"South Africa is not one facet. It has many different ways of seeing and being seen. What is the ‘wonderland’ that is South Africa? There are a lot of truths about South Africa, a lot of truths that I wanted to document in a book form."
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"I’m proud of the fact that this work existed at a time when it was not supposed to exist. It stood for a celebration of Africa and South Africa. I didn’t defend my work. I felt like I was doing something I had to get out of my system, something that had been boiling up for years inside of me."
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"This body of work shouldn’t have existed in South Africa at the time. We had our new-found freedom, we needed to express our new-found freedom. What was wrong with me expressing the things I was seeing at the time? Graffiti doesn’t last long, neither is expression through clothing permanent. Fashion and dressing will change. I wanted to capture that time. That gave me reason to do it, even in the face of criticism."
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"That photograph of the entertainer that appears on the cover – the photograph came about as a surprise. I was documenting work on HIV, and this man appeared and started performing, in a way while I was photographing him. It wasn’t expected. And then for it to appear on the cover was an even bigger surprise. I had never made the cover before!"
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"I love what’s happening nowadays within the discipline of South African photography – things are not so easily consigned to traditions of documentary, fashion and ‘fine art’. It’s all more open, more changeable."
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"The Market Photo was there to help black photographers do work, to get paid for the work they were doing. There was resistance to what I was doing, because the Workshop is known for journalistic, documentary photography. I studied with Zanele Muholi, Ingrid Masondo, Raymond Mokoena, Cariña Booyens, Oupa Nkosi, and Buyaphi Mdledle…in fact, most of the people I studied with went on to do great things."
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"I take photographs of the other, as well as me."
– Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko

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"When you think of solidarity, is there no stronger image than the raised fist? It’s iconic."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"Living in Korea, and then in Finland, I was the minority and many people’s eyes were cast on me. I decided to try make the most of that, and to not let it affect me negatively. As a black man, and a foreigner, the more time I spent there I realised my identity meant more than just myself. It meant my country, my ethnicity: I grew into the politics of race, and into this project."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"I didn’t want the book of photographs to be about me. I wanted the book to have a collective sentiment: this South African thing of ‘Come together, let’s be together.’ To invite these multiple voices."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"Words like ‘equality’ have many hidden layers to them."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"Editing pictures of the BLM protests in Finland late at night, about 10pm, this was a moment to look at what I had witnessed from a very South African perspective. I felt: this was something. There was anger, frustration, tears, it was an opportunity for people to show emotions they had been holding back – real grievances."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"On that day, 3 June, I went with my camera onto the street. I took my camera because I felt it was important that the protests were documented by a black artist, as there aren’t many of us in Finland able to tell our story. This was documentary, but also, this was a way of participating in this process."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage: that book answered some of the questions I was looking for. How grave his work was, taking on this task of documenting what was happening at the time, and taking on so much risk. These are the tasks some photographers have to take to get their work out."
– Nathi Sihlophe

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"I could have cut up new books, yet they never appealed to me. I was curious for the older books from the scientific disciplines – my father was a scientist, and books on mathematics and the natural world first proposed themselves as material for my process. Only later did I also start using other books, including history and photography."
– Barbara Wildenboer

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"As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, we were fed a lot of stories and few real explanations. Goldblatt’s The Transported speaks to me of all the inadequate responses the adults gave to our questions."
– Barbara Wildenboer

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"An orchid was delivered to my door with an unsigned card containing only the words ‘Sorry for your loss’. I had no idea where it had come from. A week later, my father died. The orchid now felt like some sort of sign, or an omen. The orchid lived in my house, I couldn’t find who it belonged to. A couple of weeks later, I was at the Milnerton Market and came across a copy of Camera Obscura, and had the idea to turn the book into a camera, and I photographed the orchid."
– Barbara Wildenboer

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"It’s easy to cut up magazines - less so with books. This changed on finding ones that had already been mined by another pair of scissors."
– Barbara Wildenboer

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"In cutting up The Cordoned Heart, I was aware of the violence in my undoing, shredding, taking apart other people’s images. I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t destroying anything, that this book and its contents would persist. I realised I couldn’t do the images any justice by repeating them. The images exist in the book, with the book as an archive, and I am working with them symbolically."
– Barbara Wildenboer

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"In another reading, in destroying or burning a book, it could be said that you offer it a second life. Attention is drawn to it, to its banning or censorship."
– Barbara Wildenboer

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"I work with an analogue camera and black-and-white film. I like to make black-and-white handprints of my images, to engage with the discipline of making. There is a sense of control and distillation. I always use the same film stock and rarely work in colour. I’m comfortable with my recipe; my process."
– Nicole Fraser

