Many months ago, I was approached by Blue Mitchell of One Twelve Publishing. He had interest in expanding their publication line-up to include a series of monographs, and he wanted to start with my work.
Well, many months and a significant amount of work later, he's launching his Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for this venture.
Obviously, I'm excited and honored to be considered for this project. I've always wanted to see my portraits in book form, all together, the way that they're meant to be. I have nothing but respect for Blue, not only as a publisher, but as the designer who will personally be handling the lay-out for the book.
We have worked through a lot of ideas, and have settled on the premise that the book will be one half art book and one half essay. It will be softcover, 9x12 in size so that we may present the 8x10 plates as they are meant to be viewed. The second half, the essay, well – let's just say that I've been re-training myself to write since March. This essay will come in at about fifteen thousand words, and if nothing else, I have the best and most diverse groups of editors that any struggling writer could ask for.
Don't worry – I'll get it together. Nothing better than pressure and support (and a looming deadline) to make things like this take form.
This book will be beautiful. I'm very excited that One Twelve Publishing wants to actually print it – not digitally, like everything we're used to seeing – but on actual offset presses. Our press check trip to the print shop was very illuminating. Things like this just don't happen anymore, but they should.
The Kickstarter campaign itself is pretty exciting – Oliver Ogden has been producing the video work and has opted to convert his mini-documentary into a serial. We'll be releasing the ongoing series one at a time, every Monday for the length of the campaign. As you might expect, I was a little fussy about being followed around by a video camera, but I changed my mind quickly once I started seeing the results.
Please join us on Kickstarter for this campaign. Donations are appreciated, of course, but it will be very important to a project of this size that folks are willing to help get the word out. Anything that you can do to help out, including spreading the message, is greatly appreciated.
Here's that link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/240268849/contact-by-jake-shivery
Your pal,
jake