I sat down recently with Anika Sabin, Executive Director of the Capricious Foundation. We discussed their background and entry into the publishing world, the Capricious Photo Award which allows an artist to publish a book with Capricious, working with a design studio like Studio Lin, what makes Capricious books different from other publishers, and the processes of working with last year’s awardees.
Capricious @capriciouspublishing
Rainer Turim: This is the third episode of Photo Things, a podcast about contemporary photography, or in this case, an art book publisher with a focus also on photography. My guest today is the Executive Director of the Capricious Foundation, Anika Sabin. Thanks for talking with me today.
Anika Sabin: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.
RT: Could you briefly speak about what Capricious is?
AS: Sure, yeah. Capricious was founded in 2004 by Sophie Mörner as sort of a new outlet for emerging photographers. In 2004, the landscape for photography was totally different. You had sort of larger institutions like Aperture, but you didn't really have the sort of smaller outlets for newer photography to kind of play.
So, she started the magazine to showcase some of what her friends were doing. And also just internationally what photography was doing that was new and different. And so, it really started from that point of wanting to platform really emerging and new or underrepresented photographers.
And then from there, I joined in 2010 and we oversaw several magazines including the photography magazine, which closed in 2015. We turned that magazine into a photo award, which is what we still do today along with other artist monographs, and some poetry, and some novels, even graphic novels from artists.
We're a publishing house, a photo award, focusing on photography and queer perspectives basically.
RT: Can you speak about your entry into Capricious and how that came about?
AS: How I came across Capricious was I was working at a bookshop in Portland, Oregon called Reading Frenzy and was also making zines at the time and different art publications.
I stumbled across Girls Like Us and realized it was published by the same people as the Capricious photo magazine, which I also really loved. At the time, that photo magazine had perforated edges when you opened it, so you could tear out sheets and put it on your wall. What I used to do was actually write letters on the different pieces from Capricious magazine. Because it actually had borders that were very radical. They had a bunch of white space. And so I would pull them out and write correspondence on them.
I had been wanting to move to New York for a while. The pacing was different. And this was 2009, we were in the middle of a recession. It was very hard to get a foot into what you really wanted to do in terms of publishing. I felt like I had to move to New York and I wanted to engage in more international artists.
I moved to New York. I showed up at Capricious and started working. At that time they had a little bookshop, and because of my experience at a bookshop in Portland, I began managing that as well as overseeing some of the production details of exhibitions and it kind of spiraled from there.
RT: What was your understanding particularly about photography books before you joined Capricious? How did you see those operating? What did you see the landscape of photography books as?
AS: My entry level to this was through zines. I was seeing a lot of zines in Portland. That was how I saw a lot of photography. And you know, they weren't particularly “well made.” They were Xeroxed. They were from Kinko's. They were made at the IPRC, Independent Publishing Resource Center, in Portland and it was like a whole ecosystem. You would go to IPRC, make your zine, and then you would just walk downstairs and go to Reading Frenzy, and put it on consignment.
I could see the whole ecosystem of independent book publishing play out. I was just fascinated and interested in that side of it. And yeah, in terms of photo books, I hadn't really considered them yet. I think it wasn't until I got to Capricious that I fully understood and appreciated what that vessel could do for artists.
RT: And you were there for some of the production of the magazine, or was it at the tail end?
AS: Yeah, it was a bit at the tail end. When I started, I was working on Capricious 11 through 15— so, a few issues.
RT: What was the transition like out of the focus on a magazine into issuing a photo award that would allow a photographer to work on a monograph?
AS: We loved making the magazine. It was a huge undertaking. We were usually publishing two a year and we would often publish like 60 to 70 photographers in one issue. We had a lot of fun sequencing them and putting them in different juxtapositions and dialogue.
And that was wonderful, but it also felt like we wanted to slow the pace down and really focus on artists' larger bodies of work. With the magazine, we were showing maybe two photographs at most of an artist. It really got me curious about the larger context of how these images were made or their own personal context, not our own creation of context for the photographer. We wanted to kind of pull back and slow down.
RT: What was it first like starting the award? What kind of response from photographers were you seeing? Could you speak about that kind of inaugural process?
AS: We announced it in 2016 and we ended up making the first book with John Edmonds in 2017. At that time there weren't that many photo awards, so we actually got a huge international response. We had like nearly 2,000 submissions and a lot of them had been involved in Capricious before through the magazine. And so we had this larger community of people who were aware of what we were trying to do.
It was really wonderful to see a lot of familiar names, but also reach a lot of places in the world that we hadn't seen work from. So I think it really opened up the world for us.