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"I love the haptic process of darkroom printing: mixing chemicals, working with time, working alone."
– Nicole Fraser

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Bookmaking offers a similar haptic engagement to darkroom printing. The two are mutually engaged processes."
– Nicole Fraser

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"I wanted the book to be held in its own room, to be fully housed in its cover."
– Nicole Fraser

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"The spaces I photographed for this book are largely public institutional spaces, though the final image returns to a private space in my home."
– Nicole Fraser

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"The project ended in a private space, which is my living room, but all the other spaces are public places. I’m looking at the language of deadpan photography, which is often framed as being beyond the self, objective, as it were. What I have tried to communicate through this dispassionate lens is my experience of space, I used this idea of deadpan photography to explore my own subjectivity."
– Nicole Fraser

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"I value the banal in photography; images that are unspectacular."
– Nicole Fraser

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There are many objects that infer touch, that speak to the humans that are absent."
– Nicole Fraser

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"I was told someone thought my photographs were taken by a man. I like that tension. There is a dispassion, but also tenderness."
– Nicole Fraser

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"The way we consume photography now is so often digital. I was missing this idea of an album, something concrete. Mothering is concrete."
– Marguerite Moon

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"I return often to the idea of the Victorian ‘hidden mother’ photographs, these strange photos of mothers covered in dark cloth holding their babies still for the long exposure time of the photographs. Why keep them invisible? And imperfectly so?"
– Marguerite Moon

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"I consider myself a photographer-artist. The two parts are important to how I understand my practice; neither only one nor the other, though both are perhaps implicated in the other."
– Marguerite Moon

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"A part of the difficulty of making work like this is the assumed sentimentality of the subject, of its assumed universality. There are so many mothers. But one mother doesn’t equate to all mothers."
– Marguerite Moon

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"My book Shape-Shifting re-images mothering and mother-being, looks beyond the idealised patriarchal institution of motherhood, beyond the Madonna and Child trope. Mother-being speaks to the individual who is separate from the child yet still a figure of mothering, responsibility and care. It acknowledges the mother as not only a mother. A mother and."
– Marguerite Moon

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Mothering feels monumental."
– Marguerite Moon

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I like the interaction of the photobook. It’s a one-on-one interaction, a conversation between two people which is open-ended and not prescriptive."
– Alistair Whitton

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"Friendships can be strategic, but they must, above all be genuine. It’s always ‘friends first.’ If there isn’t true friendship and respect between practitioners, then that ‘collaboration’ isn’t for me."
– Alistair Whitton

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"The old circus tent in the image hadn’t been used for years and was standing, seemingly abandoned on an empty lot alongside the Black River: I kept revisiting that site, and knew I had to photograph it. One day I did and the following week I drove past and it was gone; all there was left were the marks in the soil made by those people and creatures who had once been there – traces and scars in the land."
– Alistair Whitton

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"Most of my works are silver prints, and translating these images into photobooks has been an ongoing challenge. Something inevitably gets lost – the physicality and quality of the silver print are difficult to replicate. But then again, the silver prints and the photobooks are separate, albeit related, artworks."
– Alistair Whitton

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"Photographing these sights took me to places I wouldn’t ordinarily go; they became studies in the poetics and the politics of this city. The project is unapologetically about place, about time – about place in time."
– Alistair Whitton

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Whenever I find people who have a passion for the book – whether traditional book-makers, master printmakers, photographers, writers, editors – with whom I can collaborate, I am grateful."
– Alistair Whitton

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"A book is a physical thing; a container of thought and a landscape in which to ‘walk and wander’."
– Alistair Whitton

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I enjoy the fluidity I find between photography’s modes; the editorial, the documentary, the fabricated." 
– Alice Mann

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"I like using the language of fashion, advertising and photography to create a space in between the three – one that employs performativity and characters, which allows the subject, their setting and outfit, to become a projection of their aspiration."
– Alice Mann

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"Clothing can enhance a sense of character. It’s not so much fashion, perhaps, as dress-up, performativity."
– Alice Mann

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"How people play with their look, with their appearance and clothing, can unite them in a number of ways."
– Alice Mann

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"I enjoy the sense of collaboration that commercial or editorial shoots can facilitate. I like working with a big group and making a collective decision, sharing that decision, in a way." 
– Alice Mann

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"I was given some advice from someone that I think was wise, which is that one can go from fashion to art quite easily, but it can be more challenging to go the other way. It’s important to try and establish your voice for yourself."
– Alice Mann

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"With my own work, I move slowly, spread it out over time. I give myself the space to make mistakes and for the work to develop and improve as I learn. A fashion shoot is short and intense. Time is condensed, which allows for fewer mistakes and fewer images that won’t be used."
– Alice Mann

