Most photobooks follow a very simple, straightforward formula: one picture on a page, plenty of white space to make it stand out, evenly spaced. It is an elegant and unobtrusive way to give images room to breath and calm the viewer down. It worked for Robert Frank’s The Americans and is still in heavy use today with slight variations in modern classics like Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi.  However, this is not the only way to do a photobook.

In this episode, we look at the work of David Carson (known primarily for his design work for magazines including Ray Gun and Beach Culture) who has made photography a part of his design life from the very beginning. We’ll look at his Fotografiks, a free-flowing symphony that weaves together typography and photography. He is not the only one with a looser, more experimental way of spreading images over pages — Japanese photographers have long been known for their courage and experimentation in the medium of the photobook, and we’ll look at two examples from Takashi Homma and Takuma Nakahira. Join us for an hour of creative ways to move beyond the one-page-a-picture formula.