Important Update! Plus Check Out The Cover!
almost 7 years ago – Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 05:30:38 PM

The book has been sent off to print! This first edition is 650 copies, 180 pages, and over 275 photos. To be honest I am pretty proud of it. 

Check Out The Cover 

It was designed by Teddy Blanks of CHIPS who has designed book covers for Kim Gordon, Lena Dunham and a bunch of really great fake book covers... 

The cover was designed to look like a cloth bound hardcover book with a tip in image. That look is really popular in photobooks right now and I really loved the idea of playing with that on a book that is soft cover. It seems appropriate for a book of Instax scans that are digitally printed vs the feeling of holding actual Polaroids in your hand. It looks the same but feels very different. 

Locking Down BackerKit! 

This is the important part! 

Tomorrow I will be locking down the addresses in BackerKit. Once that happens you will get an email from BackerKit informing you that you have 48 hours to update your address and make additional purchases if you want the bonus zine or extra copies of the book or any of that. If nothing has changed you don't have to do anything, but if you have moved (or plan to by the first week of July) make sure you update your info.

I will also mention this again closer to the release date but if you live in or near NYC or LA and can come to the release parties send me an email ([email protected]) so you can pick up your book in person. Shipping all this stuff is gonna put me wildly in debt so anyone who can pick it up would be helping me out a lot. 

NOT SAFE Zine Cover

I sent the bonus zine to the printer today as well and it looks pretty awesome. It features some of my favorite photos of some of my favorite models and humans. Plus one dollar from each zine sold goes to Safe Horizon a charity that helps victims of violence.  

The zine is 44 pages and out of an edition of 400. If you didn't get a copy already you can still do it through BackerKit and it's only $5 for Kickstarter backers plus free shipping in the US. 

The title NOT SAFE refers to both the puritanical idea that nudity is somehow offensive and is "Not Safe For Work" and the sexist culture that has created a world where women can't go online or walk down the street without being harassed. 

The cover features my friend Kate wearing some adorable double entendre kitty underwear that in this case is meant to invoke Trump's horrifying "Grab her by the Pussy" line. 

Forewords

One last thing before I go. I wanted to give you guys some info about the Forewords section of Instaxxx. Instead of asking one person to write the foreward I asked a bunch of people. The problem with doing a book of instant film is that "anyone can do it". With Instax you pretty much just point and shoot and if you just opened this book without knowing anything else about my work you might write the whole thing off and considering how much time I have worked on it I wanted to have people who know me and my work speak about it a bit. I asked photographers, writers, models and friends to give me a little paragraph and I was really happy with what they sent me. You can read them once you get the book but here's the list of people who wrote forewords. Go Google them. 

• Leila Brillson 
• Ellen Stagg 
• River Donaghey 
• Kimberly Kane 
• Joe Swanberg 
• Maddox 
• Carter Cruise 
• Ricky Powell 
• Ali Weiss 
• Hannibal Buress 

We Have A Release Date! June 30th!
almost 7 years ago – Tue, May 30, 2017 at 02:28:57 PM

June 30th Release Date! 

One month from today I will start shipping Instaxxx to you guys! The book will be released June 30th! There will be a release party in NYC the night before and one in LA in July. More details on the parties to come...

When I launched this project I expected to be shipping the books in April. I am two months late but this is a much different book than when we started. My plan was to make a 100 page book that was 5.5"x8.5" but instead the book is going to be 180 pages and twice the physical size. I think you guys are going to agree that it is worth the wait!

Bonus Zine Named!

The bonus zine is going to be called NOT SAFE. The title is a play on the Not Safe For Work warning (NSFW) that I have to post on social media as well as the culture we live in where it is not safe for women to express themselves sexually without being attacked. I haven't really ever done anything with such a specific message but I wanted to make something as a thank you to the women who trust me enough to photograph them. My hope is that you will like the images but also read my introduction and try and take something from it. If nothing else $1 from every zine sold will be donated to Safe Horizon.

Progress Update!

So now that we have a release date we have a real deadline. I need to send this thing to the printer by this time next week. Fortunately everything is done on my end. Right before I started writing this update I sent off all the text to my designer. 

All the images are laid out, the pages are in order and the text is completely done. This week Teddy Blanks of the design firm CHIPS will lay out the text and design the covers and we will be ready to go. Once he's done with that I just need to go over everything one more time and send it off to the printer.

