I went to the publication party for “Along These Rivers” yesterday, to pick up my contributors’ copy of the book. The event was held at the Silver Eye Center for Photography and, like everything else related to this book, seemed to have been organized under a veil of secrecy: The two daily newspapers had carried no mention of it that I could find, though our “alternative” newsweekly, Pittsburgh City Paper, listed it in their events calendar for the weekend.
About the book itself, I can report that it’s quite well done. Professionally printed and bound and not looking at all like a home grown product, though the photo reproduction quality is definitely lacking. Most of the work in it is of very good quality.
The event was well attended, though the tiny space of the Silver Eye gallery probably exaggerated that feeling, but the strangest thing was that the average age of those present seemed to be about 75. OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be around 60. I expected to find it packed with young folks and was startled to see only 3-4 twentysomethings while I was there. I could read that as a sad omen about the future of art in Pittsburgh, but to be truthful I expect it was due to the “clubby” atmosphere of which this project always faintly smelled to me. Pittsburgh isn’t a huge city and it was clear that a lot of the people present already knew each other. The feeling of being an “outsider” was ever present for me.
Some other things I noticed:
• Though this event was held at an art gallery specializing in photography, the number of photos from the book on display was… zero. None at all! Since this is a book of “Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh” and its publication was being celebrated at a photo gallery, I naturally expected to see full-size prints of works from the book. But there was nothing. It reinforced my feeling that the photographers were the second class citizens of the project.
• In the book itself the quality of photo reproduction is fair to good. Not what I would be happy with if it were my own photo book, but not as bad as I’d feared. The slightly disappointing image quality is likely due to the fact that, as far as I know, they acquired the images for the final product by scanning the prints they were sent(!), rather than getting digital files from the photographers. (After my photos were accepted I kept expecting an email asking for a high resolution digital file for publication. No such request ever came.)
• The lack of Internet-savvy displayed by the publishers, on which I have commented previously, seems to exist amongst the contributors, too: In the listing of the 92 contributing poets and photographers in the back of the book, only 6 (including myself) have web sites listed.
In the end, its quite a good publication, which makes the way its creators have dropped the ball on promoting it all the sadder.
Here are the two photographs of mine that appear in the book (click on image to see full-size version):
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