Fine Art Photography Daily

Dodeca Meters: Ebti, Jamie Robertson, and Makenzie Goodman

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© Ebti / National Monument Press

Issue #4: Tafseel by Ebti
Zach Clark: Tafseel is another book in the series that falls into the “revisitation” category. Ebti took all the photos that the images from this book were pulled from almost 10 years ago during a trip home for her uncle’s funeral in Cairo. Knowing it may be the last time she entered this place that was central to her entire family, she documented it quickly. She mentioned these photos had been unused this whole time because they weren’t anything in conversation to her usual work, so possibly this series was the right time. The actual production of this book was probably my favorite of the whole book, as Ebti came over to the studio and we blared egyptian music and laughed and the whole process was extremely casual in a way artists being around for production rarely is.
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© Ebti / National Monument Press

Ebti’s Tafseel is a dedication and documentation of her Uncles’ family tailoring shop in Cairo, housed within the same building multiple generations of her family called home. The photographs were taken on the occasion of her uncle’s death, when returning home for the funeral, she attempted to capture the studio as it was, and would not be for long.
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© Ebti / National Monument Press

Tafseel is 36 pages, risograph printed in Turquoise on French Orange Memo Kraft & Husky paper. 5×8″. Edition of 200 +25. Published in April of 2024.
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Assembling Tafseel by Ebti at Chute Studio, Oakland, CA


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© Jamie Robertson / National Monument Press

Issue #5: alligatorwatergreen by Jamie Robertson
ZC: I think this is the best color combination in the entire series, moss and swamps. To use that color however, this book was printed on the RZ 310, the oldest model of our fleet, one which only uses the scanner bed, which means it has the least control of image quality. Typically when you’re printing with this machine, you have to favor text OR image, but since Jamie’s images involve both so predominantly, it meant every page needed some different adjustments, and so several spreads in this book had to be printed twice to give each side of the page the focus they needed. This really was one of the more complex books to print.
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© Jamie Robertson / National Monument Press

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© Jamie Robertson / National Monument Press

alligatorwatergreen is an investigation and celebration of swamps. The text of alligatorwatergreen was crowdsourced from a survey measuring attitudes about the word “swamp”. What words come to mind when you hear the word ‘swamp’? The booklet features responses from 85 respondents on their ruminations on this question. The subsequent responses are paired with images from swamps in Virginia and Texas, between 2007 and 2024; over 17 years. alligatorwatergreen combines text and image to explore the reality of swamps and how they live in the public imagination.
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© Jamie Robertson / National Monument Press

alligatorwatergreen is 36 pages, risograph printed in Moss on Accent Opaque Cream & Ivory paper with an RZ310. 5×8″. Edition of 200 +25. Published in April of 2024.

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© Makenzie Goodman / National Monument Press

Issue #6: Encounters by Makenzie Goodman
ZC: I have a problem telling artists no, especially when they have fun ideas. Mackenzie kept coming up with good ideas that I had to try and figure out. Encounters feature a few of my favorite things in this entire series. First off, this book features a fold out back cover with images of UFO sightings taken from the internet, which is super cool, but I didn’t think until after I printed it how it wouldn’t work in our booklet maker and would need to be folded by hand. Second, the centerfold of this book is a solid star filled night sky. I had no idea how we were going to pull this off without it being just an oversaturated inky blob, but somehow it came out perfect and is one of the crispest images I have ever printed. I swear Makenzie does something different with her photos than most other folks because of how sharp they all print, but she insists she’s not doing anything out of the ordinary.
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© Makenzie Goodman / National Monument Press

Encounters presents images and conversational text from Makenzie’s ongoing project about UFO encounters amongst people living within the Mojave Desert of Southern, California.
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© Makenzie Goodman / National Monument Press

Encounters is 32 pages, risograph printed in Midnight on Accent Opaque Grey & Neenah Stardust paper with an MZ1090. 5×8″. Edition of 200 +25.  Published in April of 2024.
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© Makenzie Goodman / National Monument Press


Zach Clark is an artisteducator, and curator based in Oakland, California; the publisher of National Monument Press; one half of Chute Studio; a collaborative Risograph publishing studio; author of A Mixtape Left Behind, a monthly music and memory newsletter.

National Monument Press is the publishing project of Oakland based artist Zach Clark focused on supporting the investigation and documentation of uniquely American stories through small edition artists’ books, zines, and printed matter, conceived of and completed largely through collaboration with other artists.

Ebti is a multidisciplinary artist, a self-taught photographer and a translator living between Cairo and San Francisco. She has a BA in German studies from Cairo University, Egypt, an MA in translation and intercultural studies from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and an MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA.

Jamie Robertson is a visual artist and educator who works in photography and video. Born and raised in Houston, her Texas roots inform her practice as she investigates the landscape of the American South as a living archive of Black life. 

Robertson has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in numerous group exhibitions like FORECAST 2021: SF Camerawork’s Annual Survey Exhibition and Exposure Photography Festival’s International Open Call (2022). Her solo exhibitions include Making Reference, Juxtaposition Arts, Minneapolis, MN (2020); One Hundred More, Galveston Arts Center, Galveston, TX (2022); and Make For High Ground, Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL (2023). She has received multiple grants and fellowships, most recently through The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her photobook, Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, TX, was published in December 2020 with Fifth Wheel Press. Work from Charting the Afriscape…  is in the collection of McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA. She earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Houston and an MS in Art Therapy from Florida State University. Robertson lives in Hampton Roads, Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University.

Makenzie Goodman is a research-based artist living between North Carolina and Texas. She works in photography, video, and installation to question belief systems associated with specific geographic places and often creates in collaboration with other artists and within communities. Her work considers the histories, narratives, and myths of a region to explore the way humans interpret and interact with the spaces they inhabit, and what that often-imposed anthropocentric relationship means for the land. Goodman is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Appalachian State University

Sara J. Winston is an artist and contributing editor at Lenscratch.

Follow Zach Clark/National Monument Press, Ebti, Jamie Robertson, Makenzie Goodman, and Sara J. Winston on Instagram: @zachclarkis@ebtiebtiebti; @__jamie.jpg; @makenzelyn; and @sarajwinston

Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.


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