Perfect Bound with Jennifer Yoffy
Perfect Bound with Jennifer Yoffy
Jason Koxvold
Jason Koxvold is the kind of person you would hate if he wasn't so smart and talented and thoughtful and kind. Oh, and charming. Did I mention charming? Yeah, he's the worst.
Jason Koxvold (b. 1977, Liege, Belgium) received his BSc in Social Science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2000. His fine art practice focuses on the shared spaces between neoliberal economic policy and military strategy; he has made work in diverse locations, from Afghanistan to Nigeria, Arctic Russia to South Africa. His first monograph, Knives, was published in 2017, followed by You Were Right All Along (2018) and Calle Tredic iMartiri (2019). He is the founder of Gnomic Book, an imprint focused on challenging subjects by emerging artists, and Virtual—Assembly, an online book fair to support publishers and artists in our present moment of social distancing. Koxvold has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UnitedStates, Britain, France, and Japan. His work has been featured in publications including The British Journal of Photography, Aperture, the Financial Times Magazine, Der Greif, Wired, Le Litteraire, Newsweek, Gestalten, Thisispaper, The Great Leap Sideways, Mother Jones, and Slate. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.
Welcome to Perfect Bound. I'm Jennifer Yoffy, the founder and publisher of Yoffy Press in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a podcast where we talk to artists about their journey, how they got where they are, what right and wrong turns they made along the way, and where they're heading next. Jason Koxvold received his bachelor's in social science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2000. His fine art practice focuses on the shared spaces between neoliberal economic policy and military strategy. He's made work in diverse locations from Afghanistan to Nigeria, Arctic Russia to South Africa. His first monograph Knives was published in 2017. Followed by two more monographs in 2018 and 2019. He is the founder of Gnomic book, an imprint focused on challenging subjects by emerging artists and Virtual--Assembly, an online book fair to support publishers and artists in our present moment of social distancing. He currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Please welcome Jason Koxvold to the podcast. So I was doing some research on you and somewhere I read that you've driven an ambulance across Europe and Central Asia to raise money to build schools, you race motorcycles in the Scottish Grand Prix series, you've been interviewed by the Russian FSB in a holding cell in the Arctic Circle. And that doesn't even talk about your art or your publishing background. Also, I read that you were from a variety of different places, and I assume you could have only been born in one of those. So can you give a little summary bio of how you got from racing motorcycles and a Russian arrest record to Gnomic?
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, sure. Okay, so so I was born in Belgium, start at the beginning, grew up in the UK, went to college in the UK and Scotland, and had a friend back then in California, who he and his brother had raced bikes all through their childhood, and they got me into it. And it's quite addictive, a remarkable sport. And I kept doing that for kind of as long as I could, but at some point realized that, like everything in life, but racing kind of focuses things down to their most essential, if you can't afford to put in 100% of your time and money into racing, you will never win a race. You might get lucky once in a while and up on the podium. But yeah, so at some point, I realized that there's no point racing anymore unless you're in it to win it. And continued riding motorcycles on that sort of recreational basis. So you know, around about that time, I moved to California, where I lived for seven years, and worked in design. I had studied photography as a student, but never in a way that I was really passionate about. I think I considered photography, the primary role of photography back then to be making beautiful things.
Jennifer Yoffy:They're just the aesthetic qualities.
