Fine Art Photography Daily

Dodeca Meters: Zach Clark / National Monument Press

Dodeca Complete Set

Dodeca Meters (National Monument Press, 2024) is a year-long publishing project featuring 12 booklets by 12 photographers, printed in a single color using Risograph printing. Dodeca Meters exists to provide an archive of what is possible within the intersection of photography and risograph printing, through accessible multiples.

Dodeca Meters was released quarterly throughout 2024, featuring the work of  tamara suarez porrasAnna RottyEbtiJamie RobertsonMakenzie GoodmanSaskia KahnNicole WhiteArielle RebekKareem WorrellLindsay BuchmanNelson Chan and Sara J. Winston,.
To purchase the collection, click here, or individual publications may be purchased on the publisher’s web store .

This week I’ll be featuring each issue from the Dodeca Meters. I thought the best way to begin the week was to learn about the found of National Monument Press, and why he decided to make these books. Below is an interview with the artist Zach Clark, founder and publisher of National Monument Press.

Sara J. Winston: Hey Zach! Thanks for taking some time to talk about art, books, Risograph, and photography with me and our readers on Lenscratch! 

Zach Clark: Oh no, thank you for wanting to talk to me and share what I’m working on. 

SJW: This week I am going to feature the 12 issues that make up your Dodeca Meters book series. Before we get to a full week of those incredible books–of which I am thrilled to have worked with you on Issue 1: Good Weather of the series–would you tell us about your life as an artist? What type of work do you make in your creative practice?

I have taken a really meandering path to get to what my practice looks like here in 2025. I originally went to school for photography in Colorado and then dropped out to be in a band and after a few years of touring eventually went back to school in Chicago where I finished with a painting degree. During these times I was also doing a lot of apparel and layout graphic design, but really I think the seed for what I’m doing now was planted when I was the editor of my high school newspaper, which I guess, is a way of saying that working in collaboration with others for create work that was distributed fairly widely has always been part of my creative pursuits.

I generally refer to myself as a printmaker, altho I’ve had the strange luck that all three schools I studied at, including my graduate studies at UC Davis, did not have printmaking faculty members at the time I was attending, so I have received pretty minimal traditional training in the field, which if I’m honest I kind of view as a blessing. Thanks to settling in the Bay Area, surrounded by it’s incredibly rich tradition of printmaking and book making, I’ve learned how to work within most of the industrial print methods (letterpress, screenprinting, risograph), but got to do so outside of the somewhat regimented tradition of Printmaking. 

My work generally comes out in book form, or wall based work attempting to translate the language and interaction of books, but consists of printmaking, photography, drawing, writing, and curatorial practices. It’s all a product of that thing I previously mentioned of just being drawn towards interactive distributed multiples, but also because of the book’s ability to relay ideas over time in a way that both allows for greater nuance and a respect for the viewer to approach the work at their own pace. 

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SJW: How did you get into using the risograph and making books?

ZC: Honestly the riso was a complete accident. I was mostly working with photography through screen printing and letterpress in graduate school, and once I realized I was about to lose my screenprinting access, I made a couple books with a few of the riso printers in town, including my now studio mate Amy Burek. In making those books, I realized riso got me closer to the image quality I wanted of my photos than screenprinting ever could while also allowing me to create work in higher editions quicker. I worked on various Risos around the bay area for about a year until I found my first riso back when you could still find screaming deals on Risos on Craigslist. I paid $400 for a machine and four drums, which was almost exactly how much money was left over from my mom’s life insurance policy after covering all the costs of her funeral, which I know is kind of a weird thing to mention, but it is also part of why publishing happened. Risos want and need to be used constantly and so being able to turn what little was left after her death into this generative thing that continues to keep growing and spreading is really important and meaningful. It’s also a big part of why I publish a lot of the work I do.

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Chute Studio in Oakland, CA

So really, once I got the Riso I knew I didn’t want to just make my own work, and started inviting friends to collaborate on things which just kind of continued to grow. Amy and I were occasionally working on each other’s machines and then we decided to buy a 2 drum machine together before even talking about if we wanted a professional relationship, but then found ourselves running a studio together, Chute Studio, which is going to celebrate its 5th anniversary this March. 

SJW: And when was National Monument Press formalized as your imprint?

ZC: 2016… 2017. I started making books in grad school and started doing fairs right after I graduated, mostly with my own work and a rotating number of clever monikers. The end of 2016 was when I settled on what would be my official publishing mission, to publish work concerned with uniquely American stories. The National Monument system within the US has always been a minor obsession of mine, with it being one of the more radical projects in land preservation since Presidents can protect land purely for historical and cultural reasons, and as of late as a way of environmental protectionism, without needing it to become a recreation site like our National Parks. It just made sense to borrow the name, especially since the first book I published as NMP was a project with Angela Willetts in which the decommissioning and refurbishing of military sites was used as a metaphor for the ending of a long term romantic relationship. 

Crop Repor

Crop Report published by National Monument Press

SJW: Do you consider your publishing work to be part of your larger creative practice? Does your work feed the publishing? Does your publishing feed the work?

ZC: This is a really messy idea for me I admittedly don’t have a good answer to. I’d say it’s all part of my practice, as everything I publish is made in collaboration, even if my name is rarely on the front of the book. I specifically try to work with artists that don’t work within books or print, and so the extremely specialized knowledge and unique way my brain is broken can be used to help others figure out new ways to work through and present their ideas. This of course means there are seasons where very little of my personal work gets made, but that whole time I’m continuing to flex the conceptual and technical muscles needed to make books with others, and usually learning new approaches along the way because of ideas my collaborators have I need to figure out solutions to. So, I’m always working, and it’s always work I care about and I’m part of. I also love how working with this type of publishing means I get to help artists who might not otherwise get collected by institutions thanks to the unique way books get acquired by educational libraries and museums. 

