All Grants | Cycle 2 –
Lin Junye is an editor, writer and curator based in Taipei, Taiwan. She predominantly uses images and books as her primary medium of work, focusing on photography, photographic publishing, and the ways of seeing between photography practitioners in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, as well as their readers in our time. She is the co-author of Tropical Reading: Photobook and Self-Publishing.
She is the director of Fotobook DUMMIES Day, an artist-led initiative focusing on photobooks and self-publishing, which is also a photobook fair of the same name. Through this project, she explores the landscape of photobooks and self-publishing through fairs, workshops, talks, exhibitions, reading rooms and other unconventional events.
Links
Profile Links
Fotobook DUMMIES Day Website
Fotobook DUMMIES Day Instagram Page
Publication Links
Tropical Reading: Photobook & Self-Publishing (Fotobook Dummies, 2022)
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Lin Junye—00:02:51)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Women Behind the Pages: Dialogues in Photobook-making from Southeast Asia Through Editing, Designing and Self-Publishing
The study of photography history in Southeast Asia is a relatively recent undertaking. Until the 2016 publication of Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey by Zhuang Wubin, there had been few monographs dedicated to this context, and even fewer covering the theme of photobooks.
As a photobook self-publisher, editor and researcher, I have been predominantly engaged with research in this field in recent years, through Fotobook DUMMIES Day—an artist-led initiative I co-founded in 2018.
In 2019, I interviewed and connected with artists, self-publishers, artist collectives, bookstores, archives and organizations onsite in locations such as Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Yangon. The project was partly funded by the National Culture and Arts Foundation, and culminated in the 2022 publication of Tropical Reading: Photobook and Self-Publishing as the major output. Recently, as the project continued, with ongoing online interviews with Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Phnom Penh and Bandung-based practitioners, I gained an even richer and more comprehensive understanding of the photobook landscape in this region, particularly from an artist and self-publisher perspective.
To borrow from Zhuang, in reference to how we study works from the region outside of a Western gaze, the point is “not to emphasize the difference between Southeast Asia and the West, but the discrepancies in ‘the desire and the need of using photography.’” The same logic here could be applied to photobooks – what is the desire behind the creation process of a photobook in Southeast Asia?
The medium of photobooks has often been discussed in terms of what they contain; most experts and readers focus on who the artist is, what the theme is, and what kind of stories the books tell. In contrast, how practitioners make books is often overlooked as a perspective when discussing the medium. The book-making process serves as a crucial detail in the overall discourse of Southeast Asian photobooks, given its impact on the final work itself, as practitioners try to operate within the limitations of funding (or lack thereof) and the need to sustain their practices.
Moreover, within the current discourse, there is a subtle erasure of female Southeast Asian bookmakers. While searching for practitioners, male artists, book-makers and their photobooks were often foregrounded. On the contrary, female practitioners were often hidden, despite their active contributions in the scene. To understand how they edit, how they design and how they self-publish would help us to better envision a landscape of photobooks through the maker’s eyes.
In the “making” process of independent publishing, the characters of a designer, an editor and a publisher are usually mixed. For this research project, delve deeply into the different yet overlapping roles. I discuss with bookmakers the ways in which they assume different roles, such as editor, designer, artist-as-self-publisher, including individuals and artist collectives. The focus is on their working methods and practices in the book-making process. How are they locally-sourced, and locally-used? By collecting and comparing ways of making, the idea of self-publishing as a new method of contemporary photography practice outside art institutions and museums are explored.
Under the umbrella concept of an editor/curator, I engage Ha Dao, who plays an important role in Matca, a Vietnamese photography online journal, publisher and artist-run space, as well as Kurnia Yaumil Fajar from artist collective SOKONG! Publishing and Grace Anata Irlanari from the artist collective RAWS—both of whom are based in Indonesia. I also profile Napisa Leelasuphapong, who worked as a bookstore manager of Bangkok CityCity gallery and Jamie Yeo from Temporary Press, both of whom are designers now dedicated to artbooks and photobooks. Lastly, I highlight artists who act as their own self-publishers, taking all the process at once, such as Minstrel Kuik from Malaysia and Pam Virada from Thailand.