John Eide

Books

I don’t caption my photos. I rarely even title them unless it’s “Antarctic Peninsula, 2014.” I don’t want a title to limit the viewer’s response to the image.

I’m not interested in having a photo illustrate an essay of mine.

I want the words to get the viewer to look at the photo in a different way.

I want the image and the text to exist is some parallel world.

Or to tear the viewer away what they might logically think and consider something new and different.

Or maybe the text has absolutely nothing to do with the photo.

Because of my grad school film experience, the sequencing of my images, whether on the wall or in a book, is very important to me. I don’t necessarily think in single images, but rather how one image can either inform or transform the following images. How do my photos talk to each other?

Prague Album

The first “book” I made is actually not a book but rather an album in an accompanying clam shell box. I found Prague in November to be a dark and gloomy place but on a few of the days with enough sun to make images, I wandered the street. One day I passed a photo store so went in and purchased a box of photo paper, grade 3, which is what I tended to print on, in a 6.5 by 8.5 inch size. I discovered when I started to print that the paper was really low in contrast, far flatter than what I would expect a grade 3 paper to be. But, I decided to keep printing since what would be better than photos made in Prague printed on a paper made in Prague. The 15 prints are tipped on to pages of Arches watercolor paper.

Prague Gardens

While in Prague, especially when photographing the gardens, I was sorting out in my mind the 50 years of them being under a military dictatorship of one kind or another, what that must have been like for them, and then, what the residents of Prague had experienced in the one year since they were loosened from the Russian choke hold. So as I edited and printed the garden photos I had those thoughts running through my mind and I felt I had to somehow add what I was thinking to the images.

To see the digital book version of Prague Gardens -- click here. 

Traces on the Hardway

My initial presentation idea for this body of work was that it should be in book form. However, the cost of scanning and digitally printing it as a book in the early 1990s was way too costly and cumbersome. So the exhibition prints were mounted on large sheets of Arches paper and hung on the walls. When I was making the digital prints for the Ice and Inca projects, I decided to also print the Traces on the Hardway in book form. 25 years after the initial book idea was formed, the technology, and especially the cost, had come down so that anyone could produce a book at home, easily.

The book is 24 inches high by 18.5 inch wide, closed, and opens to 36 inches. My goal was to make the pages somewhat reflect the size of the wall pieces, but still be a book that one could easily handle. I explored the look of turn-of-the-last century atlases so I could mimic, to a degree, that look with this book.

To see one of the wall pieces installed, go to the next page. The panorama (far wall) of the spot where the columns for St. John the Divine were quarried is 18.5 feet long by 3.5 feet high. The throw-out in the book (in foreground) is nine feet wide, which limited a bit the final size of the book. It's not a book you can easily read in bed.

To see the digital book version of Traces on the Hardway -- click here

...in 1992, I drove to Arizona...

Arizona was such a different experience for me that I thought, like in Prague, that I had to include some of the thoughts running through my mind as I made the photographs.

You may see a few of the photos from the Arizona book while I read the accompanying text in my Zoom talk, which you can find at the end of these pages.

...he whacked his finger somehow...

I broke a finger at the start of a sailing race one day and this is a bit of a journal of that experience. The title comes from my finger doctor’s notes.

In addition to the photo/text books I've made, I also did a series of what I've been calling Goofy Books where the form of the book takes its cue from the title. I was having fun playing with the formal structure of a book, or playing with the conceptual content. There are close to two dozen of these Goofy Books. It's what we do in the middle of cold, Maine winters.

In the fall of 2021, I was asked by the Director of the Kate Cheney Chappell Center for Book Arts at the University of Southern Maine to give a presentation of my books to a joint Zoom session of the Center for Book Arts members and the members of the Baxter Society, the bibliophilic fellowship of Northern New England.

Here's the link:
https://video.maine.edu/media/Photos+Pixels+Books+presented+by+John+Eide/1_ss11ejju