Digital BW, The Print

It's amazing how a project can metamorphose like a caterpillar into
a butterfly; how it can start out as one thing and end up completely
different.

My new book of photographs - Seasons of the Moon
<http://www.focuspublishing.net>  contained not one photograph when I
first started the project.  (Visit my website)
<http://seasonsofthemoon.com>

A little history.

As a ten-year old in London in 1960, I saw a black and white war movie
called "Sink the Bismarck!"  In one scene, aerial reconnaissance
photos were being `souped' in the developer, and the image of
the dreaded Bismarck started to emerge. The music swelled…
"We've found her!"

I was fascinated and went out the next day and bought a small contact
printing frame, some Kodak Velox paper, and some Johnson's Universol
developer and fixer.  I commandeered the bathroom during off hours and
immersed myself in the wonderful noxious smells of a wet darkroom.

I was hooked.

Eventually, A photograph of mine was published on the cover of the
British Journal of Photography. I was very pleased with myself and
thought that David Bailey's days were definitely numbered, but my
other love – music - distracted me for quite a while.

In the early seventies, I co-founded SARM sound studios in London's
East End, the first twenty-four track recording studio in Europe.

It was in those extremely cramped studios that Queen mixed the
gargantuan "Bohemian Rhapsody."

At the same time, I published the musical "The Rocky Horror
Show" which later went to become a cult. I started to work as a
record producer, and in 1976, I co-produced the debut album by
Foreigner, which went quadruple platinum, with two Billboard top ten
hits. "Feels like the First Time" and "Cold as Ice."

With all this action, somewhere along the line, I sort of lost the
photographic plot and put my cameras away, and it wasn't till my
mid-forties that the bug returned, and with a vengeance.

In the meantime, I had left the music business and come to Jerusalem to
immerse myself in learning Torah. After 10 years of learning, I was
given a position at Ohr Somayach/Tannenbaum College <http://www.ohr.edu>
teaching Talmudic logic and Jewish Philosophy.

Around this time, I started to write short English essays on the weekly
Torah portion for the then-fledgling Internet. I believe I was among the
first to do this.

Seasons of the Moon started as a monthly article dealing with the
connection between the astrological symbol and the corresponding events
in the Jewish calendar (For example, Libra, the sign of the Scales of
Judgment, is the month of Rosh Hashana, the day on which G-d judges the
entire world for the coming year.) A poem appeared in the middle of the
back of the page, which related to the article in some way, and in the
same position of the front, was a picture.

For the first year of its publication, I didn't even take the
photographs. The first edition of Seasons (which happened to be Libra)
boasted a very un-glorious freeware clip-art drawing of a set of scales
– not the most creative of beginnings.

From small acorns…

After a year or so of writing Seasons, I started to attend the lectures
of one of the great Jewish thinkers of our age, and I was fascinated by
his intellectual brilliance and depth. I thought I would try and take
one small point from a lecture of this great Rabbi and try and express
it in terms that a layman could understand.

Seasons started to get deeper.

After about a year later, I made the blindingly obvious link between my
writing for Seasons and using my own photographs. I don't know why
it took so long for it to occur to me, but every idea has its time.

Fast forward some eight years and I start to think about making a book
out of the synthesis of my essays, photographs and poems. At this point,
I had around 75,000 words to choose from.

My photographic skills were improving, but the photographs I was using
for Seasons didn't really have a unified identity - a look.

It was at this point that I dropped into Neil Folberg's Vision Gallery
<http://visiongallery.com>  and saw the work he was doing called
[i]Celestial Nights[/i].
It was beautiful.
Neil had managed to capture the moonlight feeling that I was looking
for.
I asked him how he had lit the scenes and he said, "They are taken
using the light of a star."
It didn't dawn on me which star he was talking about until I picked
up a copy of Popular Photography and read an article with Neil in which
he went in to details.
Most of his photographs were done using Photoshop to combine infrared
film of the landscapes, to give the `nighttime' look and
panchromatic film of actual night skies. He'd used a telescope with
tracking equipment to avoid star trails, and then contact printed large
format negatives that had been outputted on an imagesetter.
Brilliant.
I ordered some infrared film and started to shoot and I loved the
results that I was getting.

