© Paulette Myers-Rich, spread from the artist book “Black Ice”

It was Ruth Roger’s presentation on Contemporary Photographic Artists’ Books in 2022, when I came to know about Paulette Myers-Rich. I was intrigued by the content of the book ‘Ghost poems for the living’ – it was lasting and universal. I went back to her work. The work needs to be read more than once, and it would reveal new meaning upon every reading. I decided to look deeper into Paulette’s works. The content of her books, her mastery of the printmaking and processes amazed me. I wanted to know more about how Paulette developed her practice, her philosophies on photograph and book making and her emotions as an artist.

You are a photographer, bookmaker, a writer and an educator. Tell us about your growing up.  What made you choose photography as a medium to express yourself and books as a form to represent it? 

I was born in 1956 into a working-class family and raised in St. Paul MN. It was then a heavily industrial city on the upper Mississippi River. Along with industry and commerce came a variety of cultural and educational institutions. Many of these institutions were near or adjacent to the factories, mills and foundries and many working-class children were encouraged to be well-read towards higher education. I was given a library card as a child and became a regular visitor and a lover of books. We lived near several college campuses, so I interacted with students from all over and had access to bookstores, record shops and the art supply store that catered to them.

My mother was a nurse and working mother of eight. I was the oldest, responsible for helping my parents with chores including reading to my siblings. But I was also an adventurous, free-range kid. I’d ride my bike for miles with my friends to a lake to go swimming, or hike along the Mississippi river bluff trails down to the riverbank where there was a combination of wildness and industry. There were manmade caves carved into the bluffs used to grow mushrooms and store beer from nearby breweries. There were brick yards, grain elevators, power plants, massive railyards, factories, foundries, mills, and bars and nightclubs on the edge of downtown tucked in between various neighborhoods.

I came of age in the inner-city in the 1960’s – 70’s during a time of flight to the suburbs and civil rights struggles. A central event during this time was the formation of Interstate I-94 freeway system that tore out a massive swath of largely Black-owned homes and businesses in our community. Federal planners chose to build it in a deep trench running through the Rondo neighborhood through eminent domain and redlining, decimating a cohesive community of working and middle-class homeowners, businesses and professionals. My father, a machinist, worked in a factory that was on the remaining side Rondo Street facing the interstate. We didn’t move to the suburbs because this was the neighborhood my father grew up in and his widowed mother lived nearby. The freeway system also gave rise to interstate trucking and the decline of railroads and was a precursor to the wide-spread deindustrialization in the urban core.

Being an urban, working-class woman has shaped my entire life in ways that were intertwined with the art world, becoming educated in unconventional settings that influenced my studio practice. I saw myself becoming an artist as a teenager, encouraged by my teachers to pursue my interest in photography and printmaking, but I left high school early to get married and have my son. Yet I managed to continue my practice despite this. My then husband worked second-shift in a factory and parented at home in the mornings while I took a bus downtown to a media arts learning center called Film in the Cities, funded by the St. Paul public school system where students attended from all over the district. I showed up there out of the desire to learn photography and filmmaking and asked if I could attend, despite the fact I was a drop out. They accepted me probably because I was considered one of those “at-risk” youth who wanted to study. This alternative educational arts program was designed to keep us in school and I benefited from it tremendously, setting me on my path.

FITC was housed in a large funky street-level warehouse space with a darkroom, editing and sound suites, and large open spaces to use for shoots and screenings. I attended daily for three-hour sessions. We could check out cameras for days at a time, were given free rolls of film they sent to a lab, or we developed it ourselves in the darkroom where some of us experimented using chemicals or scraping and drawing on the surface. We also studied film history and contemporary practice. Prominent artists and educators visited our classes when in town for film festivals in museums and colleges that screened experimental work, with directors talks and panels that we also attended. I was introduced to alternative documentary practices, film as an artform and independent filmmaking, including groundbreaking women filmmakers as role models. I made experimental abstract films, animations and dreamlike filmic sequences at my kitchen table at night when my husband was at work and my son was sleeping. At the end of the year our films were screened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and reviewed by an arts writer. We were treated more like artists than students. I was 19, getting an extraordinary education and deep immersion in contemporary film and photography practice in this remarkable setting, for free.