Morning and a Sheen

Morning, and a Sheen of Silvery Mist by Zach Clark & Josh Dannin, published by National Monument Press

SJW: Before Dodeca Meters, how did you view the intersection of photography and risograph?

ZC: My work has always been a combination of photography and text. When I first started publishing, there were very very few people using risograph for photography, especially for 3 and 4 color photography. Admittedly, it’s not the easiest medium for printing photography, especially with older machines you only have the scanner bed. Folks like Travis Schaffer from There There Now and University of Missouri and Amelia and Adame Greenhall who make Spectrolite have really put in a lot of work to make it easier for everyone, specifically with their color separation tools. Still though, it’s quite rare, and I’ve found a lot of the photo riso work is being made by people like me who consider photography part of the way they make images, but don’t view themselves as photographers. 

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SJW: What were the questions you had going into Dodeca Meters? Do you have more questions now? Or different questions?

ZC: I’d say there were three big questions that inspired this project. 

The first is  mostly concerned with why there wasn’t more photo riso work. I had spent the previous few years thinking about some of the same ideas when it came to traditional printmaking. Traditional printmakers, especially some in academia, have a rather negative view of riso. I thought a lot of it had to do with not liking that it is semi automated and so the process flex that so many printmakers rely on starts to disappear which, it’s totally untrue, but I could see how they would think that. It wasn’t until a printmaker in Buffalo named Rachel Shelton, who has since become a really important collaborator for me, took a workshop with me and asked for more examples of “abstract” riso that I realized, oh… it might actually be about a lack of representation of the type of work available to inspire folks to maybe make work that reflects it. At the end of the process, I’m not entirely sure that’s the reason…

The second was the more I learned about the photo publishing industry, and really how kind of terrible and predatory and pay for play seems to be, which for the record is the exact opposite of the art book scene. I was hearing stories about people going massively in debt to have their monographs published by respected publishers and just how much scarcity and investment potential was a motivator in photobook publishing. From my own experience, a well respected photobook store refused to carry a book I had published because the price point was too low for them, but they still mentioned to a contact they have at a major museum they should acquire the book for their collection. That type of thing just made zero sense to me. So, I was curious what would happen with photobooks published in an art book model where none of the artists get rich off the book, but also no one goes into debt while doing it. The jury is still out on if this was a good idea.

The last question was personal. Photography has been part of my tool kit longer than any other art medium, and it’s constant in my practice. However, I do not call myself a photographer. I wanted to see if a year of working closely with photographers would help me finally find language to explain why I felt this way. This thankfully is the one question I did find an answer to. I’ve really learned I just don’t have the same questions or concerns when making images as most the photographers I know. That’s vague and probably unsatisfying, but it actually was really important for me to affirm. 

SJW: Did you know all of the photographers who you asked to take part in the series?

ZC: Yes, I had pre-existing relationships with almost everyone in the series. Some, like you and Anna, I have already made other projects with; mostly it was just friends and folks I admire. It’s worth mentioning Nicole White, because really she was the impetus for the whole project. She had me print a book for her prior to a conference one year of all black and white photos, similar to all of the books in the series, and I was so happy with the results. I wanted to see more like them.

Poll Work

Poll Work by Anna Rotty, published by National Monument Press

I don’t always work exclusively with people I have existing relationships with, although that tends to be the case as it helps the collaborative process along. In the case of this project, it was originally born out of a half baked grant proposal I wrote for a slightly different project. I didn’t get the grant, but in the process of writing it I realized I could probably pull it off without funding once I crunched the numbers. However, since it was going to be an ambitious project without funding, I wanted to try to work with friends just in case it went terribly. Luckily, that didn’t happen and I think we’ve made a really beautiful set of work.

SJW: Over the course of the next several days we will get into what makes each book special, but overall, I’m curious if there is one book in the series that is your particular favorite?

ZC: As we’ll see over the next few days, every book has a really unique story as to how it was made and what makes it interesting. I wanted it to be a place where folks could try out some new ideas and how people approached it was really varied and nice. It’s kind of like picking a favorite child, or so I hear. I do not have children. 

Dream House

SJW: When you asked me to participate I knew I wanted to take a book dummy that I made in 2010 off the shelf and see what we could do with it together. I’m so pleased with how Good Weather turned out. Thanks so much for including me.

So, what’s on the horizon for you as an artist? What are some books you’re working on with National Monument Press?

ZC: After publishing 16 books last year and being out of the country for a significant part of it thanks to a residency at TYPA Centre in Estonia, I purposely tried not to plan too much for 2025 to attempt to recover, which is kind of working. The biggest project on the horizon is publishing a series of books in collaboration with Heather Edney who is this really seminal figure in harm reduction, needle exchange, and AIDS prevention work within drug-using communities. A show of her archives is happening at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, NY this spring, so we’re making some things that are timed to release with the opening of that show. Otherwise the year is really going to be the opposite of a huge production year like 2024. I hope to get out to as many book fairs and shows to get the work seen by as many people as possible, so I think there are lots of airplanes in my future this year. 

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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.

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

Follow Zach Clark, National Monument Press and Sara J. Winston on Instagram:
@zachclarkis@sarajwinston

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


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