Jason Koxvold:Exactly, purly aesthetic considerations. And I think I probably ran out of gas in terms of exploring that because it wasn't that interesting to me. So worked in design for gosh, design and advertising for probably, you know, 15 years, call it 10 years. When I moved to New York I was looking to commission, some photography. And the photographer in question was a predominantly large format guy called grant Delon. And he said to me, Well, why don't I lend you one of my four by five bodies, and give you a bunch of film and some pointers and see what you do. And I thought, yeah, that sounds like a great way to do it. Because as you know, large format photography gets expensive very quickly. And so he did that, and I absolutely fell in love with the medium. I was also at a point in my life, where having been purely working on commercial endeavors in agency type settings, I had reached a point of fatigue, with rooms with 20 people in one of which has a different opinion about what something should do or how it should look. And so at some point I took a month off to go to China and Japan with the four by five camera that I then bought. And that became, actually speaking of the Russians, the Russian trip came before the Asian trip. And that was a tipping point in terms of wanting to go back to a place that I knew, which was Norway, half Norwegian, but explore parts of it that I hadn't seen before. And in doing so that formed the basis for what became my practice on an ongoing basis where I would use Google Earth to scout locations and then just And did you know that you were going to see that before you go there whether it be you know, flying in or in the case of Norway, I flew up to the Arctic Circle, stayed with a friend of the family who then got me in touch with a friend of his and a friend of his and then I was close enough to the Russian road border that I just you know, you need a visa but you just drive in. It's very easy for a Norwegian because there's so much, you know, they're so close together so much fishing industry and maybe some oil industry work that goes on cross border. And I knew I wanted to go to Murmansk because I'd seen photographs of almost like Edward Burtynsky's photographs of ship breaking in India. The similar thing goes on in Murmansk, but less less frenetic. So if you look at the, the Great inlet, I don't know if you'd call it a river or not. But where the river exits into the sea, it meanders out very slowly. It is just full of rusted out, decayed nuclear submarines, freights, all inds o went because of Google Earth location. Exactly. I shouldn't admit to this too readily. But everything I do, I just sort of leave a star on Google Maps or Google Earth and then just go there and see what it looks like on the ground and eventually become a bit better at kind of setting your expectation about how things will look from the ground versus how things look from 400 miles up. And so the first night I got some photographs of these wreck boats at midnight in the middle of the summer, so there's still some light. And then the second day, I drove up to a coal port in Murmansk and walked in the front door and said, Hi, can I come make some photographs of you? And they said, No, absolutely not. So I walked out and then saw a rail track that ran directly into the courthouse, so I walked down and started making some photographs. And of course, within about 10 minutes was promptly colored by security. They put me in a room and they called the FSB. And that relationship actually goes on to this day, in a very strange way, the guy has spent four hours with these two guys, and essentially, to break it down to its most basic pop cultural reference, it was good cop, bad cop. One of them was younger and spoke some English and was wearing a button down shirt. And the other guy was bald and squat and was wearing a sleeveless t shirt, spoke English. And I was like, Oh, I feel like I know how this is gonna go.
Jennifer Yoffy:Poorly for me.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah. But, it was so absurd for both of them and myself, that once they figured that I wasn't actually any sort of threat, released me back to my hotel and had someone follow me for the rest of the time, which was really an odd experience. But we stayed in touch. And now that officer works bizarrely enough in the, in some kind of government wing that deals with selling Crimea, if that makes any sense, like, showcasing Crimea as a jewel of the Russian Empire.
Jennifer Yoffy:Oh, I see, like PR.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, exactly. And he keeps inviting me to come see it. Which I really want to do. And my hope was to do it, I want to say in the fall of 2020, but for obvious reasons, that was challenging. And so at some point, when I have a little, you know, 14 day break in my schedule somewhere, I do hope to go to Crimea and make a story that kind of plays with those ideas of PR and that approaches the story from the very outset is like, this is not fact this is my own created narrative. And it's not going to favor anyone necessarily, but I kind of would like it to have a little bit of a spy saga kind of. And it's a beautiful place. I mean, I'm really excited to see all those contradictions of like this militarism, that abuts consumerism there. I've looked at extensive location scouting already You see whole kind of water parks with 1000s of people covered in foam, and then looming over it an enormous satellite array. And then culturally speaking, there's a place there, they have these sanatoriums, where Russians go to relax and receive medical treatments and whatnot. And one of them is so Bond like in its aesthetic, that for a moment in time, the West literally thought it was a military facility.
Jennifer Yoffy:Oh my gosh,
Jason Koxvold:But it is a place where people go to get in the spa and you know, have saunas and wave soaks and whatever else you do. So yeah, so very excited to do that. I feel like I meandered a bit. But how did that lead to novec?
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, actually, I want to pause because this seems relevant right now. So I read that you're fine art practice focuses on the shared spaces between neoliberal economic policy and military strategy. What does that mean?
