Interview with John O’Toole [Oranbeg Press]

John O’Toole is a Boston & Brooklyn based photographer, writer, bookmaker, and founder of Oranbeg Press. His work explores familial roots through the lens of Irish Heritage.

Oranbeg Press is an independent publisher based in Boston and New York. Through a variety of publishing projects, including As of Late, Interleaves, the Net Series, and several independently published books, Oranbeg pushes the boundaries of publishing. 

Kelsey Sucena (they/them) is an American writer, photographer, and Park Ranger. Their work rests at the intersection of photography and text, often within the bodies of performative slide-shows and photo-text-books. 

***Interview conducted in April of 2020***

Shannon in January 2018

Interview by Kelsey Sucena

Hey John, so I’m excited to finally have the chance to catch up with you. I feel like the obligatory way to start an interview right now is by asking you how you're doing. We’ve been trying to have this conversation for a few months now but life kept getting in the way and then the pandemic started. It's changed so much about the way that we're living our lives day to day and also sort of interacting with each as artists. I have questions about you and about your thoughts on Oranbeg and publishing, but just to start off, how are you doing?

I’m not too bad. At my parent's house for a month now. That's like a 10, 15-minute drive outside of Boston. Just along the mass ‘pike. It's weird working online right now. I'm a digital lab tech, but I have no digital lab. It's just me and the techs monitoring these emails. Our students and faculty have questions about remote learning. We’re all learning how to live like being cooped up in a way.

So, one of the first things I wanted to talk about relates to the quarantine. I've seen a lot of people especially on Instagram and in the sphere of the art world, asking how we continue producing work, how to continue sharing work, and how to address the fact that people can't get out to see each other? I think of this as an emerging vacuum for publishing to fill. I was wondering if you had any thoughts as far as Oranbeg goes, whether or not you have any projects you're cooking up?

Yes. So, Oranbeg does these online exhibitions called the NET series. We recently did a new call for work.

Can we get a sneak preview of what you're thinking of for that exhibition?

Yeah. So the text I wrote for the open call goes:

“For this open call, things are getting changed up a little bit. Being back in my childhood home I’ve been looking through many of things left here when I moved to New York whether they were childhood mementos, things from high school, elementary school, old CDs, boxes of c-prints, and inkjet prints from college. Not having a printer around has been a bummer so I co-opted my parents. It is a lovely HP Officejet 6970. Epson P-800 I slightly miss you now. Anyways this open call will still have an online exhibition and a PDF. It will then have an Exhibition of work printed on an HP Officejet 6970 and hung on a fence in my childhood home. ⁣
And if you need a little inspiration here is a prompt below.⁣

A mixtape. A sequence. A slideshow. A conversation. A yard. Days are slower. Just shifting moments. I’ve been looking back lately. Looking for a thread to follow. Something new, but maybe it’s old. A dusty old box of mementos & things. That forgotten hard drive, old notes, you’re unruly computer desktop. Is it that you are writing daily as a way of having a conversation from afar. Will you watch and take notice of the light that passes throughout your home. Your daily routine may be different, but they’ll be a time to get back and look back⁣”

I've been in hibernation mode with Oranbeg since fall. I've been focusing more on myself and I was planning some projects for the LA Art Book Fair. I had a few things ready to go. But around Early March I kept having a feeling that, oh, maybe the fair was going to get canceled. So, I slowed down. 

As Of Late by Taylor Galloway

You always have a strong presence at art fairs. Oranbeg is one of those tables that everyone, at least all of the photographers I know, have to visit just to see what's going on. A big part of that is your As Of Late series.

Yes.

I've always found As Of Late to be a really exciting because there's a really broad range of different artists, at different points in their career who are contributing to that as a project. When you lay it out on the table, it's really exciting to see sort of unified design and the text as familiar things, but then you see names like Nelson Chan or Sarah Palmer, and people like myself or Will Matsuda who are at different points in our careers. I feel like As Of Late, is a communal experience and I’m excited to see more but, I wanted to ask you about the LA Art Book Fair and see if it was kind of catastrophic for your planning?

No. It wasn't really. Like I said, I kind of had a weird feeling. So, some things on pause. But the one thing that made it that I have a bunch of copies made of is--, I call it like my silly things. These playful books that I do.This one’s called The Photography Activity Book.

Okay.

So, it has like, a bunch of different photography themed games. Fill in the breaks on the nozzle check. Match these 4X5 film notches. There's word searches with different photography brands, terms and photographers. Just a good mix of fun things.