RT: Could you speak about the kind of stages of these photographers? I know looking at your books that you've worked with— and now with the photo award— you've worked with photographers who this is their first book, but you're also working with photographers who are later in their careers, or maybe it's a mid-career book for them. Were there a lot of people who were looking to publish for the first time?
AS: That's who we really focused on. I think it was important to really showcase a person's work who hadn't had that opportunity for book publishing in its own right. And, in particular, John Edmonds, when we saw his work, it was like, “I can't believe he doesn't have a book yet.”
But then again, with Sasha Phyars-Burgess, who was our second award winner, for us it was, “Oh my God, this work hasn't been seen by different sectors that we're connected with.”
And so we want to be able to showcase that work that hasn't been seen yet. For every single kind of recipient, we thought about their process and their career timeline in a different way. But the bottom line was we really just wanted to serve a purpose for their career and their artistic practice, basically.
RT: Sasha's book was the winner of the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation's 2021 PhotoBook first book prize. John Edmonds was shortlisted [in 2018.] Farah Al Qasimi's book, Hello Future, was shortlisted the same year [as Sasha's.] Did you expect that kind of response from the photo community and the photo world?
AS: It was really wonderful. I was definitely surprised, and very ecstatically surprised that Sasha's book did win the award through Aperture. I think that was in a way validation that they did see Sasha and how really brilliant her practice is. I wasn't watching. I guess they did it on Instagram Live or something and a lot of people were watching, but I woke up to a lot of text messages like, “Oh my God, Sasha's book won” and I was just like I can't believe this happened. So it was just a pleasant shock basically.
RT: Now that you've worked with artists like Sasha, John, and Farah, and now it'll be Roberto Tondopó and Genesis Báez, can you speak about what kind of relationship you hope to continue with these artists that you've worked with or the kind of relationship you have continued with these past artists?
AS: When you spend so much time working with an artist on a book, you know, these book processes can take almost two years, even longer potentially. With Roberto, we're in our second year of working through which texts are appropriate for the book, and you spend this long meditative time with them thinking around intention and what is the best space for their work to thrive in. And so you kind of build these bonds with people.
I know that I will always be looking out in their career, of like what they're doing, and their book usually comes along with them. It's nice to see museum shows of our photographers and then have our book in the bookshop and just kind of follow the photographer around in that sense, and giving the sort of larger context to their work.
RT: It's interesting, especially with John Edmonds's book, which, you know, immediately after John is showing in the [2019] Whitney Biennial, and so you have Capricious as this previous book publisher of this artist.
Thinking about Capricious's earlier books, like Petra Collins’s, published in 2015, it was her first book as well, but in a different way. Can you speak about how that book and these earlier books came about?
AS: Yeah, so that book, in particular, came to be as a catalog for the show with— at that time, Company was Capricious 88. We were in the same space in 88 Eldridge Street and so the gallery was doing a show with Petra, and she had suitcases of negatives and a huge breadth of work that hadn't been seen before. Obviously, there are some limitations for exhibition space so we felt that a book could really showcase a wider breadth of her work.
We ended up deciding to do a catalog with her. And that was one of the first collaborations with the gallery that we did.
RT: I know a really difficult question to ask any kind of jury working with an award— you already briefly mentioned the kind of photographer/artist that you're looking for when going through the award. Maybe a different question is, could you speak about how the kind of panel and jury came about? Looking at past juries, it's past recipients of the award. It also included academics, photographers, and artists. Could you speak about that decision of who to bring together for the award process?
AS: Sure, yeah. I mean, we really wanted a diverse spectrum of professionals in the photography world. Whether it be scholars, photographers themselves, or curators, it has been a huge pleasure to bring together different voices.
That was one thing with the photo magazine, you know. It was Sophie, myself, and JOFF, who was the designer at the time. We all came together and looked at work and selected and sequenced, but when we ended up building a jury, it really provided a larger context to what we were doing and we really wanted it to be this community project.
RT: Could you also speak about the decision now that you're no longer doing a magazine, and no longer have an in-house design team, but working with Studio Lin? I remember watching the roundtable with Aperture where there's Farah, Alex Lin from Studio Lin, Sophie Mörner, and Aperture's director, Sarah Meisler. Could you speak about the background of that relationship with Studio Lin?
AS: Yeah. We began working with Alex back in 2017. Our first book together was by Ellen Cantor. We quickly began working on Barbara Hammer’s as well. That was our first photo book with Alex. And his sort of perspective really blew me away in terms of how he approached bookmaking. With Studio Lin, I found that there's a fluidity in bringing a variety of projects to Studio Lin and every approach is different.
