I’m fortunate that I’ve been working very hard over the past five or six years. I’ve built up a large collection of images from my travels, from which I can choose to publish books from.
Hokkaido is somewhere that I’ve had scheduled in my mind as the next book after Hálendi (my Iceland interior book) for some time. Since the pandemic has halted most of my income and work, I’ve had more time to complete the Hokkaido book than normal.
We’ve broken the format a little with this new book. It does not say ‘Hokkaido’ in Kanji on the cover. I’ll leave it as a surprise for you all to guess what it says. More concrete details about the book in the next two months if the schedule goes according to plan.
Thanks to everyone who wrote to me about Hálendi. Many of you told me it is my best book to date. Which I must admit to being taken by surprise at. Each book has its own birth where you simply cannot control how it will turn out. The Hálendi photographs have been part of my photo life for the past five or six years and I had not looked at them since we finished designing the book.
I wasn’t sure if everyone would like the book, as I have found that my style of photography has become ‘too minimal’ for some, and I’m aware I’ve lost a percentage of my audience. But this has been replaced by new followers who are into the style of work I’m doing now.
I think this just proves that you should never try to please an audience. Your audience knows what it wants and if you are true to yourself, you’ll surround yourself with the right audience. This is true in life: be authentic in everything you do, and you’ll be surrounded by others who are like-minded.
I won’t deny that things are extremely difficult right now for me. As I am sure are for many of you. I am not running workshops, and this had been at the core of my income - almost 100% of it. So offering books, and some on-line video tutorials is keeping me afloat.
The pandemic has offered some positives for me. I often find it takes more than 1 year to get a book complete. I’m not talking about making the images: they are made over a five or six year period for the last two books! But the design, concept and sequencing. It is often slowed down by being away a lot on workshops and tours, and then having to pick up the pace on the book once I return. But with no work to do right now, I’ve been able to focus more on completing the books as I intended. For the past 3 years or so, it’s been a plan to publish Altiplano, then Hálendi and now the Hokkaido book (as yet untitled). Next one, if the Hokkaido book sells, is a retrospective. Which I am in the process of writing right now. There will be a lot of text in this one, in addition to lots of images from some of the portfolios on my website that have never been included in a book before, and going back 10 years.