More on Harry Gruyaert's 'East/West'

First Harry Gruyaert book versus East/West

-

Written and illustrated by Ken Tanaka

I am delighted that Mike highlighted Harry Gruyaert's new set of books, East/West. I was so darn excited when I saw the pre-announcement for this set that I immediately ordered it. Seeing more of Harry Gruyaert's work is always welcome to me and I salute Thames & Hudson for publishing this set. These books present nearly 100 of his images, most for the first time, organized thematically (in Russia "East" and Las Vegas/Los Angeles "West"). If you enjoyed his first book(s) you'll probably like these, too.

Still, I do have two primary issues with this publication. The first is the color. Kodachrome 64 features an abundant blue cast. Skilled color scanners and printers are very careful to retain just enough for that Kodachrome signature but pull it back on many frames where it can easily overwhelm the image palette. There are more than a few images in these books that are overwhelmed with K64-blue!

But that's a nit compared to my issue with the set's format. The books are needlessly narrow, forcing many bad design choices, such as frequent double-trucking and forcing landscape-oriented frames into claustrophobic portions of otherwise blank tall pages. I just do not understand why publishers let designers run amok in such a way. Harry's work would sell plenty of books. It should always be presented in the squarish format of his previous Thames & Hudson volume; that was perfect.

Landscape-oriented images really suffer in East/West

Same image as presented in original Harry Gruyaert book (top) versus East/West.

I do encourage Thames & Hudson to bring us more of Harry Gruyaert’s wonderful work. But please, just give us the images. They need no extreme design.

Ken

©2017 by Kenneth Tanaka, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rocardo Silva Cordeiro: "Being both a photographer and a graphic designer, I suffer in double when I see bad decisions like that. I also witness similar things happening at the design studio where I work, I have to make sure my colleagues don't indulge in the temptation of over-designing things. I often making the analogy of cooking: if you have an already good source material just let it shine, don't add too much ingredients otherwise it will be a mess. Regarding double paged photographs, I'm okay with it in certain conditions, the images have to be chosen carefully to see if they work and judiciously distributed trough the book. The cut in the image problem can be somewhat attenuated by the impact of seeing it large.

"For me the the magnum opus of bad design and production choices is Gueorgui Pinkhassov's Sightwalk book. From the horrible paper choice, weird rubbery cover to the page binding: a wonderful photography work ruined in a horrible object that wants to be different and flashy just for the sake of it."

Peter Randall: "So pleased you brought up this subject. I was a book publisher for 35 years and designed a number of my own photo books. And I’ve bought hundreds more. I’m always aggrieved by designer who wants to leave evidence they were there. The best design is invisible, allowing the reader to look at photos or read text with out distracting design!"

Comments

[Benjamin Marks]

Oy vey iz mir! That page layout is really awful. Just heartbreaking. It's book design committed as a felony.

The funny thing is that outside a small number of people in the publishing world, no one, and I mean _no one_ will remember or care about the book designer's identity. The photographer is the artist here and the designer has inserted him or herself into the process of seeing Gruyaert's work in a most unhelpful, counterproductive way. Arrggg.

Oddly: This book's design reminds me of wedding bands that play too loudly. The bride and groom are thinking, "we want background music for our special day." But the band is thinking "DUDE!!!! WE GOT A GIG! LET'S THRASH!"

Sigh. I really like Gruyaert's work. And: I'd like to be able to enjoy it without being aware of the designer's choices. And that's book design at its best: invisibly helping the artist or writer convey his/her meaning. The sad thing? I might buy the book anyway, just because I find Gruyaert's use of color so interesting when it work. Reminds me of Saul Leiter and Harry Calahan's stuff. . . in a good way.

[Geoff Wittig]

Kenneth Tanaka is so right. The original Harry Gruyaert book is brilliant. Its minimalist design, right down to the spare san-serif font for the limited text, lets the photographs speak for themselves; no nonsense, one photo per page, nothing across the gutter.
The kind of intrusive design demonstrated by East/West is like an Eames chair; hipster cool, but impossible to sit in.

[Ed Hawco]

I'm not sure what to think about the landscape issue. I know what you mean about how the design in the new editions force a landscape image onto a portrait page, leaving oceans of blocky white space.

But... I absolutely hate when photographs are bisected by a gutter. I think it ruins the photograph and it leaves me frustrated and wanting to see the image unmolested.

So which is the greater evil? To ruin the layout by forcing the image onto a single page, or to ruin the photograph by imposing a gutter?

[Richard Tugwell]

Totally agree with Ken. Some design / production / style decisions have subordinated the images.

This is quite common in my own area as well ( web application design ) where sales and product ownership hi-jack the core product

[hugh crawford]

"I just do not understand why publishers let designers run amok in such a way. "

No, it is the publishers that like tall rectangular books, not the designers.

TLDR, square books are just as expensive to print as a tall book of the same width.

Based on recent personal experience;
Hugh the designer would have really liked to have a squarish book.
Hugh the publisher couldn't afford it.