Yes. Yes. That's great. I love that. I really enjoy the little bits and pieces that I get to see of it. The cards you'll hand out here and there.

Yes.

Nozzle Check Koozie at Silver Eye

It's fun because again, thinking about photography as this community. It's-- like, we can see these icons and symbols that we all interact with, but very rarely acknowledged as a sort of the universal iconography that we're all somehow familiar with. Like the little beer koozies you did, with the nozzle check pattern!

The Nozzle Check. Yes.

Those are brilliant.

 Yes. I did Nozzle Check temporary tattoos too.

I love that. I love the idea of that on your skin. As if it’s just another printable surface.
So, when we started talking, we were talking a little bit about NET. I wanted to ask about it, in part because I feel like the NET project is really unique. As far as publishing goes, it's something that I think we are already seeing more of. People trying to figure out how to curate shows through the internet. So, I wanted to know more about it. I know you have NET 1.0 and NET 2.0?  And I also wanted to know more about the history of that project and what your thinking was, when it started and how it's progressed over time?

Yes. So,1.0 is all primarily curated by guest curators, and 1.0 is only online. It's only slideshows and PDFs. Those were always really fun because everyone was different. Like no matter what, you can look at it and they all have their own identity. I wouldn't do anything. The curator would design the PDF, make the sequence for the slideshow, choose all the artists. I would contact the artists and be like, oh hey, you have been selected or whatever. The NET sort of came out of my love of blogs because blogs used to be a bigger thing, like when I was coming out of undergrad in 2011-2012. I had BlogSpot and I had Tumblr when everyone shifted to Tumblr. I still miss Tumblr.

Yes, me too. I've been talking a lot about Tumblr lately.

Then the idea of doing online shows came from Humble Arts Foundation. They've been doing it for ages. I do agree, I feel really within the last two or three years I've seen so many more different publishers, organizations, little startups all starting to do more and more online shows. Like we were both in the New Poetics show with From Here On Out, which was physical and online. There's a new one called Re-Direct Gallery, which is pretty cool. I always really enjoy online shows.

I wonder since you started the NET series, how and in what ways it's changed for you, whether it's grown or whether you've noticed patterns that emerge?

That's kind of why I did the NET 2.0. So, with 1.0, the last show people had to curate or show themselves and send a whole package and then I picked through the submissions and chose one show as the final exhibition. Then I waited for a while and I did 2.0. That was after my first summer, grad school. I felt like doing online exhibitions again and I had a sort of synergy towards that. I decided with Net 2.0 to turn them into books as well. So, one thing I enjoyed the most about the NET 2.0 is every version, the slideshow, the PDF, and the book has a different sequence. For the most part, all the books have been different, either with design choices or size, or bindings. What Will Suffice or It's a Toss Up are probably my two favorites. I got really into using tape binding and just trying to play off the colors. For the 2.0, one through six I curated those all. Then seven and eight were curated by other Artists. So, Patrice Hemlar did one called I’d rather go blind. She's this great artist from Alaska, but she teaches in New York City. She runs this cool artists talk series called Marble Hill Camera Club. It's just an awesome event. It's probably one of my favorite things to go to when I get a chance to like cut out work early on a Saturday.

Yeah, I have some friends who participate in Marble Hill. So, that's really cool to hear. 
I’m wondering, do you feel like there are limitations or benefits from having digital matter versus printed matter for these kinds of projects or even for your own projects?

No. It's just like another thing. I think, I mean, you could do a printed thing, or you could not do a printed thing. Sometimes doing a printed thing, someone totally random will end up seeing at the fair and they had no idea about open call or the online show or PDF. So when they're looking at the book and like, oh, just look at the website too. You can see other versions of this work in different ways and in different conversations. And then maybe they also get inspired to submit their work too. 

That makes sense. There's a lot of focus, within the publishing community, on printed matter specifically and conversation around the limitations of digital publication and digital work. One of the things that’s really great about your NET series is that they are all available online for free and cataloged in a way, sort of freely accessible as PDFs and slideshows for viewers, and that strikes me as something that would be very difficult to do as a publisher, if you were working exclusively with printed material. There's a kind of generosity to allowing all of the work to exist here, both for the viewer, like somebody who's approaching this, maybe somebody who only recently discovered the NET series and wants to dig back into your archives, but also generosity for the artists, people who have maybe long ago contributed to the NET series and are still on this digital bookshelf with all the new publications as they emerge. So, I really love that. It's very relevant to where we are right now.

