We are pleased to share the work and words of Matthew Magruder, photographer,printer, and book artist.
Please tell us about yourself and your background in photography.
I’ve been actively pursuing photography since around 2001. My photography started around rock climbing. I was an avid rock climber for many years during college and after and began exploring photography of my climbing excursions. I took it rather seriously for a number of years. Eventually my photography love sort of overtook the climbing and I just started focusing on photography as an artistic pursuit.
My interest always centered around film photography mainly and also I began to explore Large Format (4×5 and 8×10) and even Ultra Large Format (11×14, my beloved 7×17, and 12×20). All the while during this time my interests centered around alternative process work, primarily platinum/palladium, gumover, cyanotypes, etc. I’ve also been making tintypes pretty consistently since around 2007.
I was also an avid painter for many years amidst all that time.
My main photographic medium currently is the photography/printmaking process of Polymer Photogravure. A process that I deeply love and teach.
Please click on images to see a different view.
How did you get started making books?
Book Arts came about purely because of my photography. I’ve always admired and strived to create a good beautiful photography book and like so many photographers I have far too many on my shelves … Books of the photography of artists like Paul Strand, Edward and Brett Weston, Art Sinsabaugh, Lois Connor, Tillman Crane, George Tice, to name a few favorites … books of friends and people I know and admire like Clay Harmon, Bill Schwab, Kerik Kouklis, Keith Taylor, Ike Eisenlord, and so many more. These books have always been creative touchstones for me for decades now.
So my interest centered around wanting a book of my work. I had also heard the tough side of those stories of making bigger trade publication fine art photography books. Stories of garages full of books and huge upfront costs. Stories we’ve all likely heard.
This led to me just casually one day in 2019 coming across a workshop called Bookbinding at the Austin Book Arts Center. I immediately signed up thinking, “maybe I’ll just make my own books as I love making my own prints.”
This class was a straightforward class that created a simple case binding journal with 5 signatures, a slip case for the journal, a Japanese stab-binding book, and finally a simple clamshell enclosure. I just fell in love with the entire process on so many levels. The precision achievable, the wonderful bookcloth, the envisioning of structure and then its manifestation, all of it and so much more.
Book Arts, or Artists’ Books, have become my primary overarching creative umbrella under which I pull together so much of my various creative passions, graphic design, letterpress printings, printmaking, photography, etc.
For most of my photographic life I’ve worked in “series” or “bodies of work” for as long as I’ve explored the medium. The way in which I’m able to then combine these bodies of work in the form of Artists’ Books is deeply meaningful to me and something that I feel will be a lifelong pursuit. I most definitely have enough book ideas to fill a lifetime or more at this point.
Did you or do you have a mentor that helped you along the way?
My first class was taught by Kevin Auer at the Austin Book Arts Center. He was very inspiring in that early on stage and am so grateful for what he’s opened up in my creative life and even more grateful to be able to call him a friend and fellow Board Member at the Austin Book Arts Center.
The list of people that are inspiring me in the Book Arts world is too long to even begin to list but the most efficient way to see it is to go look at the exhibitors list for the recently concluded CODEX IX that happened in February in Oakland, CA. I was able to take part and had a table at it for the very first time getting to share my work with a community of deeply inspiring artists of whom so many I admired.
Any tools that you find indispensable?
Olfa knife, my big fat teflon bone folder. Book Board, Book Cloth, my etching press for making photogravures, my creativity and my pursuit of growth in this art.
What is on the horizon?
As mentioned, so many projects. I recently completed the second in what will likely be a long series of Artists’ Books called, “Degrees” based on the latitude and GPS coordinates of panoramic photographs I’ve taken. The first in the series was, “Thirty Six Degrees”: a series of 7 panorama photos taken at the south rim of the Grand Canyon.
The second and most recent piece is called, “Zero Degrees”: panorama photos taken on the Equator around the Galapagos Islands.
I have plans for, “Fifty Eight Degrees” (Glacier Bay National Park), “Thirty Seven Degrees” (Yosemite), “Twenty Nine Degrees” (Big Bend Natl Park), and so on.
The piece that is a longer and bigger one that is deeply meaningful to me surrounds a series of photographs I made in 2023 throughout various Holocaust locations in Europe. My hope is to combine with text extracted from Viktor Frankl’s book, “Mans Search for Meaning”. This project is very much in the incubation stages but it’s one that I look forward to exploring. Hopefully an Artists’ Book and exhibit will manifest in the near future from it.
Where can we see your work?
All of my work can be seen on my site CopeloPress.com
To learn more about the work of Matthew Magruder please click on his name.
Thank you Matthew.
