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Adobe.com: You've been very respectful of your own photos, in a way — you haven't touched them up at all.
Carson: I think there's a good point there in terms of editorial and some of the liberties I took with other people's photos. But what you're not seeing is the selection process, all the ones that weren't used. If I take a roll and get back two that are any good, that's a pretty high percentage. And you're also not seeing some pretty extreme croppings and things. They're not all snapshots as they are.
Adobe.com: What I meant to say was that there wasn't much post-production processing.
Carson: Nothing has been adjusted or tweaked. They're all as they came back from the one-hour photo place.
Adobe.com: You have a reputation for being fairly untechnological.
Carson: For me, it comes down more to placement and eyeing and seeing something. I'm not anti-computer, but it's not about that for me. In fact, there's a couple of slides in the book where I'd laid them down on the light table and at some point a slide fell on top of another slide; and I thought, "Wow, that's nice." Or I took two slides and taped them together and that's how I gave them to the printer. I could do that in Photoshop, but it would take me forever. So I'm pretty low tech.
Adobe.com: Phil Meggs' comments are interesting, and they do play well with the stories behind the photos.
Carson: He definitely made it a better book. I might have taken a photo intuitively because it was interesting to me, but he's the one who explains why it might be interesting from a design standpoint. When I read his text, I think, "Hmm ... I really hadn't thought of that. There are three triangles there" or whatever it is.
Adobe.com: Designers often have a very technical way of explaining what they do, and you tend not to do that.
Carson: Well, there's a fear that if you're not technically sophisticated, the design is somehow less valid. I don't always buy that. There's lots of ways to communicate, and I think these photos communicate different things to different people. It's largely emotional and intuitive and that's how the book was created. Yeah, we could give the theory and the thinking, and there's a place for that, but not here.
Adobe.com: You also say that there's going to be a "Fotografiks 2," with an active call for submissions. Have you got any yet?
Carson: Yes, I think I'm setting myself up for the world's biggest collection of out-of-focus photos. I've gotten probably a dozen so far, and I'll probably use almost all of them. It's much more interesting for me to get feedback and talk to people. I know that "Fotografiks" might not have the volume of readers as my other books, but the people that connect with this book really seem to respond in a deeply personal way. With the other books people might've said, "Oh, cool." But with this one they seem to really connect to something.... For me, that's been the real fun.
By a strange coincidence, Adobe.com Senior Editor Joe Shepter has been trying unsuccessfully for years to get his own personal snapshots published as a book.
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