Construction Site, Atlanta, Ga. ©Peter Essick
A few minutes before sunrise I unload my DJI drone from the back of my car in an industrial park. I power up and check all the instrument readings on the remote control. Batteries 100 percent, fourteen satellites engaged, four bars on the wireless connection, ready to fly. I am in full pilot mode as I launch the drone and climb it to a few hundred feet.
Across the road, construction workers are standing next to a line of dump trucks and earthmovers. The site is being graded to build a huge warehouse. For the next fifteen minutes, I focus on flying over the site and photographing the work in progress.
Photography has a history of documenting everyday life. In my neighborhood in Atlanta, construction activity is an everyday occurrence. It wasn’t until I started flying a drone that I realized construction sites offered so many different visual perspectives. The textures and colors of human-altered landscapes are endlessly fascinating. Seeing and photographing this landscape from the air has opened for me new ways of creative expression.
The idea to photograph construction sites came about as I was finishing another photo project on Fernbank Forest. I had a commission from Fernbank Museum to document their old growth forest in the heart of Atlanta. For this commission, I learned how to fly a drone to take photos of the forest canopy with the skyline of Atlanta in the background. Driving between my home in Stone Mountain and Fernbank I noticed a large construction site in Decatur. The new housing development didn’t look like an appealing photo subject from the street level, but when I flew my drone over the newly graded soil, I saw a lot of creative potential. For the next four years, off and on and through the pandemic, I photographed many residential and commercial sites not far from my home base in Stone Mountain.
Eventually, I had a stack of about 300 proof prints that I showed to Bill Boling, the publisher of Fall Line Press. At this point I will digress and note that I believe there are six stages to producing a photo book.
1.The Photography
- Editing and Sequencing
- Design
- Essay from an Author and/or the Photographer
- Printing – Digital or Offset
- Marketing
My 300 proof prints represented my belief that I had completed stage one of the six mentioned above. Bill Boling and I went through the stack and together we selected 66 photos that we thought were worthy of publication in a book. Editing is a very creative process, and this can be a difficult one for many photographers. A good edit is not necessarily a collection of the photographer’s favorite photos. A photographer is hopefully an expert at stage one but might not be the best person to edit their work. Certainly, a photographer can help the editor with explanations about the individual photos. However, I believe the best results come from a collaborative process where the photographer works with others who are experts in their field.
Bill Boling is an excellent photo editor and helped especially with the sequencing of the photos. I had photographed all aspects of the construction process and had many photos of the initial phase of land clearing. Putting these photos at the beginning of the book never felt right. Bill suggested to have the short section of the fallen tree/land clearing photos at the end which turned out to work the best.
Megan Flower was the designer. She selected the typefaces and did an excellent job with the design of the essays, colophon and the front and back cover. I proposed to have all the photos rendered double page, 12” x 18” in size and full bleed. Bill and Megan liked this idea, so in some ways that simplified the photo sizing aspect of the design.
The next step was to decide of how to handle the text at the end of the book. I proposed an author to write about the environmental aspects of development and construction in the South and I would write a short essay about learning to fly a drone for this project. I had read the book A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey Through an Endangered Land by Dan Chapman. I liked Dan’s environmental ethic, and he agreed to write an essay after looking at the photos.
Next came time to print the book. I wanted to try to use 100 percent recycled paper and environmentally friendly UV inks. Of course, I also wanted the best quality possible. SYL Graphics in Barcelona, Spain had just the right solution. They suggested a high-quality 100 percent recycled paper with a smooth matte surface for both the cover and inside stock. If you print with UV inks, they dry immediately and don’t soak into the paper. This allows for the use of matte surfaces that can produce excellent photo reproduction. We also used a lay flat Swiss binding that virtually eliminates the gutter which was helpful with the double page spreads.
I sent prints that I made on my Epson printer to SYL to show them how I would like the photos to look. They made proofs and sent them back to me. After a few tweaks I felt confident, and the offset UV printing matched very closely to the proofs I reviewed. The 500 copies of the book were shipped on a boat to New York and after they cleared customs were trucked to Atlanta.
Fall Line Press and I are now in the marketing stage of the book. The book is available at FallLinePress.com, so they handle individual sales. However, working with a small press requires the photographer to take the lead in getting exposure for the book. I have put together a contact list in four main categories.
1.Individual Friends and Family – These are your loyal supporters. These are the people who are on your email list if you have a newsletter. They also are the people who might pre-order the book if you have a Kickstarter or another fundraiser.
2.Online Photo Sites, Magazines – There are many websites online that feature photography and a few who review photo books. This takes some research and a lot of patience and fortitude to keep sending pitches and queries, but it is a necessary task if you want exposure for the book. It helps to start with sites that are smaller and more open to new books. Once you get a few posts you can send links to others to show off your successes.
- Bookstores-This has been a difficult business of late, but there are still some independent bookstores carrying on a great tradition. I have worked with Virginia Highland Books to have a talk and book signing.
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Galleries, Museums-If you have gallery representation for your photography, having a book can be very helpful to increase your print sales. If you have other contacts with museum curators or gallerists, it is worth sending a book to them to increase the exposure of your work.
My final thought would be that photo books are difficult and time consuming for a photographer. In most cases, the photographer will also have to raise some of the funds to produce the book. Despite these problems, I believe they are worth it in the end. There is no other medium that will challenge you as a photographer to put your best work out into the world.
Some of the ideas found in this article come from the book, Understanding Photo Books, The Form and Content of the Photographic Book by Jörg Colberg. It is highly recommended if you are a photographer planning a photo book.
The book is available at FallLinePress.com
Reviews about the book, Work in Progress
Not all painters use a paint brush. In the case of Peter Essick, he creates artful aerials with a drone and a particularly inspired vision. The four-year project of drone photographs of construction sites is an extraordinary re-seeing of the Atlanta Metro area. –Lenscratch
Essick’s photographs of industrial sites become akin to semi-abstract paintings imbued with a kaleidoscopic quality. – ARTS ATL
Essick’s camera flattens multistory sites into 2D mosaics… the entire project takes more inspiration from abstract expressionism than documentary photography. Think Kandinsky and Diebenkorn, not Lewis Baltz. – Collector Daily
BIO:
Peter Essick is a photographer, editor, author, speaker, instructor, and drone pilot with 30 years of experience working for National Geographic Magazine. He specializes in nature and environmental themes. Named one of the forty most influential nature photographers in the world by Outdoor Photography Magazine UK, Essick has been influenced by many noted American landscape photographers from Carleton Watkins to Robert Adams. His goal is to make photographs that move beyond documentation to reveal in careful compositions the human impact of development as well as the enduring power of the land.
Essick is the author of four books of his photographs, The Ansel Adams Wilderness, Our Beautiful, Fragile World, Fernbank Forest, and Work in Progress. He has photographed stories for National Geographic Magazine on many environmental issues including climate change, high-tech trash, nuclear waste, and freshwater. After 30 years traveling the world as an editorial photographer, Essick decided to focus his work on a more personal documentation of the environmental and cultural changes in his hometown of Atlanta.
Essick’s photographs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Booth Western Art Museum and many other private collections. He is represented by Spalding Nix Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.
peteressick.com