I felt that I had found a technique that reflected what I was trying to
do in the articles.

The skies were more problematical however; not all Halachic opinions
condone photographs of the celestial bodies, and as I was doing a book
that included words of Torah, I didn't want to get into a Halachic
controversy.
So I either covered over the moon with clouds or made it difficult to
make out in some other way.
It was enough to hint to a nocturnal view, without being overly
astronomical.

I also feel that this limitation helped me to intensify my ideas and
define more specifically my objectives. Limitation is the father of Art
<http://www.seasonsofthemoon.com/essay1.aspx>   just as necessity is the
mother of invention.

I had the concept for the book, but no way to fund it. I am a firm
believer that G-d runs the world, and it `just happened' that at
the same time that I was trying to fund the book,  the head of our
Institution, Rabbi Nota Schiller managed to find a sponsor for the book,
Mr. Neil Auerbach, and I had to go to work in earnest.

It worked out to be a win/win/win deal.

Mr. Auerbach did a big mitzva (good deed) giving charity to the Yeshiva
and supporting Torah and those who learn it - and he got the kudos of
having the book named "The Auerbach Edition;" the Yeshiva had a
very nice sum even after covering the publishing costs, and yours truly
got his book published for almost nothing.

One of the great drawbacks of publishing a book is that you can go into
deep-pocket debts of $50,000 and more without having to try at all. And
unless you have a guaranteed market, the sponsorship route has
tremendous advantages and virtually no drawbacks. The only thing is
– you have to find a sponsor. But if you think creatively, you might
find an angle that an individual or a company would want to sponsor in
return for the kudos of being associated with the work or theme of the
book.

So there I was with a 75,000 words and 12 of photographs.

After painstaking, not to mention painful, editing, I got the book down
to about 200 pages.
Along the way, I decided to put more photographs into the book, and
apart from the 12 photographs that represented the months of the year
– the Seasons of the Moon – I married about twenty-five other
photographs to articles, but not every article had a photograph; there
were another twenty articles without photographs, and some had no poem.

The book, as I far as I thought, was finished.

And then I tried to find a printer. It's ironic but printing black
and white seems to be much more difficult than color, and try as we
might, we couldn't find anyone in Israel that knew how to do really
high-end black and white printing.

I looked at printing the book in Germany or in China. I put a message on
the Large Format photography forum and I got a reply from David Spivak
of Focus Magazine <http://www.focusmag.info>  .

David offered to take care of the printing in the US at a very
competitive price, feature a portfolio of my work in Focus magazine, and
a free advertisement in the 12 issues of the magazine.

A great deal.

Now the name David Spivak rang a big bell with me, because my
father's family name was originally Spivack – and my
father's first name was David.

It could be that this influenced me, but together with David's
enthusiasm and his very competitive prices, we decided to go with him.

It turned out that David was much more than a vanity publisher.  He
worked tirelessly on the book as though it was his own baby.
One day he said to me, "Rabbi, you know, if you are doing a
photography book, why are there so many more articles than photographs?
I think you should consider who this book is for, and maybe adjust the
balance."

It's amazing how a few words can change the course of a whole
project.

I decided that rather than do a book of Torah ideas aimed at the
religious Jewish market with a few nice photographs, I would change
Seasons into a Fine Art photography book with a Jewish theme with an
across-the-board appeal to Jew and non-Jew. religious and non-religious
alike.

I hope I have succeeded. In any project that seeks to bridge two worlds
and include everybody, you always have the danger of falling between two
stools and pleasing no one but yourself.

At any rate, I worked furiously for the next two months, cutting and
re-writing, and going back over my files and re-working another 40
photographs.

My friend Rabbi Shlomo Simon re-edited my work. A fine photographer
himself, Shlomo was my sounding board both as to the tenor of the
articles and the choice of the photographs.

And now it's finished and out.

David did a `brilliant' job of printing the book in quadtone. I
was absolutely blown away by the quality.

At the time of writing, David is looking for a major distributor to put
the book into bookshops, and books are selling well over the internet.

Looking back, I can't say that it was an easy job, but I learned a
tremendous amount.

Probably the biggest lesson was perseverance.

Very often the difference between success and failure is the point at
which you are prepared to give up.

Visit my Website <http://www.seasonsofthemoon.com>




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