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I am very drawn to the format of a photobook as a way of displaying images, where they can be viewed as a coherent project. It’s also a more accessible way of sharing a body of work than, say, a gallery show."
– Alice Mann

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The truthfulness of children can be quite intimidating. I find it inspiring to work with this level of honesty."
– Alice Mann

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"I started to go back and unpack these haphazard and in-between moments, and comment on them through my interpretation."
– Ashley Walters

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"At this stage, attempting to make my first photobook, I was largely influenced by printed media I’d found in the public library in a nearby suburb, having to navigate through my neighbourhood to get there, choosing short-cuts, traversing obstacles."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The camera gives you a certain agency. I could get into moments that would otherwise be challenging. But then the conversation, the encounter, the occurrences are what informs the image."
– Ashley Walters

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"The book allows me to go back in time. The way I interact with books is to go back and forth, navigating different ways through a story. It doesn’t need to be experienced as a linear narrative."
– Ashley Walters

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"I learned about pacing – about the lapse of time – and rhythm in making a photobook through music."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The autobiographical felt like something I could truly talk about without the anxieties of representation."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Sometimes more goes into the intense process of making the photobook than into processing what you have done in the photographs. To have a moment to sit with the work; not to rush."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I don’t feel like the narrative is static. It’s my work – I can go back and change the sequence if I like. I can make additions and exclusions. But, in doing so, acknowledging that there are always parameters, and that’s a good thing."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"How do you break out of this linear, page-turning thing? It’s an interesting challenge. If you want to, how do you allow space; a way to meander?"
– Ben Johnson

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"The conversation 'photobook or not' is bizarre, but is also enjoyable. It’s a pity that it’s so niche." 
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There’s a tension between keeping the image untouched and offering a dynamic experience." 
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"You can design something, but you can also play with images in some way, considering the book and how things are cropped; possibly it comes out looking over-designed – and yet without apparent design – in the pursuit of play."
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I feel like decorative design is the real killer, when things are coming into the book to try and fill it up."
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Often the artist will have an idea of their book in mind, but they struggle to commit to it."
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"You need things to get ideas from, to accept or reject or even just to see what’s possible. I realised earlier that I wanted to make books, but there aren’t the sorts of bookstores and training opportunities here that there are in London, for instance, and I find myself longing for those places as spaces in which to find things to rebel against, or to learn among."
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"To include extra nuggets of information can elevate an exhibition-serving book above the exhibition." 
– Ben Johnson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I was so taken by the way Ivor writes about objects. His prose is crusty, has a sense of grit. His suggestion in this essay, that many of the traders at the market aren’t there to sell but to be proximate to an economy, was particularly striking." 
– Dave Southwood

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"The stowaway’s life is fragmented. I wanted people to take this newspaper apart, to see how it might work differently. What the text might mean when read against different images. The form, too, fragments."
– Dave Southwood

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The photobook is a container, a place for an iteration of the project to rest. It may disintegrate as the project continues. This is particularly true of the newspaper format or Memory Card. It was designed to fall apart, one way or another."
– Dave Southwood

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I was bored with photobooks that privilege photography as an art form of the highest order."
– Dave Southwood

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"How to give a sense of an anthropology of objects? How do they float through the world? Where are their redundancies?"
– Dave Southwood

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There is a metronomic approach to the arrangement of types of photographs; different metres and rhythms."
– Dave Southwood

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I wanted to convey the particularity of the atmosphere to the reader, a sense of place held not only in the images but in their object."
– Dave Southwood

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"In a sense, Gordimer was writing in a mythic vein in On the Mines, departing from the language more often used in describing heavy industry. As a piece of rhetoric, it’s ambitious. Perhaps its lack of documentary feeling was what she later took issue with."
– Hedley Twidle

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"When responding to an image, we can at least agree on something: we are looking at this image. Responding to literature, one is responding to words with words. It’s like setting up two mirrors; it can be flummoxing."
– Hedley Twidle

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"I’m interested in coded discourses that appear to be about one thing yet have unannounced – perhaps even unacknowledged – motives."
– Hedley Twidle

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"The History Workshop was a hugely important underlay for much non-fiction in South Africa. It’s important to think of the politics; the form of Marxism that underpinned the Workshop at the time was committed to being written in an accessible style. One of the critiques of the Workshop was that, in committing to this theoretical common sense, they didn’t look at the ‘irrational’ or occult realms of experience. Santu manages to do the work of the social documentarian but also enter these domains, the sites of worship, for instance, extending into realms the History Workshop wasn’t able to enter."
– Hedley Twidle