Jason Koxvold:So the best way I can answer that is, again, a sort of meandering historical walk. But back in 2002, I was strongly against the Iraq war, and protested it, marched in the streets, talked to people I could talk to, and then had a sort of depressing realization that whatever I felt, or whatever the millions of people around the world felt, who also marched against the war was irrelevant, because we were going to invade anyway. And so I started watching the news. And the news was depressing to me. So at some point, I made a very conscious decision to just ignore it. Time passed, I then happened to, while researching another project in Kuwait, sort of rediscover the US military footprint in the Middle East, and became interested in it from a fine art perspective versus from the perspective of a sort of concerned citizen. And so I dove into that, but now my interest was more attuned to how does this economic policy which we're trying to propagate around the world, how does that align, crossover, sometimes contradict military policy?But they're two arms of the same thing, essentially. And I feel like way back in the day, I read about what they called the project for the New American Century, which was this completely nakedly ambitious idea of sort of making the 21st century, the American Century, where the whole world would align with the way we do business, where much of that money would be funneled out of other countries and into the US. And I do think those things are proving to be true, especially in the context of what we're seeing now with the final pullout after two decades of war in Afghanistan, and the cost of that, and when we look at where that money went, and who benefits and who did not. That is, I guess, that confluence of economic policy and military policy.
Jennifer Yoffy:It's hard for me to wrap my head around how to represent that photographically.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the easiest way to do that is to photograph military operations as they exist away from the front line, if that makes sense. So, so a lot of the places I've gone to within the US and in the Middle East, are essentially boardrooms, right. It's the language of capitalism, that has found its way into the place where we do battle, or at least the place where you plan battle. And you see the same sort of boardroom tables with little microphones that you'll see at different agencies and then the way that's all networked back to the command centers back in the US, and I've had the pleasure of touring the Pentagon now and seeing where all that data flows into and how those decisions are made. And honestly, you could spend a lifetime digging into it. And still not really, I mean, so much of it is secret, so you still don't really understand the shape of it. So in terms of how to picture it, though, that's the best, the best way I can do and I do have no malice or ill will. I just think that it's interesting from an artistic point of view and I think it's essential from a democratic point of view.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, to bring attention to it. So you started or you still are obviously a photographer and then you also started Gnomic as a publishing imprint. So how, how and why did you start it and was it to publish your own work originally?
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, exactly. Um, having worked in design for the longest time, I knew that I could make a book in terms of the steps that are required to have a book made. And so I started off with my book Knives, which was a really pleasurable experience. For a very long time, I'd been thinking of making a book, and I had no idea how to approach it from a conceptual standpoint. I definitely didn't want to go through that whole sort of multi year process of shopping it around and whatnot. I'm somewhat impatient in that regard. And so at some point, I just decided, Well, now that it's time to make this book, there was some urgency around it. To give you a little context, sorry, to meander again. I had been in the Middle East on the day of the Trump election. And of course, no one expected him to win, he won. And having spent a few years already really dedicated to this military project, it became apparent that the forever war was not going to go away anytime soon. So I had time to change my focus to seeing what I knew was was related to the Trump victory, which was the place where I was living in upstate New York, which had been economically decimated by outsourcing production to predominantly China. And so there were a lot of sort of angry white men left behind, who no longer had a physical purpose anymore. And that was manifesting itself into rage and the desire for systemic change, much of which I couldn't disagree with. So that's what was Knives and I had been photographing it a couple years earlier, but on a fairly casual basis, because I just had a kid and I didn't really have time to spend too much time out on the road. And so when Trump won the election, I redoubled my efforts I really focused on completing that project. And once I had it in my hands as a PDF, well now have to get published. So I put the Gnomic logo on it, Gnomic is the name of my company and made the book. And from there, I started talking with a couple of other artists who I was friends with about making books with them. And each of those books has been a process that I've tremendously enjoyed. And every time you do it, you learn a little bit more. There are mistakes made or things you would have done differently, but every time it gets a little better. I just very much enjoy collaborating, first of all with people I'm already friends with, but then it became a conduit to collaborate with people from very different backgrounds. So Shahrzad Darafsheh in Tehran I ean, as a, as an emblem of just ow far a project can reach, you now, outside of your own ountry into another country, hich I mean, most of us erceive Iran as being this lacked out, umm.... And it's r ally I mean, it, yes, there are ertain challenges politicall, legally, and whatnot, d ing a project like that. But ou know, Shahrzad and I would w uld hop on a Skype call, and she would be wearing her air pods, or, you know, whatever we p cture when we think of the iddle East or that region, much f it is inaccurate, y u know. When she described the same kinds of challenge in her life, as we find here So access to health care, she pays for health insurance just like we do. The public he lth option is not always th best option in the US, she i required to have private in urance too. So anyway, once ag in meandering, but Gnomic Book became a way that I could broaden my own horizons and learn about other places in the world and help people from other places to do things that
