By Conor Risch

For Colleen Plumb, whose “Animals Are Outside Today” project was featured in Exposures this month, books have always been important to her understanding of photography. As a graphic design student, she says, she would sit in the library and become engrossed in photo books, which eventually led her to pursue her MFA in photography. “From the very beginning I’ve loved books and the tactile quality, the experience of getting lost looking at a photography book,” she tells me by phone from her Chicago home.

Once she began her career as a photographer, it was only natural that she used the medium that first engaged her to think about and understand her own work. To edit her photographs, she says, she would cut apart her 2 1/4-inch contact sheets and glue or tape them into different journals, pairing and rearranging the images to see how they worked together, informed each other, and created larger themes.

“What I love about making books is how the two images can relate to one another and create a different meaning when they’re sequenced, which is Basic Book-making 101, but I love that pure image relationship and what that can reveal,” she says. “It also asks something of the viewer, to put that meaning together, and it’s more interactive almost.”

Plumb says that at some point during the ten years she has worked on her “Animals Are Outside Today” project, which examines the way animals enter and influence our increasingly urbanized lives, she realized that she was creating a body of work whose best vehicle was a book. She began to assemble larger, handmade volumes of the work from the series. She says the process has helped her develop an intuitive understanding of the body of work as a whole. “Sometimes if I have a brand new picture I’ll think to myself, ‘Oh, we were waiting for that one,’” she says. “And I didn’t even know that it was missing.”

When she began to organize the solo show that is currently on display at the City Gallery at the Historic Water Tower in Chicago, she drew on her book-making to help her pace the show and create an experience for viewers. “The book-making has enabled me to see what’s possible [in a gallery setting] with my work,” she says.

Creating books has also been helpful to her in putting together a strong portfolio. “The process of knowing how the pictures will function and say what I want to say in such a short amount of time, that’s so valuable to me because you don’t have 50 pictures,” she says. “How do they all work together, and what is the rhythm? You want to have the first ones define the project in an understandable way. You want to have a good flow from the beginning to end.”

Plumb says she’s shown her handmade books to several people whose opinion she respects, and their reactions have helped convince her that a book is the most effective medium for the “Animals Are Outside Today” project. But, she says, “Everybody wants a book, me and the whole rest of the world. So I have to make it so the book needs to be made and has a purpose in the world.” Through creating her own books, Plumb believes she is becoming more and more effective at making the case that her work deserves to be in print.