People. Not Pages: Dennis Schoenberg
With the “People. Not Pages” mini-interview series The Phooks invites you to learn more about people who stand behind the medium of self- & indie-published photobooks, and zines.
Based in London and Berlin, Dennis Schoenberg is a renowned fashion and portrait photographer with occasional stints as a creative director.
He rose to prominence after assisting photographer Steven Klein, managing Wolfgang Tillmans’ studio and working for magazines such as i-D, Vogue, Exit, L’Officiel, Hero and Acne Paper among others. He is the founding executive editor of ‘Young Soul Rebels’ and creator and owner of ‘Plus and Negative’ Publishing.
Part II of the ‘Young Soul Rebels’ series documenting the boxer ‘Toby’ before, during and after his workout in London’s famous East End ‘Repton Boxing Club’.
How do you live and make your living?
I try to live a simple and straightforward life, lately, I’ve been drawn to minimalism and I’m usually quite content with a modest lifestyle. For a few years now I’ve made Berlin my home but I still spend plenty of time in London for both work and recreational purposes. I make my living with photography, videography and art direction.
How did you get into photography?
As a teenager, I was hugely into the art-house cinema and I was very much into the avant-garde. I was fascinated by silent movies of that genre, e.g. Man Ray’s ’L’Étoile de mer’ or ‘Le Retour à la Raison’ (and in particular the film stills of Lee Miller from that movie), also the work of Abel Gance and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s ‘Kuretta Ippei’. Those short black and white films made me extremely curious about working on celluloid but as the film (and the processing thereof) was just too expensive in the long run I decided to shoot stills on 35mm negative instead.
What do you value the most in the art of photography?
Actually I quite like the technical side of it, I loved learning about depth of field and differences in shutter speeds, etc. But I also get sucked into overthinking the emotive side of photography like the rule of thirds or the effect of negative space in an image.
Even things seemingly as banal as aspect ratios are of interest to me. I never liked the square format of a Hasselblad or Rollei for instance (I loved the cameras but not the format). It was always a kind of signature for a photographer, it made a photograph more serious as it was seen more within an art context since the square format isn’t ideal for editorial or advertising for instance. So for me shooting ‘square’ was always a little bit serious or at times even ostentatious, it wasn’t for me. But then Instagram came along and changed all that, the connotation I had once had of a square photograph being serious was replaced by it being banal or desultory. You can tell I spend a lot of time thinking about my process before (and often after) I take photographs. Despite this I do also like a snapshot, it’s just that some snapshots are better than others haha.
But I suppose what you really want to hear is what drives me to pick up a camera in order to take a picture and I can honestly say that it is usually always an emotion that I wish to capture.
Capturing beauty, especially the sentimental and melancholic kind, is usually what makes me want to pick up a camera unless, of course, it is a job in which case it is my fee that persuades me.
Is there something you hate about it?
Well… times have changed. The nostalgia I used to associate with photography is out the window. There is an excessive amount of photos being taken now, always and constantly. Often randomly, casually, without purpose, without thought. That annoys me a little, to be honest.
Thought and technique are less relevant these days it seems. Quantity over quality is prevalent. A photograph is judged with different reasons and for different meanings these days. The ‘value’ of a photograph, so it seems to me, has become less. I’ll quote Henri Cartier-Bresson: “We must avoid, however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.”
How many books do you have and what does your collection mean to you?
I used to spend all my extra cash on photobooks. It became a curse when I had to move a few times in a row. To be honest I sold a lot of my collection as I couldn’t be asked to pack and unpack them again. That may have been a mistake although I still have plenty in boxes in the attic that I’ve not even unpacked for several years now. I had hundreds.
Now I honestly don’t know, probably still too many. But it was always very important to me and it still is. Unfortunately, though I take less and less time these days to actively engage with a photo book. I hope I will change that again soon, it was always time well spent.
Is there a photobook you admire?
Miroslav Tichý by Steidl ICP comes to mind immediately, a very desirable photobook. Size, feel, texture, layout — intensely beautiful, all of it. There are many more I could list from the Steidl catalogue. They of course know how to make a desirable photobook, quality and design always coming together nicely. I appreciate the attention to detail. The choice of a nice matt and off-white paper combined with a contrasty and not overly saturated print is what I like. I can’t stand anything wrapped in plastic or glossy pages, that for me is usually a real turn-off.
Then again on the other end of the spectrum, I really appreciate ‘The Works of Nobuyoshi Araki, Vol I — Vol 20’ published by 平凡社/Heibonsha in the years 1996–1997. The small A5 size and magazine-like feel combined with a nicely designed dust jacket in pop colours makes them a really desirable item too, especially as the complete 20+1 set.
I guess Larry Clark’s ‘Tulsa’ also deserves a mention. Originally published in a limited paperback version in 1971 and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition, it’s now been republished several times and has become a classic in its own right.
What should a book be to get into your collection?
First and foremost the photos have to be to my liking. The layout, the size, the texture of the paper, the balance of the images, the print quality as well as the cover image are of importance but as long as the photographs in the book entice me and the rest isn’t a total let down, then I am happy to add it to my collection.
And don’t get me wrong, some of the most desirable photo ‘books’ I’ve seen and admired were limited edition zines, very plain and sometimes even simply photocopied in black and white and stapled together. But the way in which it was done (with so much love and dedication) really showed the admiration of the process and it really worked well, it suited the content. That works for me too.
What does it mean to you to turn your work into a sensible form of a book or a zine? Tell us based on your latest project.
It’s of great importance to me. You start analyzing your work again, often from a different point of view.
I love doing it. I can spend days playing around with just one image, deciding where on the page to place it, at what size, whether to print across the gutter or not and once finally placed what to put next to it. It’s very therapeutic.
If I had more time and would get paid for it that’s all I’d want to do. Create one photo book after another, ideally, each individual one concentrated on just one subject (matter).
What you expect people should feel when opening your book?
Ideally, I’m after some form of emotion. To say that I would like to ‘move’ people would be exaggerated but I’d like to touch them briefly, just for an instant, to maybe make them look twice before they turn the page. Maybe I can offer them some kind of relief from whatever they were thinking of before they flicked through my zine, I’d already be happy with that.
The worst insult is if someone just flicks through it briefly without paying attention and then puts it back down again. That’s always a little painful.
Teju Cole wrote a really good article about what can happen when looking at photobooks in The Guardian (24 Feb 2020). If someone would feel anything close to that when looking at my zines then that would be ideal but I’m afraid that’s mainly wishful thinking.
“I’m not talking about simply looking at photographs. There are photos everywhere, and most of them are like empty calories. Many photos, even good ones, tend simply to show you what something looks like. But if you sequence several of them, in a book, say, or in an exhibition, you see not only what something looks like but how someone looks. A sequence of photographs testifies to a photographer’s visual thinking, a way of seeing revealed through choices of color, subject, scale and perspective. The photographs encountered in an exhibition might be beautiful new prints or vintage ones imbued with the aura of originality. But there are disadvantages to exhibitions: they can be noisy and crowded, open during inconvenient hours and have closing dates. With a book, though, the images and the photographer’s arrangement of them are yours for all time.”
View all zines by Dennis Schoenberg:
— Visit Dennis’s Website
— Read all “People. Not Pages” mini-interviews
— Go to The Phooks library
