Photobook Review with the Author, Wolfgang Bellwinkel

Yumi: Tell us a bit about yourself, and what you have been up to?

Wolfgang: I finished my exam about 18 years ago, at that time I was very much involved with photographing the war in Bosnia. In this book you will find a lot of work on Asia, images with a documentary style, others more subjective style and you will always encounter kind of violence. For some reason, I don’t know why but in my life, I encounter a certain type of violence. That probably started with the war in Bosnia, and later on, it happened in other parts of the world. So I am mixing these images into the book because I think for me this is just part of life. And all this different things, the beautiful things and the negative things are kind of parallel in our world.

About my own career, I’ve always kind of split up myself. One part was commercial work, I work for magazines, I work for companies, basically to make money. On the other side I was always doing my own projects. Since I was 19 years, I’ve always came to Asia, I have a deep interest and relation to Asia. So I think the last 10, 15 years, most of work was done in Asia because that was just the place where I spent a lot of time and it’s also the place that interest me may be more than my own country.

It’s very much about strangeness, about my own search for a home, for a place, because I think being a German of a certain generation, we have a problem with our own nationality may be. We are kind of the post-war generation and we are still, like my father was a soldier, we know all these stories of the war, we know the stories of what the Germans did in a certain time. I mean we never had an easy relation to our country. This is why may be a lot of us left and are feeling kind of homeless, I think this is little bit what the book is about, a feeling of not belonging anywhere, the feeling of being somehow a little bit lost in this globalized world where you actually can live anywhere, wherever you want. but yeah, no land call home.

There are places I love to be, there are place I feel quite good but the question if this is home. I am kind of wandering between East and West. And that’s a bit tiring sometimes, but it’s interesting also. I lived in Singapore, I lived in Bangkok and I went to many many places in Asia so I have a certain feeling for Asian mentality. There is a certain Asian way of thinking I think of seeing the world and I had the chance to experience it a little of that.

It was a long process of about two years, selecting images, scanning the old stuff. And ending with a selection of about 500 images. And kind of cutting that down slowly into that what you see here. There are roughly 220 images in the book, 320 pages. So it’s a pretty thick book.

I didn’t want to arrange them by countries or I didn’t want to make it by year. It’s a little bit like the brain, like how our memory work. We might remember a certain place and we remember this certain place we might remember a certain person. And from this person, we might remember a certain situation and come back to a certain place again,. And this is basically how the book is structure, because I think our memory is not linear. It’s not fro A to B. It always make circles and goes around and go back and goes forward.

There is something more in this book which is may be not very common for photographic books is that you have short stories, something I’ve never done before. I never wrote journals or things. So it was all out of my memory, stories of encounters I had during the past 18 years and these stories, they try not to explain the images or the images don’t try to visualize the stories. For me they are two ways, two different things. They are somehow connected in a way that they deal with similar things and I find that quite interesting.

Yumi: And that was all your selection, or did you have somebody help?

Wolfgang: I did the selection myself, I was kind of shifting around images for the past one and a half years I think. I mean it was a long long process, it’s very difficult when you have so many images and you don’t have a certain line, there is not a certain logic, it’s quite difficult to find an arrangement. I mean I was just playing around for a long long time.

In this case, it’s a little bit like a documentary film. When you edit a documentary film. You can start from the end, you can start in the beginning, you can start in the middle. And it’s up to you how you arrange the flow of the images. I had the same thing with this book. I was totally free to arrange, which is great. It’s great to be free but freedom also means a lot of work.

Yumi: So when you plan in making the book, you already had the plan to make it this thick?

Wolfgang: Yes, yes. I wanted to have it like that. At the beginning it was to make the size a little bigger may be. But then also out of financial reason we decided to make a bit smaller. I think it kind of fits, I kind of like it at this size. You can still put it in your hands, you don’t have to put in on the table.

Yumi: We just finished a three-day workshop about book dummy. Some of our participants made what’s called an “atlas”, and I guess this book is like your atlas, it’s like a map of your life between 1994 until 2012. It has been very difficult to make one book like this?