I think Studio Lin has a really rare ability to listen to artists and make sure that the book is speaking their vision, and the design is the work speaking first. You know, I think sometimes design can get a little sticky with gimmicky things, and anytime we've done something that is slightly out of the norm, like Farah's sticker book, there's a specific reason why we did the stickers, right?
A lot of her practice is about re-contextualizing, seeing the kind of migration of culture and different translations of culture across geopolitical landscapes. And so we felt that the stickers, allowing people to pull them off and make their own covers and re-contextualize her own work were really fitting. But we weren't like, “Oh, stickers are cool. We should do it.” I've found that Alex's approach, intention, and precision around design have been really critical to the success of our books.
RT: Yeah, it sounds like the kind of intention behind it is not overthought or over-theorized. The decisions seem to land pretty concretely, which is interesting, whereas you think about other photo books that have decisions that seem to fly over your head, but the idea of the stickers or even Sasha's book, which comes in this case and these different parts, there's something so elaborate, but also so simple that's happening. What I love about these kinds of creative decisions is that it's something so approachable that anyone can be engaged with. People across disciplines and education in photography seem to understand.
Can you talk about this process working with Genesis and Roberto, these two artists now? I don't think it's Roberto's first book, but it's not Genesis— it is besides— I interviewed before, Martha from Matarile Ediciones where Genesis published a kind of zine, not a full monograph with a spine. Whether there's going to be a spine or not [in her forthcoming Capricious book], I don't know.
AS: Both books, working with Alex on these, are completely different. To your point about Genesis's zine, I think that was really an important step in her process of thinking around sequencing. And I would encourage anyone, who's hoping to make a book one day to sit down and play and make zines because that really is a great entry point into figuring out what kind of space you want to take up, and how your work can create— it's like world building, right?
I spoke with Genesis about a week ago around her vision for the book and talked through what worked in the zine and what she wants to expand on. I mean, it's really like fertile ground to make a book. So it's all very exciting. We're still in the beginning phases and I don't know if it's going to have a spine either, right?
We tend to, while we're designing, also sequence. So things can inform each other as it happens. We have an initial meeting with Alex, and Genesis is able to convey what her work is about, even the simple things like what colors she gravitates to.
Alex has become interested in the framing of artist's works. That was particularly an important hinge in Farah's book because he had noted that a lot of her work was framed in this chrome. And so that actually was the seed of this decision to make a chrome kind of cover on the inside.
We talk about how it's seen in the physical space, what warm tones, cool tones, that kind of thing. These conversations can last weeks or months, just speaking about what the artist is gravitating towards. Also, their preference for art books, what they've liked in their life, what they gravitate to, and what they carry with them all come into the decision-making process around what the design will be. There's a whole kind of ecosystem around it.
RT: Yeah. It sounds like a lot of collaging from different parts of their affinities for certain things and maybe also resistances, I imagine— maybe talking about what kind of book they don't want it to be.
AS: Right, because at the end of the day, this is something that they will be able to carry with them hopefully for their career as a benchmark of where they were at this time. And so we really want to make sure that it feels authentic to their voice and to their vision.
RT: Is there anything that you think, even stepping outside of the photo award, that you think separates Capricious from other publishers? In thinking about what kind of books you're making that artists will carry with themselves, it won't be the same type of book that this other photo book publisher will produce or this other art book publisher.
What kind of things do you think— maybe the word isn't unique, but things that describe the kind of Capricious book in contrast to an artist who has worked with Capricious, but has made a different book [with a different publisher] that stands out different from their Capricious publication?
AS: I think with Capricious, there is sort of— we're a very fluid sort of institution. We take time to really understand and make sure that everything is in line before publishing. A lot of publishers, not to their discredit, but they have a very intense schedule of publishing. And so, sometimes if an essay isn't ready, they'll publish without the essay. We're just a very fluid institution that kind of shapes itself with the artists that we work with. So it's a very one-on-one experience in my view.
RT: In my mind, at least, the interaction between an artist and publisher is a kind of the steering wheel of the book. You spoke earlier about calling Genesis and this conversation about colors. Can you speak about that kind of relationship and dynamic between the artist and the publisher at Capricious?
AS: I think that a trust needs to be built in order to produce the books that we do make, I think that it takes a lot of conversation and building of trust. And we really pride ourselves in the ability to build those connections with our artists. And it's vital to the book.
We really want them to feel good about the product or the result of all of our conversations and work. Continuing conversation with the designer, the artist, and the publisher, we all are looking to each other for ideas and it's always like a push and pull in the best way, but we build that trust so that we can put forth ideas and really create something that everyone is happy with.
RT: That's a good place to end. Thank you again so much for speaking with me. I'm excited to see the photo award books in the coming year.
AS: Yeah, me too, me too. Thank you.
anika sabin, capricious foundation