The Handmade Artist Book

Join us in Santa Fe for this immersive, hands-on workshop designed for photographers seeking to learn the techniques and artistry of handmade bookmaking. If you are feeling called to explore your photographic art through a new and fantastic medium, this is the program for you.

Longtime photographer and visual storyteller Diana Bloomfield highlights the endless possibilities of the artist book as a creative way to reinterpret and understand your work. Over the course of your week together, Diana introduces a diverse range of strategies that push the boundaries of the traditional book form. Diana challenges you to explore the interplay between structure and content, embrace dimensionality and tactility in your process, and offers you inspiring, innovative, and interactive new methods of creative expression.

We also look at an array of handmade books and the possibilities inherent within this art form. As so many handmade books incorporate some form of the accordion form, we begin the workshop that way, too. With Diana’s hands-on demonstrations and guidance, we move to bound books, origami, piano hinge, flag book variations, and more. Creating one book form a day and a personal artist book by the end of the week are the goals for this workshop.

Each book and technique builds upon what you learned the day before. If you happen to like one book form more than another, you are welcome to focus your time on a select process for the duration of the week. At the end of the week, you are able to take home what you learned and hopefully expand upon these designs, making them all your own. 

No prior experience is necessary for this workshop. Papers and all materials are supplied, but if you would like to incorporate photographs or other art into your artist books, please feel free to bring them. Join us in Santa Fe this summer for a fun and endlessly creative week of new techniques, storytelling, and exploration.