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"It is compensatory, in academic writing, this kind of certainty that makes such a fuss about what it is going to say. So many essays end where they should have begun. This is why I’m interested in non-fiction, where the author begins with complexity as a place to go further."
– Hedley Twidle

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"Using the essayistic mode of narrativising – beginning from a place of not knowing, to discovering – is a pleasurable way to write. The ‘knowingness’ of academic writing can be stultifying, knowing this and knowing that."
– Hedley Twidle

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"Work that makes you feel comfortable is like hearing a voice that is singing and sounds familiar."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

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"How do we communicate beyond the technique? Create a body of work that speaks and goes beyond? Create images that matter?"
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Most of the time, my photography is conversation-driven. It’s trying to make the conversation visible." 
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I started photography at an early age, at thirteen years old. I didn’t know it could be a career, though I began photographing weddings and parties in my youth. After my studies, I wanted to give back to my community. Working with Of Soul and Joy allowed me to fulfil this dream, to support other young photographers."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

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"When I looked at Peter Magubane’s work, it was a starting point. I use my work to start conversations. Psychologically, fifty years later in Sharpeville, what has happened? I used his work as a point of reference. That’s what we do as a young different generation of photographers: we look at the generation before, and we take it forward."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

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"What struck me about Lindokuhle’s work was the closeness, how close he was to his collaborators, as if he wasn’t there, or as if he was one of them. He is so light. This comes from spending so much time with the people one is working with." 
– Jabulani Dhlamini

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"The project uMama was about my mother and my experiences of growing up without a father."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I am continuing with my Sharpeville project, which is shaped by stories I have inherited from my family. My aunt lost her legs in the events of 1960. She wasn’t at the protest, but hanging washing in her garden. Everyone has stories about it, about that day. My parents tell us our histories, like that of Sharpeville. These histories change depending on the teller, the tellings shift. I want to recall what happened to us, to my family. So it is always good to hear from the people who have witnessed these life-changing stories."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

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"So many of Santu’s images appear in my mind: the experiences of the everyday and the way we live."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Free Me From My Happiness was important for the three photographers involved. Other young students were excited by it, by the idea that they might one day publish a photobook too and archive their work."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The aim of Of Soul and Joy is not to make everyone a photographer. It’s to introduce them to photography as an art form. Some students might come and go, but the idea is that we are a family, stronger together."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Whenever I have an opportunity to teach, showing students photobooks is very inspiring to youth, that they can tell their own stories in their own way. Everywhere I go, I take the books with me."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"My work speaks about generational influence."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I use photography to start conversations that are difficult to begin. We grow up inheriting these stories, but we don’t have proper conversations about them. It’s difficult to talk back or interrogate stories that are shared about pain. Photography and books offer a way to ask about these things."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The project perhaps offers some sort of healing: I know what it has done for me, to be able to relook at these difficult things." 
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The answer about Sharpeville changes depending on how you ask the question. One can hear the same story from different angles. When you go away and come again, the story is again told another way. I wanted to archive those stories."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Photography has this essence of ‘taking’, of taking a photograph. What are you bringing back? How does it enlighten a community, a sense of Ubuntu?"
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I found images – early landscapes – that hadn’t been shown before. Long drives up the West Coast in the 1980s; images of fields, of failed factories and industrial attempts – the impossibility of human endeavour in the face of a landscape that refused it. And dispossessed communities." 
– Jo Ractliffe

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"I’ve always wanted to find a way of working with image and text where the one is not illustrative, or conversely, explanatory of the other. Where they aren’t separate fixed modes or entities, but merge... I haven’t yet."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Going into my files, all that unused material – those images that don’t go anywhere – was quite disturbing. Because effectively, you are re-ascribing intention – and a new context. So what happens when, for instance, when you take a photograph from a warzone, places of terrible violence, and place it next to one of a lion park, or a TV screen. What are you doing to those things? I was nervous of disrespecting to those bodies of work from Angola particularly."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"They were images that didn’t fit, yet they refused to be thrown out. These photographs had their own agency."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I was thinking about Eliot’s The Wasteland. A jagged text. When you read it, it sounds coherent again. But it’s suspended, which is a way I feel about nighttime." 
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I reworked old material towards a narrative that was neither document nor fiction. You can mess with the photograph in a photobook in a way you can’t with a monograph."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"We combined the necessity of history and context and also a reading that invited the pictures into another realm; conceptual, perhaps, or surreal."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Those misfits, those adventurers and rogues that I long for." 
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Mistakes and accidents prompt a question."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"That book (Everything is Everything) came out of necessity – a convalescence project. They were in-between images, the last of a roll of film, testing a new camera. Images without purpose – or sometimes something serendipitous. Random pictures. Thinking of them as ‘art’ was radical for me; they didn’t belong. They had no place."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Kapuściński wrote an account of the dogs left behind by the Portuguese, who roamed the city and were fed ration by the soldiers until they left. One day the dogs disappeared. He wondered if perhaps a charismatic leader had emerged from their ranks and led them away. At that time in the 1980s, I was struggling with my work – photographing what a friend called ‘blandscapes’. So I started making these photomontages. Dogs were a trope; they weren’t anything new, but they were always around when I was taking pictures. There was a photograph I took in Crossroads, of a white dog slinking through the rubbish. We looked at each other and that’s when dogs entered the Nadir series."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"You have to trust the image to speak."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When I looked up questions around ownership, how much of an image can be appropriated, there were the two conditions: one, that the original is sufficiently transformed so not to be recognisable, and the second, that you don’t hurt the image. That struck me, the use of the word ‘hurt’."
– Jo Ractliffe

