Online Photobook Talks. The first outtakes and plans for the future

After the third online talk last Thursday I decided to take a break till mid-January at least, but not because something is wrong with them. No.

These talks bring a lot of value and interaction within the community. Help to learn, raise questions, build some exciting connections, and drive quite a lot of interest despite their poor quality to some extent.

The quality of such meetings is based on having both a spontaneous and open conversation along with a well-planned agenda, questions, and, let’s say, a scenario. Thanks to my personal impressions, records and plenty of invaluable feedbacks I see many areas of improvement in which I need to think carefully.

Another thing to mention about the concept in overall. These talks show me how the whole community is fragmented and encapsulated in itself at the same time. We see so many books and zines around, an extreme amount of posts about new releases, but all these are circulating between the same people. Photographers and bookmakers are telling about books to each other.

The same about book talks: designed as meetups for project presentation, they likely look not so useful for photographers interested in the medium itself, who come for learning about publishing experience to advance with their own projects. To get such interest really covered, we need to focus the agenda on more practical, skill- and process-wise questions. Disassembling a publication to its phases: from an idea, concept to shooting, editing and design, printing and post-production activities.

To be relevant to the wider audience of “consumers”, let’s say, we need to make such presentations more human-friendly, well-prepared, concise while engaging, inspiring. At The Phooks, we strive to go beyond the photography community.

To sum up. We will:

• work to increase the quality of calls, both technically and process-wise: define the structure, agenda and moderation, to fix problems with connection and recording;
• split into two formats: Project presentation for a wider audience & Publication analysis, discussion for photographers;
• provide better marketing to reach and engage more people: streaming to Facebook & YouTube, earlier announcements, collaboration with institutions, etc.

Welcome to share your thoughts!

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