Eventually Film in the Cities became a non-profit, acquiring their own building when the public-school budgets were cut. This change allowed me to continue my work through their filmmaker’s access center for equipment and post-production studios. There was also a library and gallery exhibiting work by local, national and international artists. FITC offered both an informal, DIY structure, as well formal classes towards an AA degree, but by this time I was parenting two children as a single mother working a full-time job, so college was still out of the question.

As a single mother, I could no longer afford to make films, so I began to work in B/W photography using a camera my father gave me when he upgraded his for volunteer work as a photographer for the St. Paul Fire Department. I used the darkroom at a community center in my Minneapolis neighborhood but eventually my father and I set up a darkroom in my home that we both used. One day in 1982, he suggested I photograph the abandoned railroad workshops where my grandfather worked as a carpenter building boxcars in the 1930’s, before they were renovated for retail and office space. This was the first time I photographed an industrial site. It was the beginning of the Rust Belt era with the economy changing due to neoliberalism and globalization. I was working with experimental abstract imagery and had no intention of making this my primary work.

© Paulette Myers-Rich, spread from the artist book “Black Ice”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, spread from the artist book “Black Ice”

What drew you to artist books? How important is it to make your books by hand as opposed to mass production? When and how did you come up with the idea of establishing the Reading Room for sharing Artist books between fellow artists? 

Hand-making my books is central to my practice and goes all the way back to my beginnings. I’ve been a craft-practitioner since childhood, always making something, including art. At Film in the Cities, I was influenced by a “film-as-film” aesthetic that emphasized the material qualities of the medium using materiality to effect in my work even then. When portable video equipment became more accessible to independent filmmakers, arguments arose about film-vs-video. I was in the analog film camp because of my hands-on approach experimenting with its surface and utilized film’s qualities of depth, warmth and presence in the room with you when it’s projected. Objects or people in front of or behind the screen would make shadows you could incorporate, or you could overlap films using double-projectors, or stop the projector and let the film burn as an effect while filming it. When we hand-edited our Super-8 film, scenes were physically cut with a blade, the emulsion was scraped off the ends and glued together for splices made as clean as possible for smooth transitions. I was skilled at this and often did it for others who weren’t very good with their hands. However, when a group of us made a project with dozens of short scenes, we made rough splices for effect on the jump cuts as a part of the visual narrative, titling it Finished Splices. We argued that video lacked this physicality, was beamed at you from behind glass and was too much like watching television, which had little appeal for us. This comparison still holds for me in the age of screen-based everything, which is now the analog-vs-digital discussion. In recent years there’s been a wide-spread increase in the use of analog and antiquarian processes in photography including the practice and interest in hand-made photobooks, which I’m very happy to see. However, I do use analog and digital tools to make work I couldn’t dream of when I first began hand-making artist photo bookworks. I shoot and develop film and scan negatives to make pigment prints and positives for photogravures. It’s the best of both worlds. But I still dislike screen-based viewing.

In producing my photo bookworks, I’ve made a variety of book dummies over the years that allow me to now work more directly. I design while I make, using materials, forms and printmaking methods that contribute to the content in varied small editions. I have strong hand skills and put them to use in both my photography and artist photo bookworks, creating them as interactive pieces intended for viewers to handle and pace the reading for themselves. This generally is not an option available in most galleries or exhibits as books tend to be displayed in vitrines or behind glass which means an incomplete encounter with the work. I make copies for viewers to handle and fully experience the book as intended, no gloves required– just clean hands. This is why I set up the reading room as an extension of my studio. I also have a significant collection of artists’ books and photo books by other artists I use for research and teaching that I share by invitation and appointment.

I discovered artists’ books through the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in 1985 as a volunteer intern and assistant to the papermaking in residence, Amanda Degener, a sculptor using hand-made paper as her medium. I wanted to study with her because I was making set-ups using paper in my home studio for my photographs. I was still influenced by my experimental filmmaking, working in sequences and series. (See Night by Night). I learned eastern papermaking methods using gampi fiber which has a beautiful, light reflecting sheen and I continue to use Japanese-made gampi paper for my photogravure prints.

