learning a new language

I actually related to this article a lot. It took me a long time to decide to develop an o online source for my images, from facebook…to flickr…through a cheap website design…to a fantastic site that my classmates and I created in my Web Design I class. After getting so in tune with the digital world, I completely left behind the physical aspect of life and my homemade portfolios ended up on my shelf and, I’ll admit, have stayed there ever since.

After recommendations for this Visual Books class, I decided, “hey, what the hell, let’s see if I’ve still got it”. What I didn’t know was that my past work was in, what seems now to be, cutesy scrapbooks.

In the Bound for Glory article I was impressed with the opportunity this contest gave photographers, in all categories (fine art, editorial and commercial) to try to go back some years and make an ACTUAL book with ACTUAL pages, and not the clicking an arrow to move further into an on-screen picture array. Sure, it wasn’t easy making a site, but now that I’m folding and sewing together books, html coding doesn’t seem so bad!

How amazing is it that 2,400 photographers created their own book, a piece of art in itself? One thing I’ve learned from this class is that when you’re constructing your own book, totally hands-on, it makes you care about your work more, and from what I’ve seen and read, other people get that feeling as well (this includes other artists loving their work, as well as non-artists admiring what you have to offer).

One of the most important things, I believe, about creating a book is that it DOES have its OWN language, just like overcoming the digital struggles of html coding. Books have to be perfected by sequence, placement, type of binding, extreme creativity from cover to cover and the amount of effort that does into it (and more). It’s just as special, if not more, than html coding and I think that the contest described in Bound for Glory is trying to reflect that and inspire artists to try going in this direction, to try to learn a new language.

Being digital and physical savvy makes you trilingual and that always looks good on a resume, right?