11 Photo Books in 5 Years: Behind Same Paper Is a Group of People Who Want to Express Themselves | Great Little Studios

"Against Instagram's tireless, always-updating feed, the photo book is still an excellent antidote — one shot, right on target, and always a sharper, deeper read."

When the photographer Yuan Xiaopeng raises his camera on the streets of Shanghai, he instinctively turns it on its side and shoots vertically. Eventually the few hundred photos on his SD card contain almost no horizontal frames at all — even he finds it a little unnatural. "This might be my own way of understanding the city. A lot of the time you have to turn the lens vertical just to fit a building in."

Around 2012, Yuan Xiaopeng noticed a new wave of street photography on image-sharing platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. Young photographers around the world seemed to be staring at the same question. Their angle on the city was not the one taken by the previous generation of American and Japanese photographers; the lenses of these city photographers no longer pointed at landmark buildings, or at the lives and moods of urban residents, but instead carried out "a shared assignment: get up, go out, shoot, upload the work as fast as possible. Tall building facades and rows of glass windows became the most frequently recurring images."

That observation later became the theme of Street, the first issue of Closing Ceremony, a magazine printed in 2017 by the self-publishing studio Same Paper. It carried work shot on city streets by 11 photographers from around the world. Twelve of Yuan Xiaopeng's own photos ran in it too, under the title "Vertical."

Yuan Xiaopeng and his colleague Wang Yijun founded Same Paper in 2013. At first it was only a Weibo account, SameStuff, that shared all kinds of art books and photography and fashion magazines. Before long they decided they might as well make a book of their own, and one thing led to another — eleven photo books, one magazine, and an independent bookstore tucked into a Shanghai lane that ran for three years and put on the occasional event.

The phrase Same Paper always uses to recommend a photographer is a plain one: "like photographer A." It is an intimate verb, but dropping the subject makes it less insistent. The self-published photo books, the large stock of foreign publications picked out for the bookstore, the things posted on Same Paper's own social accounts — all of it drew a following over the past five years on the strength of an elusive taste. So much so that when they decided to close the bookstore in the summer of 2018, the twenty-square-meter room was packed with people over its final three days.

After the bookstore closed, Wang Yijun left to "focus on making music," and Yuan Xiaopeng and Same Paper moved online, keeping up their regular posts by translating interviews from foreign magazines and running a column that recommends photographers. Not long ago they suddenly announced a second issue of the magazine and a pop-up store: "Don't worry! We're still here!"

It is hard to say in one sentence what kind of photographer or publication Same Paper "likes" — there is none of documentary photography's obsession with the "decisive moment," and rarely any of traditional photojournalism's "humanism." In their place are the small details of the city and portraits so intimate they verge on the raw; the viewer finds humor and poetry in pictures that refuse to tell a story.

They also love recommending photographers who "don't take pictures properly," work that pushes at the edges of the medium: the Minneapolis photographer Dylan James Nelson, who treats screen-capture software as his camera and computer games as the real world, or Kenta Kobayashi, who uses Photoshop to exaggerate and distort his images.

"That newer kind of image-driven publication basically doesn't exist in China," Yuan Xiaopeng told QDaily. He thinks many Chinese photo books are still stuck at the stage of recording and printing pretty pictures; he would rather use photographs to state and fill out a clear theme. "Starting with the magazine, we've been making content from more of an editor's point of view. We hope this is a way for young people to understand new visual culture, and to give them more to read."

1.

After six or seven months of layout and production, Free Park, the first publication Same Paper made after it was founded, appeared. It has many of the instantly recognizable "traits" of independent publishing: newsprint-like paper and no binding — hardly the best choice of paper for digital photographs; a cover on which Yuan Xiaopeng poses as the Same Paper logo, a staged shot of a small boy with an erection; and, in the layout, a clover logo slipped in to look like an advertisement, or a low-resolution image nodding to the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.

The photos in Free Park were taken between 2010 and 2013, the years after Yuan Xiaopeng moved to Shanghai from his home province of Jiangxi. In his introduction he wrote: "During this time in Shanghai I escaped, for a while, the pressure and constraints of family, and I often used myself up without limit. I worked here, and I also had sex with a lot of strangers in the apartment I rented. Most of the time I photographed the people I was in closest contact with, to satisfy my own imagination about the picture."

