too many photocopies?
no such thing (or: 2024 studio practice wrapped)
Having a photocopier in your living room isn’t exactly a personality, but is easily confused for one. If you know anything about me, it’s probably that in 2022, my partner and I built up a print shop in our apartment and started opening it to strangers. In 2023, our press added a bunch of titles that we needed to keep in print and tabled at a dozen or so events a year, all over the US. In 2024, we started managing more wholesale, consignment, and institutional sales for the press. We kept tabling. We took print for hire jobs. I taught classes and workshops about drawing, printmaking, color theory, and book arts. I did arts consulting here and there for orgs and individuals. We decided to open a brick-and-mortar storefront that will be our focus in 2025. And my personal studio practice has slowed down (or maybe stopped completely?).
In the last twelve months I’ve participated in just a handful of gallery shows—mostly, local opportunities that extended an invitation. I didn’t made a bunch of new work, or compete for awards or fellowships or residencies. BUT I DID MAKE 196,046 PHOTOCOPIES. (Okay, I did not personally make all those copies, but I made a lot of them.) In 2024 our print shop made 16,000+ copies a month or 500 copies a day—about the number of sheets in a ream of paper. Most of those copies became booklets. No wonder we’re always behind on binding something. I wish I knew how many booklets have been folded and stapled, mostly by hand, in my living room.
In a recent post about a decade of print production in review, GenderFail reflects on making 19,149 handmade books: “these books were once 352,018 pieces of paper that were hand collated. Therefore all the pages were touched in the process of making every single book.” (touch—a type of silent reading?)
Wake up, preflight, send a proof, make coffee, check the proof, send a print job, make breakfast, babysit the copier. Check paper levels, add paper, eat dinner, check the inner tray, shuffle piles of warm paper, watch TV, new toner. Switch paper, print the cover. Send one last print job before bed; wake up to a stack of sheets first thing in the morning. Even if the copier is not running a job, it wakes up at 11:05 pm each night, performing a sequence of beeps and chirps, an audial cue to get ready for bed. Print production structures daily life in our household, perhaps to a greater extent than other routines, like meals. In the busy seasons for printing (spring & fall), most socializing and communal meals at home happen because of the copier. If someone is printing in the living room while I’m cooking in the kitchen, we stand a good chance of having dinner together. Print production on a photocopier is not exactly difficult, but somehow it always feels like an undertaking. Paper and toner pair particularly well with beer and other carbs: pizza, pasta, fried rice.
My favorite printing guests are the publishers of Better Homes & Dykes, who bless our apartment on a quarterly schedule. They always bring (vegan and gluten free) snacks and half a dozen volunteers, and I usually cook a large late lunch, recruiting every pot in the kitchen. Over a weekend of printing, they drink cases of La Croix, and we take out the recycling three times. Whenever I give an artist talk (not too often these days), I call this “nontraditional studio production.”
If you put all your extra time, money, and energy into running a copy shop from your apartment, lots of people will think it’s cool (notably: your friends) and lots of people will think it’s weird (notably: your parents and their friends). Some people will think it’s weird but shrug and use it anyway. And, I’ve found out, something about the way you run a copy shop from your apartment might tick people off. Someone might come to your house to use your copier, and then turn around and bully you on the internet. People will forget their (backpack, water bottle, beanie). People will push back against clear boundaries about your space or time. Men you don’t know will attempt to teach you how to operate your copier in your own house. There’s a lot of learning-by-doing involved in anything that’s social and messy and domestic and public, like printing. Being misunderstood, intentionally or not, is both easy and inevitable. You’re going to fuck up your pricing and lose money you don’t have. You’re going to argue with your collaborator in front of strangers. You’re going to explain crops and bleeds to confused people in a way that leaves them even more confused. Your friends, who think your copy shop is cool, will want to hang out with you for something besides print production and then be upset when you can’t, because you spent all your time, energy, and money making 196,046 photocopies.
In Aesthetics of the Familiar, Yuriko Saito delineates two main types of everyday aesthetics: experiencing the ordinary as extraordinary, and experiencing the ordinary as ordinary. A home print shop is both. Print production in a quaint domestic setting—amongst the orange cats and doilies and abandoned teacups, comfortable throw pillows, stuffed bookshelves, smell of morning coffee—is out of the ordinary, which heightens our attention to the whole experience of bookmaking. On the other hand, to interleave eating, sleeping, and socializing with the labor and pleasure of making books and zines is to make bookmaking more ordinary, to propose it as a way of life: a habit, a task, a rhythm, a chore, a stressor, an ambient sound, a background texture. One mode isn’t necessarily a more authentic type of everyday aesthetic experience than the other, and in moments when I glimpse my domestic environment through someone else’s eyes there’s slippage. It’s pretty common for people to text a few photos after their print session, especially of funny or puzzling cat behavior, and their snapshots framing the living room print shop feel special and intensely mundane.
I’m kind of a sucker for assigned reading about art & experience, or why we make things by hand and why it matters. I underlined too many passages in Saito’s book about an aesthetics of the familiar, and have taken the arts & crafts reformers to heart by filling my home with things that I know to be useful and believe to be beautiful, like a risograph. I am surprised to find out there are consequences to this. All those years of reading theory didn’t prepare me for what happens when art and everyday life actually become enmeshed. In handiwork, a hand-sized book, the artist Sara Baume reckons with the amount of sheer repetition and time we pour into any creative pursuit, especially when creative output feels modest by comparison: “sometimes, I look back and wonder why there seems to be so little, so crushingly little, and I struggle to fully believe—to fully accept—that just this, and this, and this is where the countless hours went — the countless gestures and strokes and flourishes, the countless thoughts and decisions and preparations. I believe it does not matter at all; I believe it is all that matters.” Sometimes I have the opposite problem; I struggle with the sheer volume of everything printed and wonder, what did I even print so much of? Does a world on fire really need 196,046 more photocopies?
But each time someone sends a print file, I never second guess whether that particular project, those particular 250 copies, should exist. It’s exciting to get a front row seat to of the projects we print for other makers. Over time, the copies simply add up, the way that minutes add into hours or days. What’s beautiful about the logic of self-publishing is that it sidesteps questions of aesthetic judgement or relevance, telling us to print it anyway.
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