THE BIG IDEA: The Documentarian
By Joe Sutton I Images courtesy of Blurb
Blurb founder Eileen Gittins has always had an interest in documenting life around her through photography—and is advocating the world at large to follow suit.
An early Internet pioneer, Eileen Gittins began her company, Blurb, to enable herself and other photographers to release and distribute work on their own terms—in this case, the self-publishing of books—and she is now embracing the world of Web 2.0 as Blurb’s new territory.
While Blurb’s publishing allows you to display standalone visual works such as a portfolio, photo essay or a souvenir memory book in a compelling way, Blurb Mobile presents not just a new way to share images, but it also represents a shift in focus for the company as it embraces social media, all things digital, and the rising dominance of images on the Web. The new service fits well alongside increasingly popular photo sharing sites like Instagram and Tumblr. “I believe images are the new lingua franca,” Gittins said, “and that they can be supplemented by voice and text as opposed to the opposite, which is text supplemented by images, which is how we used to live.”
Just before the launch, Gittins unveiled the app to members of the media in New York. The preview happened during the Arab Spring, which was reported on by some of her contacts. “When we showed this [to them], they expressed this would have been awesome to have in the field. Can you imagine if they had [the app] three weeks before, to be able to hold up [their cell phone] and capture sound and video, taking still images and the ambient sound?” Gittins recalled. She was surprised to hear such unintended but brilliant use of the new tool, and felt that Blurb Mobile could be more than the standard narcissistic or self-promotional social app.
The service can also be used in non-world altering situations and be especially useful to people in the photo production industry. If you are scouting a location for a photo shoot, Blurb Mobile is a simple way to record various spots alongside your ideas via comments or video, easily communicating to clients where to move next on the fly. Those on fashion shoots may use it to inventory accessories and garments and assess with others what will be needed for a particular shot. The app is an effective step up from multimedia messaging on a standard cell phone, and the possibilities are endless for any industry that works with visuals.
For the average user, Blurb Mobile is all about the sharing of stories and experiences through multimedia. Users submit a group of photos called “stories;” you can select, edit and order images into one cohesive story with a narrative arc. From there, these stories are then broadcasted to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers (should you choose to give them access). This new way to communicate with friends somewhat evokes the photo slideshows that were so prevalent in Gittins’ childhood home, raised under the roof of a hobbyist photographer. In fact, a great deal of what Blurb has become grew naturally from many aspects of Gittins’ past.
Gittin’s father encouraged her to take photos while visiting family in England. He gave the twelve year old an old Kodak 35mm Retina camera, and passed along a few tips on photography basics such as aperture, shutter speeds and exposure. “This was a real camera,” Gittins said. “Not a Brownie or Instamatic camera. Like, a real camera, and the idea that I might break it terrified me!” Thankfully she didn’t, and soon enough Gittins had completed her first roll of film, including one photo she was especially proud of: an image of rowers at Cambridge, artfully framed by the foliage of a tree from under which Gittins took the photo. “While not a great photograph, … that picture was a ‘professional’ photograph; it wasn’t a snapshot,” Gittins thought. Her father praised and critiqued the components of the photos she sent home, and upon seeing the photo of the rowers, discussed the concept of framing with her. “He told me about not centering things in the frame; to not become static; that having things moving out of the frame was OK—that was my first photography lesson, by mail, in the late 1960s, when I was twelve and staying with my English family.”
Gittins took to studying journalism at U of C Berkeley, “sort of documenting the world around me,” Gittins said. At her job on the school magazine’s editorial staff, something clicked. Observing the way images supplemented the copy, Gittins discovered not just the beauty, but also the narrative power of photographs, which touched her interest as a lifelong avid reader who previously found narrative dominated by text. The epiphany was enough for Gittins to make an inspired decision: she would study photography. But this posed a problem because, while Berkley was a good school, it wasn’t then a hot place to study photography. Gittins turned her attention to San Francisco State, which had the likes of Catherine Wagner and Jack Walcott, among other luminaries, in its faculty. While focusing on acceptance to San Francisco State, Gittins began going to a community darkroom to hone her printing skills. “I became a fiend. Forget buying records and music and clothes—I’m just buying paper,” she said. Her diligence paid off as she eventually secured a job at the darkroom teaching photo basics, passing along the skill set she had casually learned from her father. While at San Francisco State, Gittins continued her work in the darkroom, and over time began teaching classes on how to print in addition to her class on how to use a camera. The darkroom expanded its offerings, including workshops and fieldwork in the Baja Desert, for which Gittins served as TA. “This is where I started to get exposed to medium format work, view camera work,” Gittins said of the experience, “just experimenting like crazy,” all the while building a solid portfolio.