Same Paper's early publications all have a slightly raw, private quality — concept first, images to fill it out afterward. Some of the pictures come out of Yuan Xiaopeng's own experience, such as Daddy Got A Stinky Mouth, made in 2016 as ride-hailing was taking off; without the partition glass of a taxi, passenger and driver end up in a more intimate relationship.

"At first I wanted to do a theme of my own, but filling it out with other people's work is hard, and the chance never came, so I filled it with mine," Yuan Xiaopeng said. "These things are more like an observation, a study, of ours. Very few copies — always made a few dozen at a time. It's like an artist making an installation. You wouldn't want to copy it."

Food Issue is the photo book Same Paper published in 2015 for the late photographer Ren Hang, 52 pages of work he had never planned to release. Ren Hang was already exhibiting around the world and getting press by then, but the photographs he made public were only the tiny handful he considered perfect out of the enormous number he shot each time.

"In our everyday contact with Ren Hang, we saw a lot of work he hadn't published. Some of it was photos where a foot slipped into the frame while he was shooting, or where he used his foot to feed the boys or step on their faces. These seemingly trivial little gestures caught our attention, so we thought of editing the photos into a collection about feet."

"By then plenty of foreign publishers were already doing things with his work, so we started asking what qualities were his alone," Yuan Xiaopeng said. He and his colleagues coaxed and cajoled Ren Hang into handing the photos over, convinced that the whole book's apparently funny, absurd temper came close to "the Ren Hang we knew."

In later interviews Ren Hang often refused to read his own work through the lens of controversy — "The photos are just my life; there's nothing to say about them," he said. But because those images showed, without reserve, the naked bodies of young Chinese people of different sexual orientations, once he became famous they inevitably moved from the private into public argument.

The "unpublished photos" chosen for Food Issue, though, weakened that confrontational label. The book reads more like a set of snapshots from someone's WeChat Moments. To go with it, Same Paper added a blue tablecloth, echoing the theme and toning down the erotic charge at the same time.

The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is one of Yuan Xiaopeng's favorites, and Tillmans's views go some way toward explaining how this Chinese photography self-publishing studio came to treat its work later on.

"I don't want to be a so-called gay artist," the 50-year-old Turner Prize winner once said. "Even when homosexuality shows up in my work, it shows up as an everyday thing. It doesn't stand for some 'other.'"

At a Tillmans show there is always someone who cannot help asking why so many of the photos look so ordinary and still get to hang in a gallery. His 2017 solo exhibition at Tate, 2017, offered an answer: older images — people dancing, a close-up of car headlights, a man's backside — answered the distant political questions of 2017, and reflected a new society in which dance floors were shutting and prejudice was hardening. He may in fact be the contemporary photographer most deeply involved in politics; for the past two years Tillmans has used his own Instagram account to post the anti-Brexit posters he makes.

The function of photography shifted long ago from recording to expressing. Finding the meaning in a series of pictures became the first order of business.

Photographs edited together by Same Paper may never make one great image; they are more like a fresh piece of reading sifted out of the feed. And as Yuan Xiaopeng's own "reading" grew, the themes he wanted to state grew clearer too.

2.

Purple cover, large format, printed in Shanghai, heavy in the hand. Closing Ceremony had a print run of 800 copies, the largest of anything Same Paper has published. It sold for 200 yuan / US$30 and took half a year to sell out, more than half of it abroad — Tsutaya Books in Tokyo, the MoMA Design Store in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles. It is a fairly influential list of distributors.

Street was also shortlisted for best photography in the 2017 awards from Stack, a site devoted to recommending good independent magazines. In Stack's interview, Yuan Xiaopeng, speaking as creative director, said: "Same Paper hopes to give new photographers who haven't yet won market recognition a platform to show their work and enter a dialogue with the world."

Before the first issue of the magazine came out, Same Paper had made nine photo books in four years, among them Ren Hang's Food Issue, the South Korean photographer KangHee Kim's Magic, and the French photographic artist Maxime Guyon's Toothbrushes.

That list shows something of their ambition to reach beyond China. From their seventh publication on, launches moved from the bookstore and their WeChat official account to art book fairs in New York, Tokyo and elsewhere. That is how they widened their reach.

"Actually, by the end of 2015 we'd decided to go to New York the following year, to socialize a bit. We were thinking about what kind of project to do. It had to be connected to Asia, but not too staid, and we didn't want to work with those well-known gallery photographers. Then we found this Korean photographer online, KangHee Kim, born in 1991."

