, New Jersey in a converted 1885 carriage house that includes a modern darkroom, digital printing studio and 3D printer. Recent work includes photograms made on collodion glass plates, Ilfochrome and gelatin silver media, and a collaboration with Charles Schwartz documenting the city of New York via camera obscura. He founded Petey Pie Press in 2009 to publish books of art and photography. It is named for Petey Pie – a hound dog who can’t read and isn’t particularly interested in books or pictures. Recent publications include: Manual: The Personalities of Hands, Momento: Capturing Moments and Memories, Visions in the Dark : Camera Obscura views of New York City, Oddyssey, and The Billiad. In addition, Westheimer will share two limited edition artist books: Manual and Crickets.
Roxanne Darling
Roxanne Darling is an emerging artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Previous career stints as a marine biologist, ballet dancer, corporate health coach, and marketing consultant -among others- have led her to a place where she is ready to share art and writing of a more personal nature. I AM: For the Love of Nature features nude self-portrait accompanied by original poems. The photos were taken in the American West and address climate change, #MeToo, and nature as nurturer.
Colleen Mullins
Artist Colleen Mullins has worked in the fields of book arts and photography for 30 years. She will be sharing both hand-constructed works and offset larger editions. All Your Private Information is a limited-edition portfolio of photograms of embroideries of segments of the language of sextortion. Out of their initial, ill-intentioned source material, the words sing like the cut-out magazine letters, forming a strange ransom note. Beautifully rendered in silver, they coo, “good day, my prey” and “think about the shame.” Each print is enclosed in a printed Asuka folder with a sextortion email printed on the front. The set of five photographic prints is contained in a handmade clamshell box with the title hand-embroidered on the front. In Opening Day, the author explores how family stories become family legends through oral inheritance. Why do we only remember certain stories? Using her father’s battle with dementia as a focus, and the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop, the author reminds us that our existence is our memory and the memories of those we love.
Cheryl Gerber
Cheryl Gerber is a freelance journalist and documentary photographer based in New Orleans. She will present two books. Cherchez La Femme: New Orleans Women celebrates the vibrancy and diversity of New Orleans women. Inspired by the Women’s March in Washington, DC, Gerber’s book includes photographs of the city’s most well-known women, and everyday women, highlighting their contributions to the city. Gerber’s photographs are accompanied by twelve essays about women such as Leah Chase, Irma Thomas, Mignon Faget, and Trixie Minx. Also featured are women’s groups that have made their mark on the city, like the Mardi Gras Indians, Baby Dolls, and the Krewe of Muses. The book is divided into eleven chapters, each celebrating the women who add to New Orleans’s uniqueness. (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) New Orleans: Life and Death in the Big Easy uses photo juxtaposition to portray New Orleans culture–its contrasts, dichotomies, and social ironies, the things that make the city so richly diverse and distinctive. It features local color, showing how everyday New Orleanians live and celebrate life through Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, second lines, and more. The images then take a more serious turn as they depict the inequalities that sometimes make living in New Orleans so difficult. The book closes with photos depicting the way New Orleanians observe, mourn, and celebrate death. (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2015)
Lisette de Boisblanc
Lisette de Boisblanc was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She graduated with a BFA in Photography in May of 2010 from the University of Georgia, and returned to New Orleans where she lives and works as an artist. She has recently been working on handcrafted artist books, and will share her recent project, Poisson. Inspired by frustration and opportunity, Poisson is a handmade accordion-style book about a fish that lives on the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain.