“So there I was finishing up my Bachelor’s in photography, working, teaching classes, printing like a mad woman, just educating myself,” Gittins said, “and then comes the day I graduate from college and I’m thinking, ‘Well, who’s going to hire me?’” She spent the next nine months doing whatever jobs she could—art direction, studio work, and other background tasks. But Gittins soon set her eyes on Kodak, an employer that seemed like a photographer’s paradise. She had a friend who worked there and received free paper and film from the company. “As an employee you could walk into any store and pull out your employee card and get bricks of paper and film, and to me that was better than rent money,” Gittins said. She stalked the company for a year, and in the late ‘80s, she snagged a job as a sales representative. The perks of working at Kodak allowed Gittins to continue her photography on the side, no longer needing to worry about the cost of supplies. Kodak not only supplied the paper and film needed for shooting but also ample opportunity for new photographic subjects. As Kodak’s manager of digital imaging systems in Europe, Gittins lived in London and travelled from country to country on a weekly basis—a photographer’s dream, a bounty of cultures and opportunity.
As Gittins climbed the corporate ladder, her increasingly demanding positions negatively affected the amount of time she could devote to her personal work. Around 1990 she was sent back by Kodak to the States, specifically to Rochester, NY, where the company was founded. Gittins knew she didn’t want to settle there; she decided to leave the company where she’d been so successful and hit the road, working to build a new digital imaging system for Eastman Pharmaceutical in Seattle. Then, in California, she played a vital role in new Internet startups, where she flexed her executive prowess and gained experience as CEO.
In 2001, Gittins found herself lost after the terrorist attacks and the dot-com bubble burst. She thought, “Wow, what am I going to do next?” Like any creative, Gittins took to honing her talent as catharsis, and she began seriously photographing again. “I had a huge network of people that I was really tight with,” Gittins said, “and they were all interesting. So I thought, ‘I wonder if I can create a photo essay here, a portrait of Web 1.0 pioneers, entrepreneurs who really shaped the Web as we know it.’” She didn’t know it at the time, but this project would lead her to her future startup, Blurb. “What happened was that I ended up with a body of work that was not only images but also stories, because I had spent a whole day with [each subject].” Planning to gift her subjects a book of the stories, but finding no printer that would let her to print less than a thousand copies, Gittins decided to start a company that would. Blurb launched in May of 2006, and has since allowed many to publish their own, bookstore-quality books.
Today, Blurb seems strangely divided between the print and digital worlds, though Gittins says the two may happily coexist. By allowing them to live side-by-side, Blurb keeps all possible publishing options available to its customers. Despite the vast differences between Blurb Mobile and Blurb’s books—the same dichotomy of print versus digital—Gittins says that Blurb Mobile is perfectly in line with the company’s vision. “The whole message here has been, ‘How do we become a more visual story culture?’ That’s really the mission of this company: becoming a visually-driven story culture.”
This focus in storytelling is one of the many facets of Blurb that speaks to Gittins’ many personal interests while growing up: Eileen Gittins the photographer, Eileen Gittins the journalism student, and Eileen Gittins the self-professed tech geek (she was the first person she knew who bought an IBM PC in 1983). Each has something to gain from Blurb’s mission and features. “It’s like all those things together just created this opportunity on a deeply personal level,” Gittins said. “This is the culmination for me.” So Blurb continues to innovate and to change the language of the Internet and society at large—one that emphasizes visuals and strives to more organically convey experience than the now standard 140-character tweet. It’s a language instantly recognizable and inventive, familiar but innovative.
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