KangHee Kim now has 260,000 followers on Instagram and was picked by PDN as one of its 30 new photographers to watch in 2019. The technique she is known for — using Photoshop to alter photographs, manufacturing the surprise moments she is tired of waiting for — also started in 2015. Once she had a name, her single prints sold for $600 each, in editions of no more than 30. Sneaker, perfume and liquor companies all sent her gifts, hoping she would photograph their products on social media.

When Yuan Xiaopeng and Wang Yijun first got to New York and met her, KangHee Kim was a girl "just out of college, with no reputation, making images and shooting at home every day." "This person was crazy. She made work every single day and did nothing else."

Same Paper usually finds and contacts photographers around the world through social media, but sometimes customers in the bookstore brought a surprise.

In the autumn of 2015, Joel Vancheron — a lecturer at an art school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a contributing editor at the art magazine Verities — walked into Closing Ceremony on a friend's recommendation. He was in Shanghai for the Swatch Art Peace Hotel's artist residency. Vancheron had just finished two new books of visual research and needed somewhere to launch them. Yuan Xiaopeng remembers: "You have all those books sitting there in the store, and the moment he walks in he knows who made every one of them, which ones his friends made."

Joel Vancheron was later invited to write an essay for Street, titled "Street Photography and the Metaphorical City": "Technological innovation has changed the way the urban realm is recorded, viewed and compiled. Digital photographs shot on smartphones or carefully composed in Photoshop drift from one screen to another, and become how we present and see the world around us."

The magazine ran Shanghai through the lenses of Chen Li and Yuan Xiaopeng; Tokyo shot by Yoshinori Mizutani and Go Itami; New York caught by David Brandon Geeting and KangHee Kim; and London, Amsterdam and Mexico.

The global cityscapes in these pictures looked oddly alike.

In Vancheron's words, a "globalized, generic version of the city" had appeared in the work of this new generation. They were more interested in internal structure, good at catching the poetic and funny details of a city street, and had no use for depicting the city's modernity.

"To me these images are more like paintings. They are very quiet." The photographs by David Brandon Geeting in the magazine had mostly been posted on Instagram before, more than 20 at a time, all in one go. Same Paper described him this way: "As if he were putting his followers through a visual storm. In Geeting's photos we seem to see a new interest in the everyday environment."

Outside the magazine, Yuan Xiaopeng's own favorite is Toothbrush, which Same Paper published in September 2017 for the Swiss photographer Maxime Guyon.

This photographer, who has shot futuristic advertisements for Nike, Clinique and the Peugeot 508 SW, happens to be one of Joel Vancheron's students. Everything between them was settled online, and Yuan Xiaopeng did not meet Maxime in person until the Paris art book fair in November 2018. "He really liked the toothbrush book. Because we're still a Chinese publisher, with that industrial background," Yuan Xiaopeng said. "It sold very well in Europe. Maybe they like this kind of abstract subject more."

To fit the theme, they found a factory and really did wrap the book in the plastic film toothbrushes usually come in.

Yuan Xiaopeng is happy with how Maxime Guyon read Toothbrush. "He worked more the way an artist works. He knew exactly how the thing should be done."

To Maxime, the various toothbrushes blown up under a macro lens are a metaphor for fast-moving "modern industrial products," and even hint at how the function of photographic technology itself is changing in an image economy — he went so far as to make a promotional film for the book that imitates an iPhone X ad.

But look only at the photos in Toothbrush and you obviously cannot get at any of the thinking behind them.

Maxime is only one of a growing number of young photographers trying to load digital photographs with richer meaning. Social media is no longer a distraction for photographers but a necessity, and yet they also want their work to stand out from the tons of images pouring past.

Yuan Xiaopeng says that whenever Same Paper gets in touch with a photographer, even one on the far side of the world they have never met, that photographer is glad to publish something together. The line Same Paper uses to sum up self-publishing appeals to photographers just as much: "Against Instagram's tireless, always-updating feed, the photo book is still an excellent antidote — one shot, right on target, and always a sharper, deeper read."

3.

Put simply, all of these photographers are trying to answer the same question: how do you find a reason to make work, and work out what you want to say, in an age of exploding images?

In 2011 the American artist Chris Wiley reached a pessimistic conclusion in an essay. In a "world completely dominated by photographs and digital uploaders," he wrote, "the possibility of taking a completely original, moving photograph has been thoroughly called into question." More and more American photographers, he found, were starting to lean on other media, while artists who used photography began to stress the folding-in of computer technology, much like the flashy gimmicks of the darkroom in years past.