Wolfgang: As I said, I started with 500 images, and I had to kind of cook it down to 200 something. I finally selected those 200. There are repetition and I wanted to have repetition. Usually in a photographic book, you are always told you should never take two similar images. In this case you will see like certain images are repeating, like you have the images of skies, images of the wires, you have images like this one, street scenes. In this case I wanted to do it, because I wanted to have an overflow of images. I didn’t want to make a “best of”. I didn’t want to show 40 greatest images I’ve done in my life. That was not the idea I had. The idea was to give you a tsunami of images, a lot of images. So this was the reason why from the beginning I thought yeah, it must be a big book. I mean big not by its size, but its thickness, its number of pages.

How did you approach the publisher?

Wolfgang: It’s not easy, I mean I showed the dummy, the PDF to a couple of publishing houses in Germany and they were interested. They are always interested but the thing is the financial thing. I ended up with Kehrer, which is a German publishing house, a good publishing house for photographic books or art books in Germany. The conditions were still difficult, but they were the best compared to others and I had the feeling that there is good co-operation between the publishing house and me. At the end of the day I could say yes it worked out well. They tried to make a good book, and this is important and today I mean, you have to.

No publishing is going to come and say hey let’s make a book, and we pay for it. So I mean, it’s always that, a certain part of the production cost have to paid by you. That’s different, there are publishing house they want you to pay everything which is kind of ridiculous, there are other publishing house that would say, let’s find a balance, you pay a certain part and we’ll pay a certain part. So with Kehrer it was something like that. I ended up with that, until now I can say it was the right decision. The book is good, the production was good and the images quality is okay, now let’s see. It’s also a question of marketing, it’s a question if they kind of push, if they work for the book.

Yumi: Now can I go on to ask my 5 questions. Question no.1 is why do you make photo books?

Wolfgang: I think there are so many reasons to make photo books, it’s a dream for everyone, a dream for every photographer to make a photographic book. It’s a bit like immortality, I mean, as a photographer or as an artist , you want to leave something.

I mean you are working all your life, and something should last. The book still, with internet and everything, the book is still the greatest thing to make a statement and to leave something. For me, that was one thing, Immortality. A book is like, I would call it a piece art by itself. And it’s more than the sum of images which are in the book.

Because it’s very important how you make the book, it starts with the size. It starts with the way you are arranging the images, it’s important the sizes of the images inside the book. The great thing about a book is also that nobody interferes, it’s my selection, my arrangement. I kind of forced the viewer to follow my idea. In an exhibition you never know how people are walking, in a book it’s easier, I mean there is a beginning and there is an end, and you go page by page. So then I hope you get the idea how the whole story meant. And all the things that are reasons to make a book, you have a fantastic giveaway. I mean this is an image thing also, when you make a book, people will realize, “Oh he just made a book.” And that’s interesting, so it’s a marketing instrument also, it’s important to have it.

Yumi: Who would you like this book to be seen the most?

Wolfgang: Well, everybody. The thing is about art book or photographic book, that usually there is only an inside group that actually looks, are clients of these kinds of books. Usually there is only a thousand copies done. Compare it to literature where they easily make 10,000 books to 50,000 books, it’s a bit difference. There is a big gap. There seems to be an insider group who are interested in photographic books, but this insider group is quite small.

When I saw my father, who has nothing to do with photography. For two days he went through the book, he was constantly coming back to me, he was reading and he was looking at the images, and that’s perfect. Okay, he is my father, so he is interested in my stories because he can learn about me. For him, it’s may be a little bit a black hole, my whole life. So he could find out something about myself. But I hope that this happens also to people who don’t know me, that they might be interested in the stories as well. I mean, future will tell if it works out. Now I don’t have any results yet. I don’t want to have this totally limited audience of photographic specialists or photographers or art people or whatever. I would just hope that the audience is much bigger than that.

Yumi: Is this your first book?

