HOW TO MAKE A BOOK WITH STEIDL

How to Make a Book with Steidl. 2010. 88 minutes.

How to Make a Book with Steidl begins with legendary German publisher and printer Gerhard Steidl explaining to British photographer Martin Parr his work style, qualifying "Just so you know, so you don't get mad about me." They both laugh. But he is serious too; there is real caution in his warning. Steidl hands Parr a copy of his book "How to Make a Book with Steidl"- given to each of his collaborators - which Parr covetously accepts, insisting Steidl sign it. Making a book with Gerhard Steidl is a sign that a photographer has arrived. But the booklet presented to Parr is a reminder that this is a collaboration. It is a primer for those photographers lucky enough to collaborate on a publication of their work and necessary, presumably, because Steidl's style is so unusual.

Wetzel and Adolph's documentary is an engrossing portrait of Steidl vis-à-vis his unorthodox style. At once humorous, obsessive, volatile, and awesomely intelligent, Steidl is not just a match for the artists with whom he chooses to work. He is himself an artist, and the documentary can be seen as a portrait-of-the-artist. He was born in Göttingen fifty metres from his printing house because, he claims, he was too busy to move. We see Steidl seated at his desk, surrounded by mountains of paper and books, as he types notes on a manual typewriter and files the paper on a vast wall of organized information. The printing house is both spotless and cluttered, seemingly an extension of Steidl's own relentless mind.

This movie isn't just a portrait of an important publisher-printer. It captures the beauty of analogue production. Steidl publishes in a decidedly digital world. His staff works on computers. He and Joel Sternfeld create a book of iPhone photos. And Steidl's multiple iPods seem to be his constant travel companions (we never do find out what he's stored on them!). But he also takes notes with pen and paper. He chooses paper for how it feels. And several times he extolls the virtues of specific printing inks for their smell. "This is a lost knowledge: that books should smell good," he only partly jokes. 

And Steidl physically spans the globe to meet with his photographer-collaborators. This is something that makes the documentary a joy to watch. We travel wide and far to be flies on the wall as Steidl meets with the greatest living photographers in their studios. Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Adams, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall. For photography fans, the voyeurism value of these sequences is impossible to overrate. 

But perhaps the most unusual trip is Steidl's journey to Qatar where he meets with Khalid Bin Hamad Bin Ahmad Al-Thani. He is soft-spoken and almost meek, despite (or due to) being a member of the autocratic Qatari royal family, and, at first, Steidl's collaboration with him smacks of a vanity project. But then we camp overnight under the desert stars. And watch Al Thani and Steidl select stones and plants for their soft colours. When Steidl and Al Thani finally present their project to Al Thani's father inside a trailer in the middle of the desert - elaborately furnished and powered by humming generators, the blanketed camels resting outside - we see Al Thani's photographs. In austere black and white, the first star shines in the fading desert sky; a sand dune is sculpted by the wind. They are jewels of pure photography. This is no vanity project. 

For almost a generation we have been slowly lulled into the belief that photographs are to be consumed as digital images capable of endless reproduction. But How to Make a Book with Steidl reminds us that photographs are physical, that the consumption of information is not only visual; it is visceral. Perhaps this is Steidl's most important contribution to contemporary photography: he produces beautiful books, beautiful objects. We no longer look through the image. Steidl demands that we remember the other senses when we see. He reminds us to stop and smell the photos.