RAY'S REPORTS

So I been thinking about doing a big fat book. I saw Kris Kirk do a fatty one and it came out cool. In fact, when I saw his I asked him to publish mine. He was down. We were thinking it would be around 250 pages and be released by last November. But it was killing me thinking about what the book is about or if it is about anything. We made some loose deadlines that kept getting pushed back but I couldn’t pull it together.

I cancelled it. I told him I can’t do it because I don’t know what to do. And if I did do it, it would need to be a lot more pages because I like to hide my weird photos by drowning them in a ton of pages. And it would be mostly cell phone photos. Which is totally fine with me but I didn’t want him to put his money and hard work into it if he wanted to make a super nice thing with a big box and screen printed covers etc like the way he did his. He didn’t care, he still would do it. But also I was thinking it would be stressful for someone else to edit these photos. The formalities were messing with me. I had to abort.

But a couple weeks ago I got the download from deep space. I’ll make the book about leaving SF and moving around a bunch and ending up in SD. It’ll be about being lost and wandering and found again. And I will edit it and publish it myself, since uhhh that’s what I do for a living. I am actually moving back to LA in about 2 weeks, so this book would kind of sum up this random 3 year journey I been on. I am also about to get a new camera and thinking about going back to a flip phone or some other lesser connected phone. So it will sum up that journey as well. I had been mostly using just my phone for photos and haven’t shot or processed any film since I left my darkroom in SF.

I started working on the book this past week and boom it’s done. It is photos from Dec 2014 – Dec 2017. In that time I did 7 issues of a zine series called “Koinstars”, 5 issues of another one called “EZ Beach”, and 13 issues of “Ray’s Reports”. If you have seen any of those zines or keep up with this blog then you probs have seen at least half the photos. This book highlights some of that stuff plus all the in between stuff and left overs.

This book is titled “Chrysalis” and is 800 pages and being turned in to the printers tomorrow. It will be out hopefully next week. Here are some previews and more on hamburgereyes.com