Steidlville

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Gerhard Steidl: The Making of Robert Frank’s Storylines

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  1. I love the fact that artists travel to us in Göttingen, with their photographs in their case and ideas in their mind. Our publishing house and print-works are in a couple of small converted houses in the center of this medieval city. It’s all on a small scale, and a long way from the industrial zones that most people equate with printers.
  2. On the top floor of the main house is a large room with a library. It’s where work begins on most of our books and it will be Robert Frank’s work place for the next few days.
  3. I like to do the structural work with the artist on the large wooden desk. We cut out photographs and think about sequences; we discuss the format and start to lay-out the chapters. This handicraft approach allows you to move back-and-forth and it is usually a slow process, but this time is necessary because it lays the foundations for the book.
  5. As soon as possible we make a full-size dummy. The first proper maquette conveys a real sense of the subsequent printed and bound book – an intimate object that you can hold in your hands; a sequence of pages that you can leaf through. At this stage I usually have a sense of whether the idea will work or if there are any conceptual flaws in our approach. It may be easier to scroll through a file in the computer but you don’t get the impression you have with printed pages. Our set-up is of course entirely digital but I treat myself to the luxury of switching between digital and analogue.
  6. In former times the artists always left the building for lunch and we would have to track some of them down in the pubs a few hours later. Now nobody is allowed to leave – and lunch is cooked by our chef Rüdiger Schellong in our dining room across from the library on the third floor. I often think that our building is a submarine – as soon as everyone is on board, we dive underground, and there’s no fresh air or daylight before the end of the journey.
  8. We continue to develop and improve the hand-glued maquette in parallel to the completion of high-res-data on the computers in the floor below the library. When a sequence is finished we put in the captions and deal with all the textual elements. Michael Mack managed the requirements of Tate Modern’s exhibition list and Robert Frank’s spontaneous ideas. In the end Robert wanted to use very few of the 150 captions, just sufficient to structure the stories in the book. Michael, Robert and I then checked through the final sequence.
  10. Our guests stay in The Halftone Hotel, our apartments right next door to the publishing house. It means that we can easily knock on June’s door deep in the night and drag Robert out of bed when we have to talk about the very last detail.
  14. Of course you never produce a book just for yourself. The first reader of Robert’s book is Vicente Todolí, Director of Tate Modern in London. When we had our first meetings in Bleeker Street, New York, he told Robert and me about his clear vision for the exhibition. This became the basis of the book and in discussion Robert said that he wanted a “disrespectful photo-book”, not a monograph or retrospective in the classical sense. We agreed on a light-weight book, bound in a flexible material like a pocket calendar. Vicente likes what we have done and has some good ideas for final improvements. We’re now ready to print.
  15. On the floor below the design studio we run films from the digital files in our film-plotter and then printing plates have to be made from those films.
  17. The technologies in the printing industry are constantly advancing but we always keep at hand a combination of the new and old, traditional techniques and modern technologies. Because in the end we need to have as many tools as necessary to produce the very best result in each particular case. It is not simply about machines — we maintain a high level of craftsmanship in our printing.
  18. The start of the print run is very exciting. We work with a large-scale MAN-Roland printing machine which is on the ground floor of the building.
  21. Each printing sheet has to be checked and agreed by the artist. Storylines was printed in tritone for the black and white images and four-colour process for the colour. The whole procedure is the same as in the darkroom: you have to decide on the best grey and colour tones by both looking and trusting your instincts.
  22. Printers and artists, standing together at the machine, are a sort of family. They can’t keep any secrets.
  25. The work is almost finished. The whole staff comes together for a group portrait in front of Steidlville.
  28. I always dreamt of having a small book factory. At the top, you throw in an idea and after a few days a finished book tumbles out below.
Related books
Storylines