Next time you hear from me the book should be in the printers hands, I will have covers to show and then I will go on vacation.

More Stuff To Buy!

Last time I updated I posted a few Instax prints that I had for sale. One of them was way more popular than the others so I decided to make some copies of it and I still have a few left. If you would like one you can get one here. Just four left. First come first serve!

Next up I wanted to give you guys coupon for 20% off my Girls of Driven By Boredom site. It only works for new subscriptions but the coupon is "instaxxx" or maybe "Instaxxx" to be honest I have no idea if it's case sensitive or not. Girls of Driven By Boredom is my site that features pretty much every nude shoot I have ever done but in high resolution and generally with more explicit shots than on my website. I always post stuff there first too. It's pretty cheap and it helps me afford to keep photographing babes. 

And lastly I made a t-shirt. There's this site called Teespring which started off as a kinda Kickstarter for t-shirts but now they do one off shirts as well. I have made some t-shirts on there for fun and they are really nice shirts but I have never done any photo printing. I decided to do a test run with an Instax of Charlotte Sartre. If it looks good I plan on doing a handful of shirts timed to the release of this book but for now there's just this one shirt. Check it out.

 

Layout Is (mostly) Finished!
almost 7 years ago – Fri, May 05, 2017 at 03:19:23 PM

It's been a minute since I posted an update but we reached a big milestone in the project. All of the photos have been laid out! 

Now there is still a ton of work to do, but the main bulk of the design work is done. There might be a few pages we cut out or a few images here and there that we add but the photo layout stuff is 99% done. Right now the book is looking like it's going to be about 180 pages! 

What Do We Have Left?

• Page order: I just printed out every spread of the book so that I can organize them in some sort of reasonable page order. This should be fun/ tediously awful.
• Retouching: I hired a retoucher to remove dust and the backgrounds of all the images she just got the final batch of images so hopefully I will be getting them soon and then we just have to drop them into the layout which should only take an hour or two. 
• Text: I need to write an introduction for the book which is something that's kinda giving me nightmares. I have never been great at talking about my work. Fortunately I have some help. I have asked a number of my friends to write one paragraph blurbs to act as a forward to the book. Hopefully they will actually do it!
• The Cover: I had two ideas for the cover both of which I have scrapped because of the absurd costs involved. I honestly have no idea what the cover is going to be at this point. Hopefully I will figure it out soon.
• Bonus Zine: I laid out the bonus zine in my head but we haven't actually dropped it into InDesign yet. I have written the intro to it twice and still hate it. I am pretty confident it can be done in one afternoon though.

What Comes Next:

On Monday I have a meeting about doing both NYC and LA release parties. I want to keep that mysterious from now but my hope is that I can work with the same people on both coasts and do something fun on back to back weekends. The idea is to them in late June but none of the details have been worked out yet. That being said, if you can make it to either release party to pick up your book & save me shipping costs I will give you free bonus print or something.

Next Tuesday I am meeting with my designer again and my hope is that we can get a lot done. We should be able to lock in the page order and work on the text plus hopefully get the bonus zine mostly done. The hope is that we will be completely finished by mid May giving us a full month to print the book and plan the release parties. I can see the finish line and it is stressful as hell. 

Overbudget?!

You'd think when you raise 8x your goal on Kickstarter you'd have plenty of money to spare but of course not. For whatever reason had to find a way to spend it all because that's just what I do. 

Instead of making a 100 page book I am making a 188 page book that is twice as big as the 100 page book in mind. Not only does that cost three or four times as much to print but it also costs way more to ship so that's going to be awful. And then of course there's the multiple trips to LA and the bonus zine and all the other assorted madness like printing the book just so I can organize the page order by hand.

When I started this I was in debt and when the book is done I will still be in debt but at least I will have made something not completely terrible and I hope you guys will feel like you got more than what you paid for.

One A Kind Prints For Sale

One of the (minor) unexpected costs of this project came from the fact that the book is twice the size. In the last draft of the layout we had ten spreads that featured just one single image over two pages. I scanned the Instax at three times their normal size but I wasn't sure if they would look good printed that big.  I made 10 9"x12" prints to test it out and of them 8 looked really good. The other two we ended up moving to other pages.

So anyway, I have these 8 really nice looking prints laying around my apartment and I figured if I sold them for $50 each I would just need to sell two to more than pay for them. $50 is what I sell 8"x10" prints for and these are bigger and one of a kind proofs so I figure you are getting a pretty good deal. 