You have three common sizes of paper 787x1094mm 889x1192mm and 965x635mm

The most cost-effective book sizes are a size that can be made by folding one of those sheets of paper 3 times to get a signature of 16 pages, assuming that presses come in all sizes, but of course they don't.

The largest 16 page signature on a Heidelberg press is with no waste is 235x305mm or about 12 x 9.25 inches ( or slightly bigger if no bleed), that is no waste of paper and 16 pages on each plate. Assuming that 9.24 inches is one of the dimensions the only way to make the book more square is to cut the book down to size, but you are still paying just as much paper and labor.

If you want to larger you can find a printer that uses a Mitsubishi. Max size for a vertical 16 page signature on a Mitsubishi would be 255x360mm or 10 x 13.77 inches It will use 787x1094mm paper sheet, the paper is only partly used, so there is some waste. This is somewhat more expensive than the Heidelberg, and is why you hardly ever see books larger than 12 x 9.25 inches until recently. Now there are a lot of 10-inch wide books but they tend to be a bit more costly.

I had some unique constraints so I went with a 10x12.75 inch signature on a Mitsubishi press because the alternative would have been a slightly smaller layout with more than twice as many pages. I'm not sure that it is even possible to bind an 1800 page book on 80-pound paper but it would weigh over 25 pounds. Anyway, that extra 3/4 of an inch was pretty expensive but cost a lot less than the alternatives.

The other thing to keep in mind is that shipping can cost more than manufacturing, ( a lot more if you are going through traditional sales channels where the book gets shipped multiple times ) so cutting a third of the book off and recycling it rather than shipping it could be a money saver, but the publisher doesn't pay most of the shipping traditionally.

All that said, my next project will be landscape 9.24 x 12 or smaller.

if you want to play around with how much design changes effects cost there is a cool calculator at http://www.printninja.com/pricing/photo-books. Note that changes pretty much track what the changes would cost at any other printer and binder, but you are paying a big convenience fee. Also, note that the shipping costs about as much as the printing.

[cdembrey]

Thank you, thank you, thank you hugh crawford!!

Mike, as a storyteller I prefer books/magazine to single prints. Please consider making hugh crawford a regular contributor to TOP. It looks like he could be a fount useful of information.

[Ken Tanaka]

Hugh: Keen points about the relative cost relationships of page sizes and total project costs. I cannot claim to know how much a factor it was for this project. My own guess, however, is that the design was likely the driving force for two reasons. First, whatever economies may have been achieved by paper sizes were certainly eroded by the elaborate packaging and cover stamping. The two volumes are housed in a very customized partial slipcase featuring separate tipped-on cover images and reversed stamping and mounting. Second, this ain’t no little indie publisher or one-off hobby project. This is the veneable Thames and Hudson, one of the world’s preeminent art book publishers. They certainly must have far more control over their paper cost framework than, say, an indie printer in China or Italy.

[YS]

Ugh, that layout had my eyes twitching. It really subtracts from the photos.

[Thomas Turnbull]

"to leave evidence they were there."

great insight
well said
temptation & bane of all arts
mea culpa

[Robert]

I make it a matter of principle never to buy photo books in this most irritating format. Never, ever.

[hugh crawford]

Ken
Everybody uses the same presses and other machinery.
Set up costs are pretty low on slipcases and other packaging , the labor is in the actual making of the thing, so the first one isn't that much more expensive than the next thousand. With the book block itself it can be $5000 for the first and $7 a piece for the next few thousand, but add a half inch to the short dimension and it's $7500 for the first and $12 for the next few thousand. Then you ship it and it gets marked up 4 times, it's a big difference.

I suspect that the cost of the two books in the slipcase was about the same as the larger single volume with no slipcase, but the perceived value of a two volume set in a slipcase is a lot higher, and I also suspect that a lot of these are going to be gifts. From a business perspective, it's a no brainer and Thames and Hudson is a business.

As an object, the Thames and Hudson is quite lovely, and the covers are conceptually very cool, almost like someone came up with the idea and the cool title and then a design that played off the title and only then handed it off to someone else and said "now fill it with photos".

The book I just did, is an exercise in first figuring out what the densest way of laying out 6754 pictures is, and then what is the least amount of book that I can contain that with. I love whitespace , but there is maybe 3 pages worth of blank space out of 768 pages.

All book designs are a compromise and you have to pick one or two things that are important and take what you can get away with for the rest.

Apparently seeing the images with few distractions was not the important thing in the east west books.

Of course I could be radically and totally wrong on this, I am only going by what I see here and have not seen the books in the pulp as it were.

[Hernan Zenteno]

First at all was the decision to print that size of book. Probably it was an economic decision and when you have a vertical book and a lot of landscape images you have to take decisions. Just thinking before to point the designer.

[Hendrik]

Ken, the book which you point out as the "first" Gruyaert book - a retrospective volume, probably accompanying an exhibition somewhere - is by no means the first book by Harry Gruyaert. The Magnum site lists his publications. Personally I would recommend "Maroc" and "Rivages", both of which have English editions (Morocco and Edges resp.). Granted, these are a little hard to come by, but it can be done.