Jennifer Yoffy:Do you feel like and I kind of have recently been otherwise might be not possible. That's not to say that soc al good is the core driver of nomic Book, but it's de initely something I enjoy do ng when I can. thinking through these things with Yoffy like, you know, how much of what I'm doing in the titles that I'm choosing to publish, you know, and participate in, like, how much of it am I doing it for the photographers, like helping them you know, this is great work and it should have a platform and get the name out, and how much am I, I mean, as I'm sure you know, it's not a very lucrative venture. It's more like a super expensive hobby. So, you know how much am I doing it for me? You know, like the things that I'm personally getting out of it. And there are certain types of projects that I feel a stronger connection to and feel like I learn more from than others. And so, yeah, how do you define that for yourself? Like, how much of it is, okay, I'm doing this to enrich my self like to create these connections that you find rewarding and challenging and learning and collaborative versus more of a mission driven, like, it's important to get X, Y, and Z type of work out in the world?
Jason Koxvold:Gosh, that's a great question. And I think the two things are, I guess there is a line where there's a delineation between the two, if the last year has taught me anything, it's that it made me take a look at the catalog and say, yes, you know, what, simply by virtue of my being a white man, much of the catalog is sort of overwhelmingly skewed towards white male photographers. So that was a real wake up call. And I guess in terms of publishing a diverse set of voices, I think of diversity in terms of what I want to achieve, as as diverse globally. Yes, of course, we'll feature artists who are from diverse voices within the US. But I feel like more and more, I'm interested by what goes on outside the US, and how that relates to us here. Absolutely. But I think there's a paucity of information. There's a paucity of information, it's there, it just did doesn't reach us here. So I think of it as something of a bridge between other cultures and the one I live in. And so yes, they can be one of the same, I feel like what I enjoy, and what enriches me, has the possibility to enrich others. And that really becomes the filter through which we view how we take on new projects. Most of the time.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, most of the time, but yes, when you can get both of those things aligned, that is a sweet spot for sure. Something that I think photographers struggle with, for good reason, is deciding which type of publishing model is best for them financially, especially. And I think publishers struggle with the same question. I certainly do. And I feel like the different titles that I've done have been funded in a million different ways. And there's just not a great solution, to be honest, for everyone involved. So what is your take on kind of the current state of the publishing business model landscape?
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, it's fascinating. Um, I think that most people would agree that there is something of a glut of photo books. And it creates a market that's super saturated and hard to break through in. And that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to make it make sense financially. A friend of mine reached out not long ago and was asking for some advice as to how to publish books. And so I told him everything I could. And then, about a week or two ago, he emailed me again and said, I've got 500 books, and they're not selling.
Jennifer Yoffy:He just knows how to make it, not how to sell it.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, and making it is literally probably less than half of the work.
Jennifer Yoffy:No kidding. Oh, yeah.
Jason Koxvold:The state of the business is, is definitely crowded. And that's one of the things that I enjoy. Again, it's not a separate purpose. I'm not making books to a level of craft just so they break through. Everything kind of informs the other. So the form of the book is, in my opinion, right for the book, and hopefully that differentiates us from you know, I think there are a lot of lot of smaller presses out there who think a book is a book, it has a cover and a back and pages, as long as it fulfills those goals, Congratulations. And I really enjoy the opportunity to make a book very different from what you..., it's not a print that you buy in a gallery. It's not even a collection of prints. It's its whole own thing that has life beyond individual works.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, I think you and I are aligned in that for sure, like creating something that is more than an exhibition catalog, that experiencing it in book form is its own purpose, you know, it's got a different experience then if you saw it on gallery walls or on a website or in a different way.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, and you can really get, as you know, way down into the weeds on all the micro decisions that are made and kind of case in point we made a book a year ago with Ryan Debolski called Like that was printed using UV LED presses. And then made a book in almost the same form factor using a different paper and printed conventionally not not UV LED. The difference that those two things make obviously, the photographs are different, too. But but to hold each one in your hand is a very different experience. Sort of minute adjustment, but it's definitely a technical thing that most people don't consider, I think.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, I told you that I saw that book in its previous iteration. And then when it came out, I was like, that's really good.
