Several years ago, photographer, Diffusion Magazine and One Twelve Publishing founder/editor Blue Mitchell gave me the heads up about photographer Jake Shivery’s terrific work.  Blue’s enthusiasm for this talented image maker has not waned over the years and he is celebrating Jake’s photographs with a new monograph to be published by One Twelve Publishing, their first foray into artist’s monographs. In order to raise funds for the book, One Twelve Publishing has launched a Kickstarter campaign to make it a reality. You can donate here.

Blue started One Twelve Publishing as a movement to “save endangered photography: to capture it in its purest forms, accurately reproduce it in print and online, and distribute it to the world. The film, handmade photography, and alternative process work featured by One Twelve Publishing has been practiced and celebrated across the world for decades, yet now it teeters on the brink of obsolescence. One Twelve Publishing is here to resist that flow in the direction of forgetting; to find those artists who appreciate photography as crafted and who want to ensure that generations to come will, as well.”

One Twelve Publishing is a Mission. Measured by its products, it is the distributor of art through means that can be considered on their own to be an art form. This new monograph series, of which Contact is the first, will be printed using the time-honored method of offset printing. This process yields beautiful pages as full of depth as the negatives and prints from which they came.

Jake Shivery’s body of work is an earnest, honest, and admiring catalog of the North Portland neighborhood where he lives and works. What starts out as a simple concept-the photographs of loved ones in a common setting-becomes something much grander: a beautiful and thoughtful collection of souls ready for viewing. Working with an 8×10 film camera and printing in contact sheet form, Jake’s tools and approach are less about capturing a moment as they are about capturing a mood and a life. His photographs are haunting, intimate, and layered with pieces of visual narration that together tell the story of both the subject and the artist.

This book is a bit more than a photo book, because Jake is a bit more than a photographer. When looking at one of his photographs, one feels a sense of a story. The narrative lens through which Jake views the world is due in part to his background as a writer, and thanks to his second talent this book will also contain an extensive and inspiring essay on photography as a practice and as a subject. The essay is both enamored with and incensed by the world of photography: Jake’s honest and thoughtful account of his decades of photographic experience rings with a refreshing tone of truth.