The Artist Initiative continues to expand editorial content showcasing the diversity of our community and their talent. One of the foundational elements is the discussion around process — how an artist approaches their work, their challenges and successes, and informative pieces that can give insight and provide inspiration for aspiring creatives. In addition to new content, we are welcoming guest contributors to use Artist Initiative as a forum to share their experience and stories. Through their contributions, we aim to give insight into the many facets of creating.

We welcome Romke Hoogwaerts as the inaugural guest writer on the Artist Initiative. Hoogwaerts is a photographer, publisher, and editor with an enviable CV including roles at the NY Times, MSNBC, and most notably, the creator and editor of independent photo publication Mossless. The fourth issue of Mossless, Public/Private/Secret, was recently released in collaboration with Charlotte Cotton and the International Center for Photography. This piece is the first of three by Hoogwaerts, sharing his experience in photobook publishing and creating Mossless, and his efforts to shape an idea into a tangible artifact.

If it wasn’t for the internet, I probably wouldn’t be making photobooks.

Halfway across the world from where I live now and at half my current age, I was dreaming of photography as a career. My library didn’t have too much for me and I soon poured over everything I could find online. At the time, the internet was just starting to blossom, full of those of our generation, the youthful underbelly, making and showing beautiful and ugly things alike while the adults were too put off by the idea to even give us a glance. There weren’t many photoblogs yet, but there were, as there are now, plenty of places to look. I was reading everything I could find, looking at every picture I could see and learning about every book I couldn’t buy or access, like Vitamin PH, a Phaidon catalog of contemporary photography which I have to admit is a book that stole my heart.

When I was applying to colleges right as the economic crisis fell in all of our laps, my dreams of doing photography seemed like a shot in the dark. I was seeing many more young photographers making incredible work than there were outlets to share them, let alone publishers to find them. Maybe I wasn’t confident enough to knowingly add myself to that pile, but I thought we could use another host for showcases, so I took it upon myself to get the stone rolling (the name Mossless, I admit, was a cursory idea). I booked a domain and within a few months I was interviewing a photographer every two days. The idea was that hopefully, after growing some kind of audience, I could find a way into publishing photography. Luckily for me, I’ve always liked asking questions.

About 200 interviews or so later, I was introduced to a photographer who could not possibly be reduced to a four-question internet post. I wanted the first Mossless book or issue to be about him and I spent week after week interviewing him, working through those transcriptions, thinking of ways to build on what I had. I worked with a friend in graphic design to make the prototype of this first issue, which was never released.

The idea evolved and the first book was actually a box with four books inside, one of which was about Sean. That box and everything in it was the result of a collaboration with Jesse Hlebo. Almost every book since has been the result of some kind of collaboration, the latest being with Elana Schlenker. And with almost every photographer we’ve published, we first saw their work online -- in fact I generally don’t like to work with photographers who don’t share work online in some shape or form because I would see that as a kind of betrayal of where my love for publishing grew. What I’ve tried to do with Mossless is to arrange many of the beautiful works I see online, in that malleable interconnected space, into a fixed physical state, to put those voices into some kind of new harmony.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this was because it seemed to me that photographers of today were interviewed, discussed and disseminated much more superficially than those from a few decades before us. I wondered if it was because the evolution of photography towards digital eroded the social status of even the best photographers, affecting the way they are discussed, if at all. It’s trouble for would-be-blossoming photographers in particular, since you usually can’t get published without being published before, or at least written about in a meaningful way. Established publishers, facing trouble too, were smart to stick with the guns they knew and had. You can see how people like me would want to take up the challenge of trying to be a new platform for young photographers, small as that platform might be. My favourite part is that I’m far from alone in taking up that challenge.

Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair opens in September and it will be in its eleventh year. I don’t know if it has been as vibrant since day one because I missed the first four. It’s the best and I don’t know any event like it. Four sweaty days of nothing but art books and people, it makes other art fairs look placid and austere. What you see is a lot of young people showing books and zines they’ve made.

VSCO has asked me to write about what I do, and about others, and of course I could not turn the opportunity down -- they’re one of the greatest examples of a company born out of the same reactionary concepts. First I have to get this personal portion out of the way, which will be followed by a roundtable conversation I’ll be having with fellow independent photobook makers about lessons learned along the way. Soon after that, you'll be able to read some more technical details about independent bookmaking. If you're into this insight, be sure to follow along.