Guest Lecture & Portfolio Review: Ben Weaver
Designer and publisher, Ben Weaver, came to talk to us about producing photobooks, sequencing and collaborating with other people.

Below are the notes that I took from his lecture:
- Here Press publishing
- First project was the history of skateboarding, created a book from that
- Produced book with photographer Tom Hunter
- Art director of Wire Magazine
- Drowned by Sea Kurtis – first photobook to be published by Here (2011)
- They reached out to people to ask if they wanted to create a photobook with them, rather than waiting for people to approach them
- Jack Latham, Sugar Paper Theories & Parliament of Owls
- Spent 3 days solid creating the edit for Sugar Paper Theories
- Designed it the way the police would have presented it to people.
- Stacey Kranitz, Speak Your Piece

Following Ben’s guest lecture, I had a portfolio review with him, here is the notes on the feedback I received from him:
- Current images show the calm before the storm and the storm
- Don’t force the studio work and water work together
- They’re okay being so different
- Something is missing, make another series
- Try another approach, a whole new thing you haven’t thought of before
- Try the domestic environment with diabetic stuff
- Don’t restrict yourself to thinking the studio has to work with the water
- Just allow anything to happen
- There is a distance in the studio stuff, try extreme detail of the items
- Try just photographing your lifestyle, see if there’s more of an everyday element you could incorporate, like maybe where you go, or things you eat
- Set diabetes as what the work is about; then it sets how people will see the work
- Doesn’t necessarily matter what it is because you’re saying its about diabetes – to people who don’t have it, it won’t be obvious
- Interesting to look at carb counting and the numbers, menu boards etc
- Look at things that are mundane, people wouldn’t think twice but when you make the connection they look at them differently.
- Try the process of not thinking literally, the world will open up
- purposely throw spanners in the work
- Look into the oblique strategies – Brian Eno, prompts creative ideas and development!
- Don’t produce work that’s so abstract, that it can be anything
- The work should still be about diabetes, but it’s not so direct