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The captions are not always factual, nor are they often in my own words."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I printed a small book because the images were hard. I wanted something more intimate, something like a school textbook. David Goldblatt was upset with how small it was, as were booksellers in South Africa. But I wanted it that way – wanted the book to be small and the content to be powerful."
– Jodi Bieber

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"There is a text I included to explain the book, the experiences and emotions that shaped Between Dogs and Wolves. It was such a personal journey – I felt like I was the best, the only, person to frame it."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"My first book was a scrapbook of every single thing – all the clippings of my work. In form, it was the beginning of a book. It was only in my personal work that I began thinking about real books."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Photobooks, to my mind, are the ultimate form of the photograph. Having a book, in the end, is having a legacy – books last longer than people. You can push for how you want your work to be seen and understood. In an exhibition, there are always competing ideas, always other voices. In a book, it can belong entirely to you."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"It wasn’t that long ago that, all of a sudden, there were ‘women’ photographers, I think perhaps through social media and the internet. I feel that prior to this, the ‘men’ photographers were taken a little more seriously, but I don’t know why."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I show my work to quite a few people. It’s so important for me that people I really respect look at the prints as I start to get things down. You begin to hear a common theme, a common choice. In my mind, I know what images are important to me but hearing it from others without telling them confirms this, and then the editing starts."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Isn’t the first book always the special book?"
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I would like to get rid of this photo-journalism thing, that I never thought I was, and look at the work I’ve been making as a photographer for thirty years."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I love love. I collect naive art about love. Billy Monk’s photographs show humanity at its most vulnerable. I never get bored looking at that book."
– Jodi Bieber

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Wanting to understand the setting and sentiments of the photographs, Santu's words were at first more important to me than his choice of images. His voice, his awareness of where he was in space and history, his ability to think around what he was doing, wasn’t predictable but open and raw and simultaneously hidden."
– Josh Chuang

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I made a promise. 'Santu,' I said, 'you don’t know me, but my commitment is for your voice to be articulated, loud and clear, and if you don’t see yourself represented at the end of this I will consider this a failure. But if you are willing, I’d like very much to work with you.' We quickly fell into a rhythm when we began editing together several months later. He was interested in my questions and I was interested in his answers, and in all these unseen images."
– Josh Chuang

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"We had laser prints all over every available surface, trying to figure out what images related to one another. Sometimes it was clear there was a sequence of successive frames; sometimes the files were jumbled. I wanted to tease out a chronology of the picture-making, to get a feel for the natural order within the larger group of pictures."
– Josh Chuang

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Making a photobook is a collaboration with photographers, with materials, with time, with – ultimately – the individual viewers who activate it with their attention. Having something physical to touch is irreplaceable. I have yet to have a digital experience of a photograph that I can relate to as intimately as in a book."
– Josh Chuang

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I was hungry for pictures, to see more. The photobook proposed itself as the vehicle that most satisfied my desire."
– Josh Chuang

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Ponte offered variable ways of thinking and learning. We had so much material that needed to find a form. Bookmaking was the brain, the dummies were ways of rationalising and making sense of what we were working with."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I’ve often described Ponte as a greedy project – we wanted it to work in all the ways: as a book, an exhibition, a work, an object, a ‘good’ traditional photo-essay, a historical document."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I was relieved when we found an exhibition form that was as strong as the form of a book. This was about layering. Ponte is about stories, a web or cloud of stories floating one above the other, and this sense of the building as being a repository for stories. I knew the book would reflect that, but I was glad when the exhibition did."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"What is rubbish and what is treasure? If I were on my own, I would never have collected all this stuff out of the rubbish, so to speak. I’m very chaotic in many ways, but I like being precise. Patrick’s way of ‘getting messy’ with the project gave me a huge amount."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"This new book is returning to the book after it was exploded out. It is like putting the genie back into the bottle; now one book, designed to be more affordable, without a box."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"We argued each other around and so strongly that we argued ourselves out of our own original positions."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"It’s complicated to know when to trust your instincts as an artist and hold on, or when to let go, and the opportunities and unknowns that taking either position may bring."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"With Beaufort West, I wasn’t in control of the form. I made formal decisions, but I wasn’t in control of those decisions. What I loved being a part of and observing with Ponte was the degree of love that went into design and every detail and discovering this way of making decisions."
– Mikhael Subotzky

