Thorsten Overgaard

The idea was to show the complete cycle from a bookstore counting their stocks to placing an order online, the factory planning the weekly production, the actual production, the stocking and the packing of individual orders and sending them off.

So the final series is somewhat 300+ pictures for the client to select down to 50 or so. The total number of pictures I took was about 3,400 but I pre-selected a few of each step and gave them those to work with.

When you have invested that much money into machines and computer systems you guess the pictures you will want to get is those nice machines.

Well, that is not quite what you get when I’m around. I like people more than anything else and I remember that I learned already very early that if you have a spread in a company brochure, you throw in one cute face of a boy, it makes that spread about 6,000% more interesting to look at.

Minimum.

Of course any producer want to show his buildings, his machines and his products.

Machines can be human, too.

They have rhythm and can be friendly in the way that they are predictable. True love between man and machine is when a complicated machine does exactly what you wanted it to do.

Anyway, the way we went about with it was that Andy (the client) had the shooting list and crossed out things as we had gotten them.

I wanted to go zig-zag through production and shoot things as they went on and without having to stop, start or arrange processes to be photographed.

Here he is checking the list while he thinks I’m occupied shooting a lady elsewhere.

I don’t know if that qualify as street photography inside a factory. Perhaps.

This shot shows four Indigo color printers lined up. It might not say many of you that much, but any owner of a printing facility will start dribbling by the look of such a collection and the order surrounding them.

I guess that also goes for the suppliers of paper and ink. They got to love this. Running 24/7/365 it’s the largest consumer of digital ink products in Europe.

There were some other very impressive printing machines around printing from rolls of paper and even larger color printers. All digital.

What I personally liked was the book binding and dust cover machines that make the digital prints into ordinary looking books and full-color dust jackets with foil and all. You have no idea when looking at the final book that it was made in a digital process. A lot of care went into making the final books represent top notch standards within graphic book production and literature.

There’s actually a lot of technology – or knowledge – about which types to use, the spacing of the text, how to arrange the text on a page and with how much space in the sides, the reflections from the paper, etc. and all of that went into this production.

Stuff that happens by itself is great. You can’t arrange a photo like that.

This one though is arranged. He’s not moving at all and has a large reflector to his left.

He’s preparing cobber plates for this machine that put gold foils on book covers. Quite a machine:

Another interesting machine is this one that makes thumb holes (or whatever those are called) in books, so you can easily find references. All their books has those and they invented a machine doing those so one machine can do what ten people had to do by hand before.

There’s an interesting rhythm to machines and machine-made things.

Okay, you got a look into a different world here. One final shot we had to do was the shipping that is quite computerized and very intelligent made. But not that easy to show in pictures, however.

The client and I had opposing ideas on the importance of a shot of labels being put onto boxes.

There you go, ship him off to Bern in Germany, I think it says.

Anyway, we had fun and I got to see a lot of fancy machines. What strikes me also, is that with that factory it is possible to produce a number of books in lots of languages and in varying numbers. All in that facility was print runs for a few weeks stock so you save those huge book stocks that you else see around in the publishing industry.

But also, it’s new technology enabled to make such an old-fashioned thing as books.

The book isn’t dead.