The Cali Years | Behind the scenes from hand-bound book production

About a year ago, my studio launched a months-long campaign on Instagram that would highlight a selection of the photographs I made over the 25-year period that I lived in the Bay Area in California.

Fast forward to November 1, 2021, we launched a book project known as The Cali Years. What started out as a potential zine project became a hand-bound, three-part, fold-out book, straddling the line of collectible and accessible. We produced a limited edition run of 100 copies. After two weeks, we have almost sold out, and wanted to share a bit about our process…

I moved to San Francisco right after graduating with a BS in Photojournalism from Syracuse University and dove into a completely new life, far away from everything I knew before, and immersed myself in this new experience. Over this time, I pursued my in-depth long-term person projects as well as an abundance of assignment work that varied from tech to celebrities, daily life to innovation. I started my professional photography career in California. I became an adult in California. I met my partner and started my family in California. In 2004, my father-in-law fell ill and needed more hands-on support, so my family moved back to the east coast.

Last year, I decided to go back through my archives to examine this pivotal time in my life. My studio and I started narrowing down the edit and shared much of the work on Instagram with the hashtag #TheCaliforniaYears.

The work continued to feel too disparate to form something tangible, but rather than letting it go, we made hundreds of tiny prints and laid them out all over our studio, and organically began to find threads and connections that seemingly weren’t there before.

This edit of images was simultaneous with the stirrings of a possible zine.

Multiple iterations were created, each one a bit less formal, and a bit more experimental than the last.

Next came the process of cracking the physical production without completely breaking the bank (or our hands). After much trial and error (where the magic happens) we built out the cover, created book spines for sturdiness, and chose to glue the zines into the covers, which were printed double-sided on photo paper that was certainly not meant for double-sided printing.

This has been a labor of love and collaboration between Brenda Bingham, Michael Curry, and myself, and we’re elated to share this piece we are so proud of.

As we worked through our edits and designs, we realized there were too many images to fit within one staple or perfect-bound zine, so we went back to the drawing board and sought book design inspiration all around us. It was important for us to have some element of this creation done in-house with our own hands, if not all of it. We came up with the solution of outsourcing the printing for the zines (three in total) and printing our own wrap-around covers at our studio.