Tillman Crane / STRUCTURE

The good news is there are only 22 hardcover copies of Tillman Crane/STRUCTURE left! I would love for all of them to find homes with you. Published eighteen years ago (April 2001), it has been essential to my career, but it is time to move them out of my inventory and me to new projects.

From my earliest days in photography, I collected an assortment of books of various photographers and topics. I belonged to one of those book clubs that required you to buy a book every month, and if you didn’t choose, they chose for you. Two choices that turned out to be catalysts for my work are Keepers of the Light by William Crawford and The Darkness and Light by Doris Ullman. Keepers of the Light was one of the first books to give both a history and “how to” of the historic/alternative processes. I had no idea at the time that I would spend most of my career working with these. Doris Ullman’s beautifully photographed soft focused portraits of the Gullah community in South Carolina were made between 1925 and 1934. They made an indelible mark on me. Interesting how two books, bought sight unseen, became such great influences on my work years later.

Publishing a book today is both different and the same as it was 18 years ago. The obvious differences are the digital advantages of the computer for creating, selecting and sequencing the images. Also, with on-demand printing, you can commit to printing one book or thousands. As a solo artist, you can be creator, designer, and publisher all in one, taking any photographic project from idea to book. The two greatest advantages of this are keeping the costs down and not having to depend on others.

For each of my books, I made a crazy number of prints, which were sequenced and rearranged and often required my making new images as the idea for the book evolved. I was working from film so once images were final, the negatives were sent off to be scanned for the press. For Tillman Crane/STRUCTURE I worked with a publisher, who provided the designer for helping with aesthetic choices and the layout of the book. We printed the book in Milan, spending a week on the press, and in lieu of speaking Italian used a list of words for lighter, darker, more contrast, more of this or less of that and compared test pages to the stack of silver prints I’d brought along. We waited for months for the 2500+ books to clear customs and arrive for storage in our garage.

Fine Art books then, as well as now, are primarily author funded. I was blessed to have a patron willing to help get the project off the ground. We presold book specials before going to press and have been selling the book for the last 18 years.

A few weeks ago I brought the last boxes in from the storage unit. It was a little sad but also a relief to realize that this project is done. We still have a few Limited Edition copies of Tillman Crane/STRUCTURE but these I will leave to another musing.

If you want a copy of Tillman Crane/STRUCTURE it’s best to order soon. Twenty-two copies, selling for $55 plus shipping, are all that I have left. Contact my wife, Donna (donna@tillmancrane.com), if you are interested before they are gone!

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