Jason Koxvold:Thank you very much.
Jennifer Yoffy:Like oh, man, you know, like, just all these little choices. Like, that was a great choice.
Jason Koxvold:The journey is so fun. You know, when I first saw Ryan's layout for Like, I thought well this is great, why wouldn't you just print it as it is?
Jennifer Yoffy:That's what I told him. (laughs) And then yours came out, and I was like, Oh, yeah, that is better.
Jason Koxvold:But that journey was like, Oh, well, this is an opportunity to take something that's already good, and see if you can improve it. And I love that, I guess being able to juxtapose the initial experience of it with holding it in your hand and then it's like, oh, okay, so even for me having worked on it myself, it's wonderful to kind of look back and see what could have been versus what ended up being.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, I mean, and that's that exact situation is why I wanted you to design Chase's book, because it's a similar situation where he came to me with a book that felt like it was 80%, maybe even 90% there. And, but I couldn't tell him what to do, you know, for that extra 10 to 20%. And I was like, but I know who can.
Jason Koxvold:No pressure, man.
Jennifer Yoffy:No pressure(laughs)
Jason Koxvold:I mean, the work is really good. And the part I probably enjoy the most is that I would say 90 something percent of the thinking gets done in a split second. And then the rest is noodling exact material choices and whatnot. But that initial split second, when you're going through the work, and sparks start flying, and you start kind of seeing it as what it can be, that's really rewarding. And then when you get it back from the printer, obviously, the moment of truth.
Jennifer Yoffy:I feel like you know, and for me personally, my strength is more narrative projects. And so ones like that, that are more conceptual, it's like, I know, this is amazing. And I know it can be even more amazing, but, I need, you know, I need some help with that bridge. So it's been really fun working with you on that.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, I've been really enjoying it.
Jennifer Yoffy:What are you looking for in a project to publish? And what have you not seen, but want to? Like, is there something out there that you're like, Oh, I'd love to do a book about this, or, you know, that has this element, and it just hasn't.
Jason Koxvold:Um, the first part of that was, what am I looking for. And I hate to use a trope like this, but it's something I haven't seen before. I feel like there was a lot of photography for a very long time that was very derivative of certain viewpoints that were shaped by white men from the 70s onwards. And those, I can immediately say, I'm not very interested in unless it subverts that in some way. I think the word subversive is kind of key to what I like to do. I like to think of output as difficult in quotes, things that show you either a world that you hadn't considered, or a different side of a world that you thought you knew. So those tend to be things I look for. In terms of what I'm looking for now. I'm really interested in work of a high standard from places that we haven't considered before. And I've been reaching out to friends like Emma Bowkett for advice, on like okay, Who should I be looking at, in for example, Asia, India, places like that where people have not traditionally had exposure to a Western audience. And then how can we, how for projects like those, can we fund them in a way that works for the artists? Because someone was telling me the other day that they found an artist in Latin America, and it's a great we can make a book for you for $60,000. He's like, that's two years salary. That's three years. That is absurd.
Jennifer Yoffy:It's absurd period.
Jason Koxvold:It's absurd period. Yeah. And it's, it is interesting for me, like, if you, if you make a book on your own, and you handle all the interfacing with the printer, and whatnot, you can get it done for a lot less than that. And I remember being shocked at how much some people were charging to make books. But now that we also..., part of our business is making books for commercial clients, or galleries and museums, now I start to see how you can very quickly get to those numbers without really trying to without really...
Jennifer Yoffy:There's so much time, yeah, if you're valuing your own time, yes, yes, I hear this. What do you feel has been the best career decision you've made in terms of photography and publishing.
