Anyone who can afford a smartphone can be an instant photographer, but are they really?

Photography has changed a lot in the past decade, mainly due to rapid technological development.

Some 20 years ago, the ability to take high-quality pictures using a palm-sized tool might have sounded like something taken from a futuristic novel but these days, thousands of handheld gadgets — from smartphones to digital cameras — have exactly that kind of capability.

The development of photo editing applications like Photoshop and Instagram has allowed for more ways for common people to take high-quality photographs that look as if they had been taken by professionals.

Digital technology, essentially, has given the photography world much more freedom than it used to have.

Don’t have a clue about lighting and angles? No problem, as most photo applications come with an auto or semi-auto color balancing feature.

Are your hands too shaky when taking photos so the results are blurred pictures? Then just give them more artsy effects using Instagram and within seconds you will have obscure high-quality photos that hipsters would love.

With that in mind, what then separates true professional photographers from the picture-and-selfie-snapping commoners?

Photography expert Markus Schaden said this is where the photo book culture comes into play.

“Everybody can take part and make photos. This means how do we deal with all these images? The best practice is, for sure, if you put them into a book. By doing this, you can make them into a story, a documentation or whatever you want,” Schaden told The Jakarta Post in a recent interview.

“You can make it [your photo book] into a PDF and print it as a physical book. The digital things actually help the analog version because it makes it easier for photos to be printed and to be shared.”

For Schaden, although technology helped photographers greatly when it came to publishing their photo books, the aspect of having a physical paper versions of them remained relevant in the digital age.

“For the human being, the love of paper is a long story. It is a story that is a few hundred years old. The physical book is an object that you can touch and feel and it always offers more sensitivity than the digital version. The young generation might not have the same sentiments toward other kinds of books but they are totally crazy in the photography section for the physical version,” Schaden said.

Schaden, who is from Germany, has more than 20 years of experience in photo book publishing. In 1995, he founded schaden.com, a publisher and a bookshop specializing in photo books.

So far, schaden.com has published over 100 photo books and participated in hundreds of international festivals, congresses and photographic events.

Schaden was also the vice-president of the German Society of Photography (DGPh), a member of the editorial board of the FOAM magazine and a jury member at numerous photo festivals, including Arles, Paris, Krakow, Amsterdam and Los Angeles.

In 2014, he founded the PhotoBook Museum, the first ever museum devoted to international photography book exhibitions.

Schaden has visited Indonesia numerous times in the past to conduct workshops on photo books for photographers. This year, with the support of the Goethe Institut, the Pannafoto Institute, the Japan Foundation and Afterhours Books, he returns for his third photo book workshop.

“The first workshop gave inspiration. After it was done, we set up a Facebook group a few thousand people joined. The community grew bigger and in the next workshop, there was a lot of enthusiasm,” he said.

For the current workshop, Schaden said he would bring new ideas and would discuss more than just how to make a photo book.

“The workshop also includes the general view on photo books, on photography, on how we archive and on how we produce,” he said.

The workshop is actually a part of a photo book exhibition held by Goethe. The exhibition, which runs until Nov. 13 in Jakarta, features hundreds of high-quality and selected photo books from Germany, Indonesia and Japan.

The exhibition also features two public discussions, with the first one on Nov. 5 focused on books as part of visual culture, while a week later photographer Romi Perbawa and Lans Bramantyo of Afterhours Books will disclose the creation process behind The Riders of Destiny photo book.

Lans said he hoped the exhibition, workshop and discussions would inspire more Indonesian photographers to start working on their photo books. “If you are not inspired to create your own photo book, then you are not a true photographer,” he said.

— Photo by JP/Jerry Adiguna

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