Wolfgang: Long long time ago I did a book and in between, like Rupture where I was a part. But it’s the second book I made by myself.

Yumi: What do you think you have gained from your first book, and how do you think differs from what you gained from doing an exhibition.

Wolfgang: I made my first book just after finishing university. This book was on the war in Bosnia. It was published during a time when the war was still going on. At that time, I was a nobody, I mean, nobody knew me. I just finished being a student, this book was great. Absolutely it was a door opener, I showed this book to many people and straight away I got assignments, I got exhibitions so that book helped me a lot. Basically it was the start of my career as a photographer I think. So that was fantastic.

With this book, I don’t know, I am in a totally different situation now, I am much more established than I was at the time. I hope this book again would become a door opener or at least it makes people interested in my book, in my work and me as a person. It kinds of consolidate my reputation, I think this is when photographer makes a book, that’s very important.

The difference between a book and a exhibition, I like both. It’s two sides of the coin. An exhibition is fantastic, I love to make exhibition, it’s a totally different thing. A book is a piece by itself, you can take it away. An exhibition is always connected to a space and that’s also the fun of it. When you do an exhibition, you kind of react to the space that have been given to you. And you can work with sizes, I love big sizes and book definitely cannot do that. The advantage of a book is that it stays, I mean, an exhibition is always over after three weeks, four weeks. The exhibition is gone. The book stays even after five years. After 10 years, the book is still there.

I was at a bookstore the other day and saw a guy going through my book which is 18 years old. The old book, and I was kind of wow. The book is somehow, this book is around and people are still interested in it. 18 years later, and that’s great.

Yumi: Question 4. How involved were you in the making of your book?

Wolfgang: It is my images, I did the selection. So this is definitely the photographer’s work. But what I consider as very very important as once you have your selection of images, once you arranged the images, you find a good graphic designer.

Yumi: So did you hire a designer?

Wolfgang: Yes it’s a guy I know quite well. The most important thing about this guy is that he is interested in photography. I know a lot of these uninspired graphic designer who are sitting somewhere at a magazine and they are cropping your images just to force it into some layout. They have no idea, they have no respect. So yeah, the main thing is to find a graphic designer who respects your work, who likes your work. You will get very involved in it. The graphic designer should be able to say, this is also my book. This is not just a job I get paid for. It must be a collaboration.

In our case, it worked out pretty well, I had bad experience before so I was selective this time. I said, I want to have a guy who is good for the job, who is interested and have experience in photography. Long time ago, he did a book with lots of photographers and I was part of that, and he did a good job. I think this is important because when you create a book it’s a process, it’s not somebody comes along and say “we will do it this way” and that’s it.

It’s a collaboration and the graphic designer has certain ideas and then you discuss it with him. I don’t know how many times I went, at least 10, 12 times. He sent me PDFs and stuff like that, so he was always informing me what he was doing. I think he did a good job. It was his idea to use red colour. We chose the paper together, but it was his idea to use two different types of papers which is something I really like about the book.

I see a lot of photography books where the images might be good, but I just don’t like the layout very much, you have white page on the left side, and you have an image on the right side. And that’s very boring, I find. Again, you have the chance to do something which is more than just a catalogue. So I was very much involved with the design of the book, and at the end I went to the printing house, I think that’s the most important thing. You really have to be standing next to them, and you have to control it. In my case, it was good, there was some mistakes, and thank god I saw them, and we could change it.

Yumi: Last question, if you had to pick one photo book with you in a fire, which one wil it be?

Wolfang: I probably wouldn’t take a photo book, I would take a camera when there is a fire. I don’t know. There were books that were very important for my career, there is definitely books like (William) Eggleston, or Robert Frank, “The Americans” or Richard Misrach, this kind of guys who have influenced me, who may be are not as important to me today. At a certain time, also Martin Parr, when I was studying he was my hero. I don’t know if today I would take a book by Martin Parr if I was only able to take one book. It’s a difficult question. They are great books, but at the end of the day, I’d rather take my camera, and my passport.