‘American Portraits: Hopes & Dreams’ – 200 Book Previews Seen

Our book was announced just a couple of days ago over at Blurb.com, and already almost 200 people have seen the Book Preview which we’re very happy about. We’ve announced the publication to many of our friends and family members, and just some of our clients, so this is all good. Next week we’ll spread the word with more of the people we’ve worked over the years. We have several goals with the publication of the book – one is to finally get this work out from the box it’s been sitting in on our bookshelf for years and years, and the second is for it to be ‘the thing’ that we can show to galleries and museums as we pursue representation and shows in the fine art world. So we’ll see how that goes.

Here’s the link to Blurb.com where you can see a Book Preview of the 1st 15 pages, and purchase it if you wish — http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/279514

One of the very positive things that digital technology has given us as photographers is this ability to self publish our own book, as so many companies have sprouted up in the past several years which allow photographers and writers to do just that. We love the idea of photography books, have a real good collection of them, and it’s always been a goal of ours to somehow have this project in a book as well.

Here’s 3 photographs from the book -

We’re in the Multimedia World Now

We just uploaded 3 of the 7 segments from ‘Bubbles in the Fishtank,’ the multimedia fundraising project we did along with Jeannette Copperwaite and Ani Dimusheva last April and May, to the multimedia section on our web site. This was a real fun project to do, and it would be great to do these kind of presentations for some of our clients.

‘American Portraits: Hopes and Dreams’ published

Well what do you know, we have finally published our project ‘American Portraits: Hopes and Dreams,’ with Blurb.com and are very excited it. After working on this for so many years, since the late 70’s, it really was time to see how it would look in a book format. I (SB) went to a seminar by Deanne Delbridge, the Creative Consultant, earlier in the year, and she had the group commit to doing at least one ‘passion work,’ and this is what I promised myself that I would do by August.

Here’s the cover of the book. We often wonder whatever happened to Pam, this 4 year old girl who is on the cover of the book, as she would be in her early 20’s by now. We were doing a photo story about her family of 9 who lived in a school bus in a campground, in Fall City, WA. During our 5 years of living in Seattle, among other things, we were shooting for a small weekly called the Eastside Week which had a brilliant art director Sandra Schneider, who was able to design very progressive and edgy layouts. She pushed us in ways not many had done up to that point, or since. So while walking around the campground, Pam was following us, curious, and wanting to play.

At one point Pam asked if she could take a picture with one of our cameras, so Sandy gave her one of our Nikormat cameras to shoot with, and then she did her portrait of Pam with the camera she had, also a Nikormat probably. That old camera was built like a tank, and we loved it. We had a camera technician ask us once, why we had a garden growing in our cameras, and what could we say besides smile a bit.

It’s an interesting thing really, that both of us were drawn to documenting the small and ordinary but very important moments of our daily lives, with our families and in our communities, even before we met back in 1984. Many years later, we can now see that we’ve always known that these moments and scenes described the iconic Americana which interests and excites us – and that they are important to document and interpret with our vision.

To see a brief 15 page preview of the book, just go to Blurb.com, and go to the Recently Published Books section –

Before too much time passed, this is how the DVD cover ended up looking for the fundraiser we worked on since the beginning of April, for Bryce’s Otis School’s Art Program. It was a great successs with all the kids and their families, and we were able to raise a little bit of money for the school. To see how the b&w portraits played with the that great song by Maurice Chevalier, go to the Multi-Media section on our web site: saul-sandraphoto.com

* Portraits of Doctors and Kids

We had a great time doing the photography for UCSF’s AIDS Research Institute’s 2008 annual report these past 5-6 weeks – some challenging photo shoots where we had 10 – 15 minutes at most to come up with a strong portrait, but it all worked out. We’ll be able to show some of the portraits once the annual report is published in June.

Last Saturday, we showed a more complete version of the ‘Bubbles in the Fishtank’ multi-media project at the Otis Elementary School’s Spring Fling fundraiser, and happy to say, it was a great success – as was the fundraiser. Here’s 4 more portraits from the project –

Plamen

Christopher

Maryam

Derek

* Stephanie & Jeff’s Wedding Photography

We’ll be doing the wedding photography for Stephanie & Jeff at the end of June, which should be a lot of fun as they’ll be having family coming from all over the country for their wedding in San Francisco. It’s interesting how many of the weddings we’ve photographed in recent years are also family reunions. During their visit to S.F. 2 months ago, we met up at Baker’s Beach and did some fun portraits of them for their Engagement Album.

* A Great Night – Showing the Fundraising Multi-Media Project

We’ve been meaning to start a blog for awhile now, so here it goes. Great time we had last Thursday night at our son Bryce’s Art Auction at his Otis Elementary School, in Alameda. To help raise funds for the school’s art program because of potential budget cuts, we’ve teamed up with 2 other parents, Jeannette Copperwaite and Ani Dimusheva, to create ‘Bubbles in the Fishtank’ — a multi-media presentation of Bryce’s 2nd grade classmates using our portraits and candids of them, the kids’s artwork, interviews of the kids and their teacher Mrs. Scriven, and video. It feels great to be doing a project of value to the community we live in. We’ll be showing a more in-depth presentation at another fundraiser on May 10th.

We’ve been looking to do a documentary photography project where we can shoot with b&w film, and to spend some time in the darkroom where we can produce beautiful prints. To see more of the project: go to the Client Access section on our web site, the password is: sbsh10, and then click on Gallery.