Was Home by John Steck Jr.

Was Home. This book has been in the making for some time now. It took a while to get the feel just right for this book, but I must say I am very pleased with the final outcome. Each book takes several days to make, with an extreme attention to detail. This results in each copy being very special and unique.

These images were taken in my childhood home in 2005 and 2006, right after my family sold it. It had remained empty for a couple years and I was able to get inside during that time. These images represent the foundations of a family and are meant to remind us of our own family settings and traditions.

Was Home by John Steck Jr.

22 pages, 8 x 8 in. Stiff Leaf Binding. Hand Written Text on Front Cover.

Handmade & Printed on Rag Natural Paper.

Made in an edition of 12.

Signed & Numbered.

$150 + S&H for the first 6 books. Price will increase as the last half of the edition sells.

Found Piles and other Topographica

My first release for 2011. This book contains 9 images of some of my most recent landscape work, focusing on random piles that I come across during my everyday journeys. There will be several more Topographica books to come out as part of this series. Stay tuned for those.

Found Piles and other Topographica by John Steck Jr.

9 pages, 6 x 8 in. Hand Sewn Binding.

Handmade & Printed on Rag Natural Paper.

Made in an edition of 30.

Signed & Numbered.

$18 + S&H

Hour of Lead by Ariel Kessler

Hour of Lead by Ariel Kessler
14 pages, 6 x 6 in. Japanese Stab Stitched.
Handmade & Printed on Inkjet Paper, text printed on
Japanese Sumi-e Paper.
Made in an edition of 20 with 2 artist proofs.
Signed & Numbered.
$32 + S&H

Ariel Kessler, who I had just recently graduated with from The Massachusetts College of Art & Design, approached me early this summer about making her series, Hour of lead, into a book. I was stoked from the get-go about doing this book with her. I was excited not only because I liked the project idea, but also because I thought the narrative book form would be well suited for it because the project is about a conversation through photographic images. A couple of months later, after a little mail (now that she lives in Portland, OR), texting, email and Facebook chat exchange, here we have it. A sweet little handmade book with a sweet story.

The series itself is a dialogue created by Ariel, combining her own silver gelatin prints and her late father's Kodachrome color slides. Having just a little memory of him, she created this narrative of images not only to gain insight into his world, but to also show the effect of losing him.

You can see more of her work on her website arielkessler.com.

Artist Book: Unique c-Prints by John Steck Jr.

Unique c-Prints Artist Book by John Steck Jr.

Sixteen Pages, 7 x 8 in. Stiff Leaf Bound.

Handmade & printed on Inkjet Paper.

Made** in an edition of 16 with 2 artist proofs.

Signed & numbered.

The price will increase for this edition as each book sells.
$115 + S&H

This book consist of sixteen pages of work from my thesis project from my final year at MassArt. My goal with this work was to create a non existing landscape that could still be experienced and entered into. I wanted to make my own language through image making, creating an organic and visceral feel to the work. Having been mostly a landscape photographer this past decade, I needed to make images that still expressed my interpretation of the landscape but that also pushed the limits of photography. All this work was make in the color darkroom, using photograms, negatives, and other objects all pulled from the land.

Here are a few pages from the book.













































** Since each print ever made in this series is unique because of the darkroom process involved, I decided to print each book on demand to try and keep to that unique quality. Allow two to three weeks for purchase to arrive.

Hour of Lead by Ariel Kessler.

A book I'm currently working on with Ariel Kessler who I previously went to MassArt with but now lives in Portland, Or. I just started printing some mockups for her and we are sending them back and forth via the mail. You can call us the Postal Service of photo books, minus the singer from Death Cab. Stay Tuned for more info on the book and release date!