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"It was an aspirational thing, to publish, as a photographer. The book was a metaphor, a way of immortalising one’s value."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I’m receptive to the need for photographers to express themselves, not only to observe."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"We were pretty naive in those days. We did our work and submitted it, left it to others who might have the gravitas and ‘smarties’ to frame our photographs. We didn’t have a great deal of agency, but then we didn’t resist this."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When something is in a book, it has a particular resonance. There were few galleries for photographers back then and, in any case, the value system of the collective photographers I was among considered fine art galleries bourgeois. The church or community hall was the place for us, with printing as a way of sharing information."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"We used terms like “the camera is a weapon against the struggle.” Ours was a fight to tell the truth. It was a highly weaponised apartheid system in which we operated, and this was the rhetoric of the time."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Books** **were validation for us working in the anti-apartheid movement, and they were very successful. Coverage, exposure, and some criticism."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"This first book is a manifestation of my idealism, kicking against the bourgeoisie world. It is small, it is not hardcover. David Goldblatt said the poor quality of the book made it shoot itself in the foot as the photographs didn’t come across strongly. This was a good example of how not to do this."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The book is a vector of ideas."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When people talk about struggle photography, it’s a very specific vision or imagination they have of the past. Fists and flags. But at the same time, many of the photographers working at the time were also creating their own photographic projects, extending ourselves beyond the news moment as storytellers."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Being a literature student in the mid-1980s during the maddest and baddest days, we regularly had arguments. Everyone was behind Gordimer and the Black Consciousness poets, but there was a question mark about JM Coetzee. I found Coetzee’s work invitingly baffling and challenging. Perhaps, I thought, Coetzee was doing something we couldn’t, or hadn’t yet, come to terms with. The counterargument was that he was clearly a problem because he was never banned."
– Peter McDonald

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"It took a while to get the censorship reports together, and as soon as I got those first reports and was able to link actual censors’ names to decisions and to read their comments in detail, I realised there was a massive problem. What were these censors doing there? We like to think of the censor as a dull bureaucrat. In fact, they were in some cases eminent writers and academics."
– Peter McDonald

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Whether one gets conspiratorial about it or not, files went missing. This could have simply been a bureaucratic error. But sometimes, I would come across a glimpse that the security police had been on the telephone – tantalising hints that there was a bigger story there beyond the censorship board, but that was impossible to substantiate."
– Peter McDonald

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There are documents that have disappeared and never been found – records that may have been pulped, accidentally or otherwise. There are gaps in the archives, enigmas. But when it comes to censorship bureaucracy in South Africa the record is pretty much complete, and it is vast. If anything, the challenge is to deal with the overwhelming amount of evidence, more than what is not there."
– Peter McDonald

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I was driven by a set of intellectual preoccupations regarding the category of the literary and found myself facing a bizarre situation where these seemingly abstruse matters were a feature of the state apparatus."
– Peter McDonald

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"What is it that elicits discomfort in the viewer? This discomfort is worth considering, pursuing. I’ve explored it in other subjects too, in other series."
– Pieter Hugo

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"I guess the arguments that happen around a work at a time are important because those conversations need to be had. But looking back, one can be surprised by the furore an image, or a book, created."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"One of the things about designing books that people often overlook is the conversation that happens between the images and ideas, then the material availability and resources one has; those compromises and constraints."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There’s something about the materiality of a book that speaks to a certain era, to the era of its making."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Many of my projects begin as collaborations. I try to cultivate those relationships. You can’t get laid if you don’t go to the club, as they say."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Hopefully, at some point you begin looking beyond your craft and towards a form of authorship."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Often, the strength in a work is also where its problem lies."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"In answer to the question, ‘What is a photobook?’ – a photobook has a narrative and clear author’s voice, whether emanating from found material or originating from a practitioner through a lens. It has a rhythm found in its sequencing. You are trying to create an object that has its own sentience. This is also beyond your control, and perhaps your intentions aren’t what the book ends up articulating. There are times when one can see a premeditated idea imposing itself at the cost of the book."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"As an artist, you’ll always find certain themes that you keep returning to. At some stage, you start having conversations with your own work."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Personally, I am attracted to a portrait. I make books because I want to share them. These are the variables that need to be taken into account when choosing a cover."
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Are photobooks still relevant? They certainly meant a lot to me at some stage…"
– Pieter Hugo