MCBA also housed a gallery and artists’ book archive alongside the book arts studios that hosted an exhibitions program with workshops taught by contemporary artists using the book form as their medium. Artists’ books as a genre were still emerging and was wide open for experimentation. There were performance artists using photography to document their work in offset printed editions, there were sculptors who made altered books and printmakers producing letterpress printed hand-made books. The curator of these exhibits was Dr. Betty Bright who wrote No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America:1960–1980, “the first history to trace the emergence of the artists’ book in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.” (Granary Books). I was in the right place at the right time, studying with exceptional artists and scholars who were developing and defining the field.

When I first saw Ed Ruscha’s accordion photobooks, I realized this was what I was looking for – a simple form that reminded me of a filmstrip, with pages as frames, perfect for sequences and visual narratives. Ruscha’s books were offset printed, but I adhered gelatin silver prints onto printmaking paper and bound them in boards with bands or wrappers. I still use this method with both pigment prints on rag paper and photogravure prints. The accordion book offers the option of viewing the book spread open to see the entire piece or as a hand-held two-page spread. I love this format for its simplicity and other variations of fold-out designs that enhance or drive the narrative and viewing experience.

My time at MCBA inspired me to study library science and creative writing in a program designed for working women at the College of St. Catherine, then I returned to MCBA in 1990 to continue my studies in all aspects of the book arts including letterpress printing, relief printmaking, box making and binding, eventually becoming an educator and a master letterpress printer-in-residence there. I acquired my own equipment in 1992, rented a warehouse studio a few doors down from my husband’s painting studio, and in 1996, I started Traffic Street Press, naming it after the cobblestone alley below my studio window. I produced both personal projects and collaborations, often using photography for illustrations that fit the poems. This is when I began my sustained practice as a photo-based book artist and educator.

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Broder” clamshell

© Paulette Myers-Rich, spread from artist book “Broder”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Broder”

In your process, when does your work take a specific form of the book? How do you balance the relationship between the contents of the book (the story) and the form of the book? For instance, the process behind ‘Ghost Poems for the Living’? 

Sometimes my process is an intuitive one and I’ll produce variable editions using the same suites of photos and texts to see how they present according to the format. Other times, a book is previsualized and then I make it as it was ideated. For example, with the book Broder, I was asked to review a portfolio of poems by the British poet Anna Reckin. I set it aside for several months until I finished a work in progress, but when I finally reviewed Broder, I was imagining how I would illustrate each poem as I read them.

The title Broder comes from the French word to embroider. The poems look at specific types of embroidery and/or lacework, challenging the idea the stitching is simply surface ornament. The various kinds of openwork described– broderie anglaise and fagoting (decorative bridging between strips of cloth) are all concerned with opening up the woven surface. Embroidery is seen as stereotypically female, but the techniques, such as piercing, binding, and so on, speak more of violence than gentility. The double-meaning of the suite was powerful.

The photographs were composed from set-ups using antique linens and sewing tools that I had collected in my youth when I once did needlework. I printed them on rag paper, then reached out to Anna telling her I had photographed her poems and proposed an artist’s book. She was astonished to see what her poems had evoked, and we agreed to collaborate.

I hand-set and letterpress printed Anna’s poems in metal type, made pigment prints of my B/W photographs and hand bound them in an accordion book in a clamshell box. Broder went on to receive the Minnesota Book Award for Fine Press in 2000.

However, Ghost Poems for the Living: 13 Sonnets by Shakespeare With Distillations and Images was a more intuitive personal project that took shape slowly. In 2005, I was feeling overwhelmed by many life changes including the deaths of my parents and a sister. My parents both died in their sixties from cancer. My father, in 1996 from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma caused by daily exposure to benzene at work, then my mother, in 2002 from a rare form of breast cancer. I lived around the block from them at the time and became the primary caregiver for my mother when she was widowed in ill health. I was still photographing the ongoing disappearance of industrial sites, including the demolition of the factory where my father had worked for 40 years, walking the site with him while he was undergoing chemotherapy. I had accumulated hundreds of contact sheets from these photo shoots and was not in the mood to even look at them. I was about to turn 50 and needed to change the subject.

Ghost Poems for the Living emerged from a return to set-up photography after I acquired a Linhof 4×5 camera from a friend, an architectural photographer who went digital. He had used it in the field, but I set it up as a studio camera, teaching myself how to use it by photographing still lifes of botanicals that I kept on display in my studio. Some had overwintered in my garden, and some came from industrial ruins. These plants gathered in situ were life forms that had endured exposure in extreme conditions taking on forms that I found beautiful and resonant for this reason. They became stand-ins for my mother, my sister, my aging self, and mature women in general.