Jason Koxvold:Um, I would say making that second book after I made Knives, in terms of photography and publishing, because making Knives was a no brainer, if it failed, the simple answer would be, you can take them to the dump. And so, but that initial moment of making Knives and seeing the possibilities that flowed out of it, and the decision to make that second book, and third and fourth, fifth books really became rewarding. And it is my hope now that I could find a way to make Gnomic Book a financially sustaining endeavor, where it doesn't eat into my ability to make a living, perhaps replaces some of those previous work streams that I had going. And of course, the more something becomes like a business, the, the more challenging it becomes in terms of finding internal energy to sustain that project. But I still enjoy it very much it's truly the highlight of my day outside of dealing with my children when they're being good. You know, when we did Virtual--Assembly, it was like nourishment, especially after a couple months of being in lockdown, to reach out and have no geographical constraints on who you could speak to what you could talk about. And those those moments that previously only would happen at book fairs, and not even really then because honestly, most people at the book fair 80% of those people are from the city you're in right there. So unless you're traveling to the book fair, which also you can do, you're still meeting people in the same sort of socio economic group as yourself. And when we did Virtual--Assembly, I was like, Oh my gosh, like we have people dialing in from their rooftops in India, using their cell phones as a Wi Fi router, and what it was just like, it was like... I don't know, it's hard to, to not say something trite here, but it was it was phenomenal. And I think that's part of the joy that I take from doing a Gnomic Book. Just learning and like becoming less dumb.
Jennifer Yoffy:Do you think you'll do Virtual--Assembly again?
Jason Koxvold:Well, we kind of are actually, it's never, I don't think it's ever going to be a big bonanza weekend, like we did the first time because that was we kind of bit off a little more than we could chew. But it's become an ongoing platform. And so now it lives on Gnomic Book dot com, and we have right about a monthly chat with an artist between two or three artists, sometimes 10 in one go, which is interesting. But yeah, it becomes a way of us talking about books we love and artists we love. And it's hopefully, you know, 50/50 sort of Gnomic and other artists. So that's a way to showcase our work, but also to talk about other people we love who maybe we wish we'd published or we'd like to publish in the future or whatever it may be.
Jennifer Yoffy:That's great. And are they recorded and you can access them?
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, so the last time we did it, or the first time we did it we built our own infrastructure. And it was probably ill advised it was too much to think on when you could just fire up Zoom and record that. So we had this whole system that was extremely expensive to build and maintain. And then when it came time to reboot, it was like, well, let's just use Zoom and Vimeo, why are we making our lives harder?
Jennifer Yoffy:Right, right, that already exist. Can you talk about a wrong turn you made in this publishing venture and what you've learned from it?
Jason Koxvold:Um, yeah, a wrong turn. I mean, every book we do, almost every book we do, there's something I wish I'd done differently, whether it be making more copies, making less copies, material choices, editing choices. But I think in terms of an actual wrong turn, just a learning we had along the way was that now when you begin by making books with people, you already know, there's an element of trust there and a shared responsibility. And then once you start making books with people you didn't know, then you you need a little bit of a framework, or dare I say, legal framework, everyone is on the same page on track.
Jennifer Yoffy:A contract.(laughs)
Jason Koxvold:A contract, yeah. And, you know, I definitely don't want to exploit people, but I also don't want to be exploited. And there was one book that we did, where the artists, gosh, you may need to edit this. So everyone wants to make money from the book they make the challenge is that if we make a great book for an artist, that then gives them greater value in the future so that their work can find more audiences and be sold for more money.
Jennifer Yoffy:Sure.
Jason Koxvold:But it does not do the same for us. So the only place where we get compensated, is if the book sells.
Jennifer Yoffy:Absolutely
Jason Koxvold:It's not a ton of money. So it's not being just independently wealthy, there has to be some financial reason for me to do it. And on one job, there was a bit of a conflict in terms of how that would work. And since I've sort of learned to be much more explicit about the basic fundamentals of the business relationship.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah. Yeah, I think I've also had that lesson.(laughs) So, I feel you. Um, this is sort of an existential question. So these last ones are ones that I everyone, but what would you say is your barometer for success in photography and publishing? And do you feel like you're there, or you feel like there's still more work that you need to do to feel satisfied?