In 2013, the year Same Paper was founded, 350 million photos a day were being uploaded to Facebook, and Instagram was adding 95 million pictures and 4.2 billion likes a day. That year was also a turning point for social media in China: of the 9% of users Weibo lost, 40% went to WeChat. Two years later Tencent said 1 billion photos a day were being uploaded to Moments.

This frenzy over images looks familiar. In a 1975 essay, Photogenic Painting, Michel Foucault sketched a scene of late-nineteenth-century "universal involvement," in which almost everyone was captivated by the game of the "image": "The image on the photograph and the image on the canvas can exchange rapidly, completing exposure and printing between canvas, photosensitive film and paper. Every new means was put to use: freely shifting, displacing, distorting, imitating, disguising, duplicating, superimposing and performing tricks on the photograph. The flexibility and utter lack of restraint delighted people no end."

The force behind that "universal involvement" used to be the invention of photographic technology. Now it is the flood of photographs themselves.

The self-publishing trend in photography has come back in an era like this one. The most representative outfit is Self Publish, Be Happy, founded in 2011 by the former publisher Bruno Ceschel, which has put out about 2,700 publications so far. Ceschel has said in an interview that the collapse of traditional publishing, combined with the boost from personal printing technology, has turned independently published art books and book fairs into a channel for today's creators to talk to each other. "I think the way people publish work now has made the photographer's profession more complicated, partly because the internet lets them see more."

The culture has spread to China in recent years. Jiazazhi ("Fake Magazine") in Ningbo and Wuxiang ("No Image") in Wuxi both make publications like Same Paper's. Many independent artists have started printing their work in small runs, somewhere between a magazine and a booklet — usually called a zine. But it is hard for them to run as self-sufficiently as their foreign counterparts, who have mature distribution networks and buyers.

London's Palm Studios put out five photo books at once in 2018 and co-published a photography magazine as well. Same Paper called that kind of "hyper-efficiency" both "shocking and intriguing" in its interview with the founder, Lola Paprocka.

Counting Yuan Xiaopeng, Same Paper has five people, most from media backgrounds, two of them interns. The commercial photography jobs that feed them and keep the studio running take up half their working time. "We're split into two teams now. Some people look after our own products, others deal with clients. Me, I do everything, all over the place."

Closing Ceremony, an independent bookstore open only on weekends, was for a time Yuan Xiaopeng and Wang Yijun's office. In the summer of 2015 they quit their jobs at Modern Weekly and decided to spend their savings renting the space and buying enough foreign photo books and magazines to fill the shelves. Over three years the store moved photo books and art books from more than 40 publishers and more than 100 independent magazines, covering fashion, photography, gender and sexuality, sport and more.

On why they named the store Closing Ceremony, they said: "There's a common phenomenon in the self-publishing business. Young creators always stop a phase of their work with no warning, and the small physical spaces they set up on their own usually can't last long, because there isn't much operating experience or money. So a 'closing ceremony' became the norm in this business."

The landlord raised the rent and the bookstore closed. Now that it has moved online, Same Paper looks more and more like an account that publishes print work at irregular intervals.

"We think a lot more now about what we make. Before, we never thought about what to do with something in the market, or where it could be sent. Now we think much more about how many copies to make, and how many to send to a given region to sell."

"If we print 600 and sell 300, those 300 earn the cost back. Abroad it all goes at cost price, and we pay the shipping ourselves."

For a while after Spring Festival, Yuan Xiaopeng was busy earning money while also adjusting the contents of the second issue of the magazine, due in April. "This time we've put in some photographers with gallery backgrounds. The lineup is completely different from the first issue, and we spent a lot of time contacting people." The new issue has reportedly landed the American photographer Buck Ellison, who shot Balenciaga's 2019 spring/summer campaign.

Fashion, trying to bind itself to an artistic sensibility, has paid more attention to independent photographers over the past two years, bringing more money into the field and letting photographers survive without the gallery and institutional system. The first issue of Closing Ceremony already carried advertisements from Zuczug and JNBY, and Same Paper recently planned to hire one more person for "Same Service," its arm for commercial brands.

As for Yuan Xiaopeng himself, he says none of his own photos will appear in the second issue of the magazine. Nor does he plan to publish another book of his own through Same Paper any time soon. "I might wait for a better moment. If I get the chance, I'd like to show my work more systematically to the publishers I like. I want the publishers and magazines I like to like my work too."

Cover image courtesy of Same Paper