I mean, most of the people I've met, I've met them online. Either through the NETs or through social media. Then I meet them in person, at an event or something. I really enjoy that because I'm like, "Oh, you're that cool person?"

It's so fun when you have a friend that you know from the internet, and then you meet them in real life.

Yes. But then you have that awkward conversation like, "Are you, Kelsey?" [laughs]

Yeah! That’s so funny. That's exactly how we met. 

Yes.

I think what Oranbeg is doing is really cool because, again, I keep coming back to this feeling of it being a community of people, being a digital space that is very robust in a way that even social media doesn't do as well. Instagram doesn't do it as well just because there are so many other things going on. But then here's a space that is curated and that is controlled by you, but that has connections to a really broad range of different artists. So, I've always really loved that about it. I want to know more about where Oranbeg came from for you as an artist. I know it was established in 2012. Where were you when you decided to establish Oranbeg? What you were thinking about? How did you feel Oranbeg could operate within the larger photo world?

It kind of started once I got access to a lab again. So like, I was home after graduating college for a few months and then I got the job at Pratt and I was just kind of messing around and trying to do my own stuff. The first book I printed was my O'Toole's book. I would google search my last name and use Dogpile and Bing and a bunch of other search engines to create an archive. So O'Toole's is just like a small little collection of those pictures. Some of them are really weird. But I printed out the first version on newsprint I bought from Blick with the inkjet printers.

O'Tooles Book reprint 2019

What other projects have you worked on just through Oranbeg that you're really proud of for, that you're really excited for, if there's something that's coming up?

The one I'm most proud about is Interleaves. Interleaves is like the precursor to As Of Late. They were just double-sided posters that were folded twice over. Always with a full image on the front and then the back was whatever the artists wanted to do. I had 150 artists participate in the project over three years. Once I figured out the system, I was very proud of it. The coolest thing about those is that for a lot of them, artists didn't put their names on them. Like you have no idea who they are really though I can always remember whose is whose. My friend Nelson [Chan] always teased me at book fairs, because I would lay it out like a deck of cards, like when a dealer puts down a deck for a casino or something.

Interleaves project on display

I love the image you have on your website of them altogether. You could see figures or faces poking out and the colors interacting with each other in really interesting ways. It's really impressive that you have, like 150 artists.

Yes. I was kind of crazy at the time. [laughs]

When you contacted me for the As Of Late, you had-- I can't remember if it was two or three different formats that we could shape our publication around. As an artist, I found that very interesting. This publisher imposed limitation that I could work into or , for other people, maybe something to work against. 

As of late by Kelsey Sucena

People do try to work against it, and it's really funny. With As of Lates, I like leaving as much leeway for artists to decide everything. I just follow one or two simple rules. Like the page limit and preferably a full-bleed spread for the front/back cover. And sometimes I'll work with people on the sequencing and we go through a few drafts or it's just a one time done edit. Both of those ways of editing always lead to great things.

You were going to say before, and I want to ask about, people trying to push up against the format for either Interleaves or As of Late. In what ways have you seen people doing that? 

I'm trying to think back now. Thinking back to As of Late, I don't have that many. They’re either the left bound, like a normal zine, or top bound. I’m always trying to convince people to do the top bounds, so I don't have a bunch of the top bound. So  trying to convince people to do something different with the left bounds is always a challenge. Something that no one's ever done, which I really want someone to do because it fits perfectly, was to do a left  bound, but treat is like a top bound. It'd be a nice vertical full-bleed book. 

Yes, that'd be great. Sort of like a calendar?

Yes. My thing is about having fun. If you're not having fun with it, if you're overstressed about it, you got to take a step back and kind of really, really just do it.

Yeah, for me, it was such a nice outlet. It was really well-timed when you invited me on board, and it was, I had this sort of collection of photographs and this poem that I had more or less resigned to not doing anything with. And then suddenly I was like, "Oh, here's something I use it for." So, I imagine a lot of other artists feel like it's a good opportunity to release some pressure, blow off some steam.

Yeah. Or experimenting with a sequence. 

///

I want to talk to you a little bit about your work, about you've been working on. Moving back a little bit in our conversation, I wasn't as familiar with O'Tooles, but I love the idea of using algorithms to search out O'Tooles. And it made sense to me to hear you talk about it because I know based on some of your other work, including the work that I know as your thesis work, There’s the Right Way, the Wrong Way and [Inaudible] and Diaspora. Those projects all seem to have a really strong personal thread. They’re very much about like your familial lineage and in a way that reflects what I think is your very Irish sensibility. 