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole in a mini-marathon towards the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"It seems to be the essential labour of the photobook: editing and sequencing."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Photography, perhaps of all the practices, is the most democratic: within the archive and the surplus, there are these hidden gems."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There's an earnestness that often animates South African photography."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Many people want to make a book – it's an aspiration. But when they make it, they often mimic what other people have done: they don't experiment, play."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The hardest thing for me as a curator was to narrativise the contemporary period and the emergence of a vibrant and robust art market. From roughly 1995 onwards, the Internet hovers – the surplus-building machine. The photobook had to contend with the sudden surplus of images primed by a voracious economic market that happened in tandem with the Internet; a dyke had ruptured, its pictures everywhere. It's become clear that contemporary photobooks are seldom projects of bookmaking but rather a figuring-out of how to answer – and be allied to – exhibition projects as catalogues of sorts."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I'm always astonished by how well photographers write – David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Santu Mofokeng, others internationally. The text supports the images; there's a co-dependency." 
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"With Sue Williamson’s photocopier works, there was fun and experimentation happening in a period of flux, interregnum; artists pushing against censorship and pursuing new levels of liberty."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There are photo ethics involved; one can tear apart an image and let it speak for itself."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Text is one way of describing what a flood of words is."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"In the 1980s, the rhetorical device of documentary photography was emphatic." 
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The importance of books as teaching tools is augmented by the fact that they are mobile."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"It sounds as if you were saying, 'Let's not too tightly determine this,' and in doing so, you created something more generative in allowing Ponte City these different expressions."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Is the picture demonstrative proof of intention?"
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I focused on Ernest Cole as the most important book of the apartheid era, but others have suggested that the most important book was the passbook."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"As a raw material, the Ponte City project is like yeast: it lives."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There's a cultural climate in which images operate. Things change."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"If this is the autonomous object – the book – you have to put great emphasis and belief in it."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When a book of that size proposes itself to you, what kind of mental calculus do you need to do? Do you come prepared with mental fluency? Or do you need some time to get into it?"
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The closer the book happens to the work, the more immediate it becomes: a making-sense can happen. When you wait, it inevitably becomes retrospective. The book's mistakes are the work's mistakes."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"It seems that – for the apartheid state – images had a more unstable agency."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"One of the techniques you use is seriality – taking photos of the same thing. But I'm interested in how you found a rhythm or a way to lay them out."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Particularly when one publishes an archive of images, a kind of discipline of organisation arises."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I've seen it with some photographers who work on a book, and it never gets made: they're working on making it perfect, and it's never perfect."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I listened to you talk about how you source books – digging through 'mortuaries' of secondhand books. Clearly it creates an awareness for you of both the redundancy and the importance of books."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When one self-publishes, it's a way of testing the project against the public. But, of course, one could argue that of all books. But it's very honest when it is self-financed and -published. There's more of a commercial transaction when someone else takes all that on."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Once a book is printed and bound, it's irrevocable."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"One of the ironies of Santu Mofokeng's Stories is that it's the most articulate expression of his project, made at a time when he could no longer speak."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Silence is, I think, the worst response."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"As a research exhibition, what arises? What can it recall and tell?"
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Did you feel you were working in the absence of a tradition in South Africa?"
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The book predates the photograph."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There is a transition where the photograph has merged with the paper, where invisible hands make that possible, those artisans of bookmaking."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The books were the thing."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Magazines are a site of experimentation; they're fluid spaces to experiment. Many leading photographers found their footing in magazines with fashion."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Self-published books can often elicit a feeling of shame in the maker, but looking back, they are the most immediate expression of the maker's means as well as attitude at the time."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The book allows you to stage relationships between images."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There isn't a great tradition of humour in photography in South Africa."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Many people want to make a book but, when they make it, they don't recognise the full potential of book arts."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There's a difficult relationship between image and text, particularly in the South African photobook."
– Sean O'Toole

