Fishpond Press -

Stories About Places and Times

Many photobooks are organized as collections of themed photographs – landscapes, indigenous communities, rural life, street scenes, marginalized social groups, beach dwellers, stray dogs, billboards, cowboys, gangsters, travelers in airports, denizens of hotels and highways, partygoers in clubs, subway riders, people with red hair, teens in Tulsa, mycologists in Moravia, and so on.  We are familiar with them and with how they function as descriptive essays, how they accumulate examples and variations to develop and flesh out their subjects.  The images in them are typically taken over an extended period, after months and often years of multiple trips or visits.

In contrast, several Fishpond Press books tell stories that document the experience of a limited time and place.  A Day at the Lake, for example, shares a class excursion in Germany on June 20, 2000; A Year in Avignon is about a college study-abroad year in the late 1970s; and Jacqueline Takes Me to the Market presents a minutes-long visit to a French market in December of 1977.

The photos in FPP books are of a particular place and time and the written texts complement them as they tell the story.  The goal is to re-create the experience of the event for the viewer, with the page turning reinforcing the reveal of the narrative.  Since the goal is to describe an experience, images that have something to offer are not limited to a single category but can include anything that contributes – portraits, landscapes, street scenes, close-ups of telling details – whatever works.

Other FPP books also employ another distinctive technique, that of organizing the first-person narrative into sections or chapters introduced by texts that orient the viewer and contextualize what follows.  Chapters themselves can be chronologies or can be themed collections of pictures, and when writing care is taken to respect and not limit the resonance of the images. 

These books include Photobook / Journal, a sequel to A Year in Avignon that follows the author through a year in Washington and Oregon in 1978 and 1979, and Morrison Street, not a chronology but a sequence that documents passersby at a specific time and place, one block in downtown Portland, Oregon, at lunch hour on two days in March of 1983.

Transgressions, while technically a Fishpond Press book, is an outlier, a sequenced collection of hand manipulated cut-out photographs.

In production and scheduled for release in 2026, a forthcoming FPP book,Then Was Now, explores new territory in the photo / text tradition. Layered texts unfold on different levels and fuse several distinct strands: a visual document of a previous time, a personal narrative, and a vehicle for playful musings on culture, time, change, life, loss, and on how photographs serve as visual memories and representations of the past.

In Then Was Now Hickerson explores Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s. His photographs document particulars of the time, including physical appearances and social behavior. People – students and businessmen, kids and commuters, seniors and teens, parents and protestors, shoppers and police, office workers and artists – are observed in a variety of situations and settings. Embedded in the photographs is an awareness of social class, status, gender, and power as well as of the subject’s relationship to the photographer. We see people from a multiplicity of backgrounds and abilities – physical, cultural, ethnic, political, and professional – collected into a mosaic of society.

Layered texts function as narrative, background information, labels, asides, quotes, coy hidden clues, and commentary. Their graphic form complements and interacts with the photographs and plays with the tension between blank two-dimensional space and the pictorial illusion that we read as three dimensions. Although they are not always visible at first glance, some two thirds of the images include texts.

Retired from a teaching career in 2023, Fishpond Press founder Hans Hickerson has been mining decades of negatives to contribute books with novel subjects and forms to the photobook conversation.  Hickerson has made photographs since the 1970s and over the years has explored different ways of working, including collage, cut-outs, framing in non-traditional ways, and contextualizing photographs in books.  He has a degree in French from Portland State University and a Maîtrise de Lettres Modernes from the University of Avignon.