I used Polaroid’s Type 55 B/W positive/negative 4×5 film (now extinct) to get immediate results so I could see how each lens and exposure worked. In this film, the negative was layered with the positive print and developed simultaneously. I loved the look of these negatives and experimented with them as I once had with my Super-8 film, cutting them apart and layering them in my enlarger, making gelatin silver prints that I then scanned. I made both positive and negative digital prints as the ghostly appearance of the negatives signaled to me a veiled state evocative of life’s other side. I began to design the book by pairing these images to represent the living and the dead, but I was struggling with the text. I was still grieving too much to approach this subject and feared writing maudlin poetry.

I was inspired to use Shakespeare’s sonnets after reading an essay about aging women and their appearance that quoted the well-known lines, thy glass shall show thee how thy beauties wear, thy dial how precious minutes waste. I turned to his sonnets on loss, aging, and death, which are less known than his love sonnets. As I read through them, I realized that Elizabethan English was difficult for many readers, and it felt too formal for me. I searched within the antique language of Shakespeare to find verse for contemporary poems, engaging in the long-practiced tradition of adapting Shakespeare for modern presentation while respecting the source. I called the resulting poems distillations, as they were formed by erasures of sonnets that offered clear and powerful lines that I kept in their place within the source, shaping the white space on the page. I paired the complete sonnet with a positive image and its distillation with the negative image. I printed the photographs on digital rag paper and letterpress printed the poems on the prints using photopolymer plates. Ghost Poems also received the Minnesota Book Award for Fine Press in 2006 and has become even more powerful for me as I approach my seventh decade.

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Ghost Poems for the Living”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Ghost Poems for the Living”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, “Ghost Poems for the Living”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, “Ghost Poems for the Living”

I felt a sense of vulnerability and loss when I was going through your work ‘Quartet’ and ‘Work Sites’. The lines and forms in ‘Night by Night’ were stirring different emotions in me. Can you elaborate your emotions behind these works?

Night by Night is my earliest work in B/W photography, still images intended to be a continuation of my experimental S-8 filmmaking from the 1970’s and 80’s. The photographs are poetic and mysterious, with titles derived from lines in an early edition of A Humument, a commercially printed version of the artist Tom Philip’s unique bookwork of ongoing alterations and erasures. His work felt very much in the spirit of what I’d been doing– experimental, hand-altered, ephemeral, evocative, surreal, cryptic image, and text. This was the work I first exhibited and become known for as a photographer that I set aside when I began to concentrate on my Work Sites/Work Cites series.

The sense of loss and sadness present in Work Sites comes from experiencing the abandonment and eventual erasure of the places we lived and worked, our way of life and community. If deindustrialization hadn’t occurred in this place and time, I might have become a machinist or other skilled industrial worker instead of a librarian. Women could make a good living in a union job with paid vacation, benefits, and a pension and as a single mother this appealed to me. So, it’s possible that I would have learned a trade, which ironically, I did with letterpress printing, but as an artist in her studio located in a post-industrial warehouse making her work. Yet I couldn’t ignore what was happening outside my window and all around me, so I photographed various sites for decades as an act of bearing witness during this Rust Belt period in the Twin Cities. Eventually, adaptive reuse and demolition for new construction followed when a strong local economy returned and the sites I had photographed were completely transformed. I now consider my photographs as relics and fragments of an extinction event. The Quartets, a sub-set of the Work Sites project, is an example of a form I created to enhance this sense of fragmentation. In the last five years I’ve devoted my attention solely to this work forty years after taking the first photographs in 1982.

Early on the books in my Work Sites/Work Cites series emerged slowly and organically through an ongoing photo-editing process of thousands of images over the years. I was seeing sets emerge in typologies such as windows and doors, site conditions and the remnants found there. I began to form groupings from various locations. Volume I contain four sets: Afterlife, Urban Verticals, Warehouse Windows, and Warehouse Doors. Each set of 12 photographs has a poem on the wrapper as the primary text. Volume II, Fire, Wrack and Ruin, contains 50 photographs that examine the conditions that caused the sites as I found them– abandonment, accidental fires and arson, demolition, or ruination from natural forces. There are also essays in a single signature book included in both volumes, housed in a clamshell box in an edition of 3.