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The copier was like having this giant instant camera. These were the days before the digital camera, it was before scanning was common, laptops didn’t exist. The closest thing to the copier would have been a polaroid camera, and how much better were these colour copies than a polaroid print in size, quality of image – everything. It was as if the whole photocopier bed was an A3 camera lens."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I remember Linda Givon saying then that it was important that I make these little photocopied books. And I look at them now, and I agree. The book holds its time. They are written at a moment. If you start to update a book, you usually find you can’t."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"In making a photocopy, you could manipulate the image to get a strong sense of movement, an intentional blur of the image, or have fingers coming in at the edges of the screen – there was a filmic quality to it."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"If you made a copy of an image or an object, then copied the copy, over and over again, the colours became distorted and dark, something curious happened."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"In art making, collage was definitely a practice of the 1980s. We were conscious of starting to push through the barrier of apartheid and the layering of different elements in our work." 
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Seeing a passbook laid out and enlarged gives one a sense of how entirely the State controlled black people’s lives – from where they lived to how they moved, what employment they could seek. It was the absolute icon of state control, the most hated object. Without it on the street, a black person could be arrested immediately."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I remember the excitement of first using the Canon copier. There was a sense of immediacy I couldn’t otherwise capture. The process feels more direct, even now, than a photograph."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"A postcard I made and had printed about the demolition of the Modderdam squatter camp was banned for distribution within a week of its making. I wish I had the letter from the government department that banned it: ‘While this postcard is not without artistic merit, it does not present the true position: that these people are here illegally.’ That would have been about 1978."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"My interest was in books and printing – in getting information out. I designed this little rubber stamp: ‘Sue Williamson, original photocopy’. Each photocopy is an original, it images whatever object is on the copier bed directly, time after time."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Words are as powerful as steel at enclosing and framing the way you think about people."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"In 1990, I was artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, with the brand new Canon Colour Copier to play with in the space. For a workshop, I invited people to come along and bring personal objects and images and documents to copy with the idea of making a self-portrait. The resulting images were extraordinary, and I kept one of each for this sample book."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Design is something of a ghost discipline – much like the term 'artist', it has a broad definition. The way I work is to begin with a concept as a super-structure. Traditionally, photo sequencing is intuitive. With design, you’re logic-building, working beyond intuition in pursuit of that conceptual framing."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I work with words, but I don’t use words. I keep a scrapbook, a document of the process. This way of keeping a journal is the closest thing I have to a commentary on the book."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"There are the paginations of books we made but didn’t print; the PDFs of books that never were – a massive collection of other iterations. These are intrinsic to the work’s archive. It becomes even more extensive."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The lightboxes are the platonic form of Ponte; the concept in its entirety."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Often there isn’t as much of a hard edge as one might like between projects. Influences appear in other projects along the way. When you are collaborating, you bleed into one another, and one needs time if one is to individuate and really draw a boundary behind a project."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"You can’t be as spatial in a photobook as you can in an exhibition, but you can be temporal. Binding and size can slow down the reader, while a small, compact book can speed them up."
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The photobook is less fluid than the exhibition. Spatially, the photobook is more predetermined."
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Photographers and designers speak about a photobook having a 'not designed' aesthetic. But that is still a specific look, and begs the question: What are the features of this 'not designed' aesthetic?"
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"In thinking about the history of photography in South Africa, the archive left behind by this history, and the photobooks that were never made at the time the photographs were taken, there is now an imperative to make photobooks from this archive to mark particular kinds of photographic work."
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The bodies of photographic work are in the archives, waiting to find photobook form. But how exactly do you make a photobook retrospectively, because surely it’s different from making a photobook out of a body of work that is new?"
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Multi-sitedness in archaeology is useful because it means looking at multiple sites to understand a single site. Given our history, there is a strong emphasis on single sites – Sharpeville, Soweto – and reading history through single sites. Photobooks tend to ape this approach. It would be interesting to see a photobook on June 1976 that was multi-sited, and put it in dialogue with the photobooks that are hyper-focused on a single site."
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Often there are projects that you can’t reflect or write against, especially when you’re invested in the art world in other kinds of ways, playing other roles, and wearing multiple hats."
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

“Using a few different papers or changing page sizes within a book is sometimes more of a headache than a cost – but the headache is a cost.”
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Perhaps because fashion photographers have become familiar with printed images in a different way through magazines, they are willing to be more experimental."
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I tend to agree that, when it comes to photobooks, the design should be understated. Ultimately, though, it’s a question of what the photographer or artist wants, what they want their book to communicate."
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"A photobook is not about design – it's about the images, the artist. The design cannot be allowed to take over. It shouldn't be distracting. Graphic designers can tend to sometimes over-design."
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The artist would have to give permission for the classic 'rules' of photobook design to be bent. Images are a sacred thing, and usually I won’t mess with them. Bookmaking is definitely collaborative; the artist would set the constraints."
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When I was younger, I didn't realise that book design was a specific trade, its own discipline. In South Africa, there are so few book designers – we have to figure it out by ourselves, try things out, see what works."
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"I don’t like to spend too much time looking at the internet. The digital realm is too abstract and vague for me, it's too fluid, changeable and impermanent. I guess this is why I'm drawn to making books, and not websites, for instance."
– Gabrielle Guy

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.