A shoulder, a fall of dark hair, a curve of skin against black. The cover of Semblance Volume 01 gives you almost nothing and everything: the title in white, the photographer's name small at the foot, and a monochrome study that could be a hillside at dusk until you look again. Tom spent a decade photographing the natural landscape before turning his camera on the human body, and this A5 booklet, 32 pages on 150gsm silk inside a gloss-laminated 300gsm silk cover, is the result.
He did his homework on our YouTube channel, and when he ordered he wrote: "Thanks for all your time, help and youtube videos, it has really demystified the whole process!"
The project reached us under the working title Bodyscapes. Its introduction, "A Need for Change", describes the turn: models first outdoors, then under studio light, the body treated the way he had treated the land. The photographs are all close, all monochrome, and abstracted just enough that ribs read as strata and a folded arm reads as a valley. These are studies in form, skin texture and shadow, and they ask to be printed with restraint: one or two pictures to a spread, generous white margins, a single three-image page as a change of rhythm. Tom had followed our black-and-white video and converted every image to greyscale before export, so he, not the press, decided how each colour turned to grey. It was his first time in InDesign, and the only preflight fix was 3mm bleed on the front cover.
Gloss lamination was on Tom's very first enquiry, and on this cover it earns its place. Gloss film gives maximum punch and sheen: the black of the cover goes deeper, the highlight along a shoulder goes brighter, and the distance between them, which is the whole subject of a black and white photograph, gets wider. On a busy colour cover gloss can tip into shine for its own sake; on a single monochrome image it adds pure emphasis. Underneath is 300gsm silk, which Tom had chosen from our videos and confirmed once he held a sample: "I definitely love the 300gsm Silk for the cover." Stiff enough to protect the pages, it is light enough to lie closed rather than spring open.
Inside, Tom's plan was 150gsm uncoated. Uncoated is soft, matt and tactile, and the ink sinks into the sheet, which can be lovely but takes the edge off the deepest blacks. To take away any indecision, we sent out a paper sample pack. It took about two weeks to reach Oregon, and once Tom had the sheets in his hands he asked us to requote on 150gsm silk; the sample sheet, he wrote, "REALLY helped". Silk is smooth and takes an image crisply, so the grain of skin and the soft fall-off into shadow survive the press, and 150gsm is heavy enough that a dark image does not ghost through to a pale one overleaf. The booklet is 36 pages in all, a 4pp cover around 32 inside, wire stitched through the fold. Stapling works from 8 to 72 pages in multiples of four; at 36, the booklet opens flat so a spread reads as one picture.
Four days after proof approval the booklets were finished and on their way by tracked courier, one box with the customs paperwork done. On arrival, Tom wrote: "The print is great ... Thanks again for all the help and great communication, I will definitely print with you again."
If you have a first volume in mind, our zine printing and booklet printing pages set out the papers and finishes, and Opera in the Dark by Robert James shows another black and white photography zine we printed.
Get an instant price at exwhyzed.com, or send Harriet and Mike a few images and a page count and we will tell you whether gloss or matt suits them.