Jason Koxvold:That's so interesting, I always joke that I always say the first million is the hardest, extremely hard. In terms of success, I don't see it as necessarily a place that we're going to get to. I see it as the ongoing sort of nourishment of making these projects. And every one we do, the next one should be better. I'm one of those people who beat myself up a lot about my own work. And that includes work that I've made for other people. So sometimes I'll receive a book back from the printer, and look and be like, Oh, so disappointing, that that one thing wasn't perfect. And then when I look at them again, side by side, if I look at the family of books we've made, I don't think there have been any real misses. So yeah, just that the ability to look at the whole catalog as a family and think of all our artists as a family, too. I do try and encourage them to use that connection to build their own careers. Yeah, I mean, you could say maybe one day, we win the Aperture Perry Photo Book Award, and that will be success. Obviously, that'd be amazing. But the journey is really the bit that I'm interested in.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, cuz it's, I mean, I also get a lot of satisfaction about the family, you know, the family of books, the family of people and the artists. And, you know, I have a super strict, no asshole rule where I really only, you know, we both do this for ourselves in a lot of ways, and I certainly don't make any money on it. I don't want to spend my time working with people that are terrible.
Jason Koxvold:Right? So I mean, where I think I've seen a couple of publishers who have come and gone because the no asshole rule failed. And it's no, money isn't the reason we're doing this. But if there's no money and it's painful, then it becomes tiring really quickly.
Jennifer Yoffy:Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So what's next for Gnomic? What do you have coming up? And do you kind of plan far in advance? Or do you sort of like, take it as it comes,
Jason Koxvold:You know, I, there's one thing I could do better, which is planning better. I tend to discover work that I'm really excited about. And then just immediately just on a gut, just say, Yes, let's do this. And then, but when can we do it? Sometime this year, maybe next year. And I know that people, there's that great documentary about making a book which title that that. I remember talking to Ssangyong, I'm sure I butcher his name every time but, he had talked about making a book with style on how it's just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then suddenly it's go time and let's get this done. I hope we're not quite that. Not to throw shade at the legend of the shadow, but yeah, I tend to become very excited about individual projects and stick them on the calendar insofar as we can, and then try to get it done. And if anything, it makes me less able to respond to questions from artists who I might be interested in. But at some point, I just become overwhelmed. So there's a couple things on the horizon. The artists are obviously like, are we going to do this, are we going to do this? Yes, yes. But I just have to get these next three books off my plate. But from a business standpoint, it would make absolute sense. I mean, you were talking to me about how now that you have more advanced distribution that requires a lot of lead time, a lot of forethought and working with your partner so they can help you get those books out into the world.
Jennifer Yoffy:Brutal though.(laughs)
Jason Koxvold:Yeah. And of course, while I really enjoy working on these projects, that they can impede my ability to work on my own work. So that's a thing. But we're also doing a couple of projects for corporate clients and museums, which I'm surprisingly excited about. I can't say who for necessarily, but there's one very socially conscious project that they're only going to make 200 copies initially. Which is crazy to me. But yeah...
Jennifer Yoffy:Thats exciting, kind of a little bit of a different challenge.
Jason Koxvold:Yeah. And it's fun, like, I mean, it's a, it's a big bank. And they are trying to make lives better for black women in the United States. And they are 100% open to seeing how an art book publisher would do this inside of the program, which is very operational and financial. But as part of talking about it, they want to make a book and and so they came to us and said, Well, how would you do this in the most authentic way?
Jennifer Yoffy:Wow!
Jason Koxvold:Yeah, it's really fun.
Jennifer Yoffy:That sounds like such a great fit for you.
Jason Koxvold:I've been enjoying it thus far. Yeah.
Jennifer Yoffy:Great. Well, I have loved talking to you, as always.
Jason Koxvold:Thank you Jennifer.
Jennifer Yoffy:And thank you for doing this.
Jason Koxvold:Oh, my pleasure. It's always always good to catch up.
Jennifer Yoffy:Rich, my assistant who's amazing did kind of the preliminary research on you for this. And he sent it to me and he was like, Oh my gosh, this is, he's so amazing. And he's so accomplished. And he's done so many things. And I just responded back like I know it's gross. And he didn't even know about the accent, which I think is especially unfair. It's kind of like a really wealthy person also being you know, gorgeous. It's like you don't get to have both.
Jason Koxvold:Oh wow, um gosh, I don't do well with compliments but thank you.