With our big exhibition at the Portland Art Museum celebrating the 39+ years of Blue Sky we got excited and went out and did something a bit crazy. We looked at the 767 exhibitions we've created for 650 different wonderful photographers and we, um, "accidentally" published 37 monograph books from those shows. Okay, we know that's crazy, but take a look at the great work in these books and you'll see why we couldn't help ourselves.
I am glad to be among the photographers choose by Blue Sky for its first selection of books.
We've got portraits, landscapes, street photography and family rituals, mythologies, quirkiness and pathology. We've got soldiers, civilians, bachelors, Haitian workers, Moslem youth, synchronized swimmers, people dressed as the statue of liberty, people holding snapshots, and people scarily dressed in rubbish. We have pictures from Russia, Cuba, Mexico, India, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Burkina Faso, small town Oregon, and Canadian suburbs. We've got projects about prison cells, proms, English gardens, Judaism, weddings, museums, and AIDS. We've got blueprints, pre-Photoshop shenanigans, plastic camera pictures, stereographs, photographic sculpture, scanners used as cameras, pictures made with hand-held fishtank cameras, and trees seen from every direction at once. There's something for everyone on your Christmas list too, so you can skip those Black Friday crowds.
With Blue Sky's usual mix of populism and exuberance, the books are delightfully inexpensive. These books average 64 pages in length and an average price of only $18 (whereas the average photo book today costs around $70). They're not available in any store so go to BlueSkyGallery.org/books to find, preview and order them (lots of them). Have fun! Go crazy. You won't regret it.