Various faces from O'Tooles 2012

Mm-hmm.

So I want to know more about your personal work. Where it's been and where you see it going in the future.

Well, what I've actually been doing lately is, I'm going back to my hard drive and looking at stuff I have written off. Like, I'm looking at the  Diaspora stuff again because that's more or less like the precursor of There's a Right Way, the Wrong Way, and [Inaudible]. I haven't really touched the last edit I made to my thesis work since November. I went to Ireland in January this year, and I shot a bunch, and I went during the summer, and I shot a bit. And now I’m figuring out ‘what do I need?’ What's the way to change what I am comfortable with and what kind of imagery should I aim for? But then, the other thing are these poems I write on my phone while I ride the subway.

Swimming 2020

Yes, those are great. I love those.

They're fun. I like them a lot. I was like, "Okay, well, I ride the subway for 15 minutes a day, so let me just do that."

Has that slowed down since the pandemic?

A little bit, yes. Now I either try to write something late at night, or I try to write something in the morning. If I'm either working or if I'm sitting, watching something, and I hear something that sounds cool, I'll write that down, and I start going. But then, the thing that I would want to do with those is have them in conversation with these photos that are orphans that I have, photos that aren't particularly part of anything.

Okay. I wanted to, just for people who are maybe not familiar with your work, ask you for a description of your [Inaudible] project.

I like that shortening of the title of the project. 

How would you describe to people who are maybe unfamiliar with your work what [Inaudible] is?

So [Inaudible] is this photography and text work that is about the idea of looking for home and what is home. The main reason why I say that is whenever my family goes to Ireland, because my dad's from Ireland, he came to the US in the 80s and my mom's Father was from Ireland too, so my mom is a first-gen Irish American as well, is when we go back and visit aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and we're staying at someone's house, they're like, "Oh, welcome home." And I'm like, "Yeah, it's my home." Massachusetts is also my home. Brooklyn is more or less my home. Ireland is also home because I've been going there since I was a kid, almost every other year. So, it became about this investigation into my thoughts and feelings towards this place and my thoughts and feelings towards the idea of home and family, and maybe more of this longing for something.

Mom on Easter 2018

Yes, I was going to say, I think that your images tend to have this sense of longing, and I think it's a sense that is reinforced by the locality, all of the Irish countryside imagery. I know just within the United States, Irish folks have strong connections to their national origin. Part of my family is pretty Irish. So then to see this landscape, to hear you refer to it as a kind of home, it all feels very longing. It feels both distant and close, both something that you possess and something that you don't always possess, that you don't always have access to.

Yes. Because the main thing is, I'm American, not Irish. So, it is my home, but it’s not really my home.

Yes. There's that distance there, that longing.

I think that's where I struggled for a while. That's where the text helped because the text was all me taking the portraits of my different family members and having conversations with them, and then I would get the lowest quality transcription on TranscribeMe. I just threw that all into a document and would grab a word, and I would search for another word, and then slowly build-up that new conversation.

Which feels very familiar. Like sitting down and getting information from parents and grandparents about a place that you're not familiar with. There’s that constant re-translation of a place, again that you have a strong connection to, but that you're also so distant from.

Yes. Exactly. 

I'm trying to remember the last few things that I wanted to talk to you about. Do you have any grand feelings, any important statements? Anything that you've been thinking about lately? Maybe especially in relation to the quarantine, about photography and publishing and the role of those things at this moment in time?

Well, I've been cleaning out my childhood bedroom because all my old stuff is in boxes. So, I've been photographing that stuff, and I've been watching the light in my parents' house because I’m photographing there now. But now I'm trying to looking for particular moments in the different spaces, like chasing something. Don't know what it is. And I've been chasing the idea of something for the past couple of months. Like how I said, I've been in this weird hibernation trying to figure out this idea that's stuck in my brain, but I don't know what it is yet. And I like when it comes from books. I think books are super important. I just read that Rebecca Solnit book, I have to look up what it's called.
I read it on an entire train ride from Boston to New York. A really close friend found a copy on the street in Brooklyn and gave it to me right before my trip.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, maybe?

Yes.

Oh, that's a good one.

I read it on an entire train ride from Boston to New York.

Wow, that's such a way to read it.

Yeah. Oh, it was great. I haven't done that in ages. I just did not put the book down. That book's been in my brain a lot. I'm on a book buying splurge lately while I'm home because I don't have any of my photo books here. And I’m also wanting to support all these other publishers and buy things and have some stuff to look at while I'm here. So, I think that's very important right now.

Books in Auburndale