If you want one email me at [email protected]. First come, first serve. $10 US shipping and $15 anywhere else.

Here are the four available right now...

Get Your Postcards! Fill Out Your Surveys!
about 7 years ago – Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 11:52:40 AM

Post Cards!

The Instaxxx postcards are here! I want to send these out next week so please, please fill out your BackerKit surveys! 

Less than 60 of you have yet to fill them out so we are doing pretty good, but getting them all filled out would make my life so much easier.  If you didn't seen an email search your email for an email from BackerKit.

It takes two seconds to send it in and it makes my life a lot easier. If you have any questions or would rather I send your postcard with the book feel free to email me at [email protected]. 

Other Updates!

On Wednesday I had my first layout session for the book with my designer. It was only two hours so we didn't get a ton done but we made a lot of cuts and we designed several page layouts so now I can start organizing images on my own and our time spent next week should be much more productive because we will just be dropping images into layouts that already exist.

The only other update of note, for now, is that I found about 20 images that had been missing. I had scanned them and everything I just had put them in the wrong folder. A bunch of them were really good ones and I can't tell you how happy I was to find them. I also dug up a few more images that I didn't think worked at the time I started scanning but work really well with the new layout. I find that often images that aren't that great by themselves can work really well in a series.

Really excited to keep working on this layout. I hope you guys love it. 

Important Update! Please Read!
about 7 years ago – Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 08:35:09 PM

Postcards have been sent to the printers and will be here soon which means it's time to collect your addresses so please read at least the section about BackerKit! Thanks!

BackerKit Surveys

I am using a company called Backer Kit to help me fulfill all of your orders so the surveys you have to fill out to get me your addresses will come from BackerKit and not from Kickstarter!

The surveys will come to the email that you signed up for Kickstarter with and all you have to do is click the link in the email. You don't have to sign up for BackerKit and you don't need a credit card unless you are buying something additional. It's super easy. 

Once you put in your info you will have the opportunity to get the stretch goals like the bonus zine and the Instaxxx enamel pin. There are a limited number of pins so the sooner you fill this out the better! You will also have a chance to buy additional copies of the book if you like and a few other things.

I will be sending the postcards out in early April but the book won't be finished until May or June. If you need to change your address between now and then it's super easy to do and you will get a reminder email from BackerKit before the books are shipped. 

If you are one of the few people who have a big print coming they will be shipping in April as well. 

Postcards

As I mentioned postcards have been sent to the printer and will be sent out around the first week of April. I had a few ideas but in the end I went with the main project image that I have been using. It's fairly "safe for work" and it features my friend Medusa reading my first book so it seemed ideal for the post card.

If for some reason you don't want the mildly scandalous postcard coming to you in the mail let me know and I will ship it with the book. 

So Where Are We With The Book?

After talking to a few printers I have some disappointing news. The two ideas I had for the book (hardcover or softcover w/ slipcase) are frankly too expensive. I knew when I hit $20k that I had raised way too much money to do a small digitally printed book like I planned but I was afraid it wouldn't be enough to do something special and I was right. My lowest quote came in at $18k, which after Kickstarter fees an all the other assorted costs, was way over budget. 

In the end I am going back to the digital printer I used on my last book. The book is going to be printed at the very standard size of 8.5"x11" which will allow me to save about $2000 which will essentially pay for the bonus zine. The quality will still be very high and I am going with a thicker paper stock than my last two books. 

The good news about this is that I can afford to include more pages. This book is now going to be at least 120 pages which means over 200 images. The other advantage to using a digital printer is that the turn around time is very, very fast. Printing in the US also means no waiting for books on a boat or in customs which allows me to set a very specific release date once I send it to print. 

Designing The Book!

Now that we know the printer and we know the size and the paper stock it's time to get designing. As with my last two books I am going to be working with Teddy Blanks of CHIPS. Chips has designed book covers for Kim Gordon, Lena Dunham, Gay Talese and even the anniversary edition of Valley of the Dolls!

Teddy is an old friend and one of my favorite people and is working on the book for the love of it which is amazing but it also means working in his free time which he has very little. This is the most complicated project we've worked on so it's difficult to say exactly how long it's going to take but our first design session is on Wednesday and I will probably have a better idea after that.

My hope is that the book will be out sometime in May but June seems reasonable as well. Whatever the case I will keep you guys updated and get this thing done quickly, but done well.