The Photobook: Structure and Meaning
© Kai McBride
ONLINE COURSE

The Photobook: Structure and Meaning

Interested in this class? Email us and we'll notify you next time it runs.

Would you like to make a photobook, but struggle trying to shape your individual images into a cohesive form? How do you get your audience to understand what your book is about? In this 6-week class (an expanded version of our popular 4-week intensive) students learn to read a photobook holistically and understand its structural and conceptual elements. Through editing and sequencing exercises, we’ll explore image-to-image connections that further the overall meaning and make a book come together as a whole. Students will learn a powerful workflow to guide them through the process of creating a book — from selecting images, laying out sequences, and constructing a maquette, to producing a finished book dummy. Class lectures will include analysis of important photobooks and technical considerations for preparing photographs for book printing. Students will gain insight and experience into how to craft a book that is more than the sum of its parts. The emphasis is to understand the structure and methods of making a photobook, so it’s not necessary to have a completed body of work for this class. Unlike the 4-week intensive, students will be encouraged to begin using their own photographs for the homework exercises.


Presented in conjunction with InDesign for Photobooks and Zines.

 

 
I am so glad I signed up for this black and white class. Kai is a wonderful teacher. Not only is he organized, interesting, challenging and creative, but he goes that extra mile to provide us with very helpful handouts and resources! This class is opening up a whole new world to me!
—Barbara (New Jersey)
Thanks, Kai! The class was an enormous learning experience for me. The arc of my understanding between weeks one and four amazed me. I thank you for sharing your encyclopedic knowledge and your methods and I hope we have the chance to experience another class together soon. I can’t wait to get back in the studio to cut and paste. 
—Fran (New York City)


Kai McBride
Kai McBride

Kai McBride is a photographer, musician, teacher, and avid cyclist who recently uprooted from Brooklyn to sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico. He spent the last ten years teaching photography and managing the photo facilities at Columbia University, his alma mater, where he received an MFA in 2008.

Born on the island of Kauai in 1972, by his 18th birthday Kai had lived in California, Oregon, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Texas, Oahu, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. He sharpened his powers of observation while adjusting to life between suburban ranch-style homes, cabins with no running water, and a 20-foot teepee in the field of a commune.

His photographs have been exhibited in museum and gallery exhibitions, and are held in public and private collections. His first monograph, About Face: Picturing Tampa, was published by SPQR Editions in Fall 2016.

Kai teaches black and white photography, photobooks, and more for StrudelmediaLive.