29.2 Seconds, Thursday 30th May 2013, 2:44 PM, Villa Lumière, Lyon by Andreas Schmidt

Format: Physical book containing a DVD.

Price: £40 (you can watch the video for free)

Links: Schmidtbooks, Blurb and YouTube

Comment: Say what you want about Andreas Schmidt, but I like the fact that he's always challenging, pushing and playing with the photobook medium. He doesn't think twice and asks for your opinion, he just puts it out there. Some context about this book below.

"Is it a book? Is it a photo-book? Or is it a film?

Andreas Schmidt's book "29.2 Seconds, Thursday 30th May 2013, 2:44 PM, Villa Lumière, Lyon" is a conundrum. The cover image of the book shows a film still from a YouTube upload (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfOV7Zuvrrc) of the same silent movie and, apart from a short explanatory text, the book only contains a single DVD onto which the film has been transferred. As the title indicates, Schmidt filmed it, situated on the main staircase at Villa Lumière in Lyon, through a window - a classic framing device used throughout the history of the medium by many photographers and filmmakers alike. In the distance we can observe nursery children on their break, running about and somewhat resembling speeded up planets orbiting around each other, almost as if we are looking at a little 29.2 second explanation of the universe.

The artist filmed this short scene a little more than 118 years after the Lumière brothers filmed their workers leaving their factory at the birthplace of cinema http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO0EkMKfgJI with what could be considered a pretty rudimentary device, a Canon G10 Digital Compact Camera; a present-day apparatus maybe much more sophisticated but essentially not so different from the Lumière brothers' own Cinématographe, which was an all-in-one camera that also served as a film projector and developer.

In another 118 years time will anyone still be able to watch Schmidt's DVD? Quite possibly there will be no device left to play it on. Maybe a good museum will show it? Or your grand-children or great-grand-children can show the book and tell the story." Schmidtbooks

My Own Wilderness by Christopher H Paquette

Photos from top: Martin Buday, M Scott Brauer, Eamon Mac Mahon, Herve Demers

"Wilderness has many meanings in this shrinking world we live in. The traditional definition is 'an area of earth untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain'. Where there once were immense regions on the planet that could be defined in this way, today there are fewer and fewer untrammeled places. But wilderness can also be more than a physical place. It can be a state of mind, a condition of loneliness, an economic or political status. It can exist within the most populated cities as a personal space created by the individual. How do you define wilderness?
I was looking for answers to the ways in which photographers interpret and sort through their own personal experiences with both the physical and the theoretical forms of wilderness. How would these conceptions look as photographs?"  Christopher H Paquette


Format: Blurb ebook or print on demand book

Price: Free (book $47.95)

Links: Blurb and PHOTO/arts Magazine

Comment: I have decided to not rate/review Blurb ebooks simply because I don't like them. I don't like the fake spreads, pages and shadowing, and they are simply to easy to make, as you can create these ebooks from any Blurb print on demand book you've made (which even I made myself). Physical and digital books are two different things and to automatically transfer a physical book to digital rarely work.
That said, "My Own Wilderness" is a good project and the ebook is free, so it is definitely worth a look to see this nicely edited body of work from various photographers. It also offers a good preview if you're thinking of getting the print on demand book.