The Work Site/Work Cites books also serves as a counter-narrative to associations that people often have about my photographs. For about 20 years, there’s been a trend called Ruin Porn resulting from urban exploration by outsiders who travel to post-industrial ruins they photograph and share in competitive online forums. My work pre-dates this “genre” and has nothing to do with it. As a woman from the working-class now living in different surroundings since I moved to New York in 2012, I’m very aware of the assumptions associating my photographs with that practice. Working-class folk rarely get to share their experiences in their own voices. Much is written about us, but not by us, so I’m also claiming my ground. The larger forces that set deindustrialization into motion — neoliberalism, NAFTA, globalism, container shipping, the interstate freeway system and the trucking industry changed the way goods are manufactured and transported — and this also needed to be addressed, but in my own words. My work should not be conflated with ruins-porn trophy photos and my point of view should be included amongst the academic studies and political narratives one often encounters about the Working Class. I hope my series enlightens those unfamiliar with the devastation that deindustrialization continues to have on those impacted by those forces.

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Quartet”

During our zoom conversation, I was intrigued when you mentioned ‘eyes having a sense of touch’. Can you tell us more about this?

So much of what we see or read is viewed through glass or screens– on our phones, through our computers and TV, and even in exhibits of prints framed under glass and it all feels slippery to me. The reflections and bouncing light interfere with the text, the image, and the sense of material culture as a part of the content is lost. It’s why I want viewers to handle my work. If I need to frame something, I don’t put glass over it, it remains exposed so the viewer can experience the piece in its entirety. The materials and the form are crucial parts of the content of my books; however, they’re not intended to be virtuoso displays of craft, but must serve the narrative in a manner that satisfies the eyes, the hand and the mind.

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Quartet”

What is your dream project? What’s next?

Last September, I sold much of my letterpress equipment to a friend, holding back a small proofing press, ornaments and some wood and metal type, my bookbinding tools and etching press. The physical demands and the time involved making letterpress editions are beyond my means these days and for this reason, I no longer collaborate with others as I once did. But I continue to pursue my own work in small, variable editions or as unique photo bookworks that can be reproduced digitally for wider distribution.

I continue to photo edit decades of negatives, research and write texts for my projects and make photogravure etchings for my bookworks. Currently, I’m working on a project called Cuts & Reconstructures. I’m using my photographs differently now, inspired by an artist friend years ago while we were observing the demolition of the coal-fired power plant below a bridge over the Mississippi River in our neighborhood. He wanted to get some of the pieces from the site for his sculpture even though we knew it was all being sold for scrap. But I’m able to salvage this and other sites from their photographs, mining them for elements for what I call Reconstructures– collages made from dismantled and reassembled photogravure prints in my own form of adaptive reuse of buildings and sites. My dream project is to have a set of volumes from the Work Sites/Work Cites series printed commercially in a small edition to place in institutional collections where they can be more widely shared.

As for No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works, I continue to seek out, collect and share artist-made and independent press photo books and projects combining photography and text. Like all collections, there’s a focus– books dealing with place, real and imagined landscapes, and environments altered by various forces; and photo books featuring hand-worked imagery, alternative processes, and set-up photography. Visitors can visit and view books by appointment, participate in The Evening Read and other gatherings around books and photography. I enjoy meeting photo-based book artists and looking at their work, and I’m open to reviewing books for consideration.

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Fire Rack Ruins”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Fire Rack Ruins”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Fire Rack Ruins

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Fire Rack Ruins”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “River Reveal”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “River Reveal”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “River Reveal”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “River Reveal”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Work Sites Afterlife”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, artist book “Work Sites Afterlife”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, “Work Sites Warehouse Windows

© Paulette Myers-Rich, “Work Sites Afterlife”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, “Night by Night”

© Paulette Myers-Rich, “Soft Black Petal”

Paulette Myers-Rich is a photo-based fine-press book artist, writer, librarian, and the director of her artist-run space No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works, featuring artist-made and small press photography books, works on paper and books on books. She has produced over 30 fine press poetry and photography titles using traditional book arts tools and methods by hand. She lives and works in Beacon, NY.

Follow Paulette Myers-Rich:

Website www.paulettemyersrich.com.

Learn more about the Reading Room at www.photobookworks.com.

Paulette can be reached photobookworks@gmail.com.