The Structure of the Photobook: Strategies for Editing and Sequencing
Instructor: Tim Carpenter | Tuition: $390 (Members) $460 (Non-Members) |
Dates: Tuesdays, December 10, 17, January 7, & 14 | Time: 6-9 PM EST | Class Size Max: 6






Many photographers who have little problem completing a body of work are intimidated by the process of editing, sequencing, and structuring their pictures in the photobook form. This online class, developed in collaboration with Image Threads, offers a variety of approaches for managing and shaping one's book. Through practical assignments, concrete examples, lectures, and group discussions of works-in-progress, participants will apply specific strategies for aligning the structure of their book with the personal impetus that led them to make the pictures in the first place. Participants should come to the first class with a early-draft PDF version of their book project: edited, sequenced, and ready for discussion.
If your desired tuition option is unavailable, please email info@penumbrafoundation.org and we will do our best to accommodate you. If the entire class is sold out, we can add you to the waitlist.
Tim Carpenter (Illinois, 1968) is a photographer, writer, and educator who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is the author of several photobooks, among them A month of Sundays (TIS books); Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road (The Ice Plant); Local objects (The Ice Plant); township (collaboration with Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Brad Zellar; TIS/dumbsaint); Bement grain (TIS/dumbsaint); Still feel gone (collaboration with Nathan Pearce; Deadbeat Club Press); Illinois central (Kris Graves Projects); The king of the birds (TIS books); and A house and a tree (TIS books). Local objects was included in the 2018 exhibition “American Surfaces and the Photobook” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was listed for the Kassel Photobook Award 2018. Tim received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and in 2015 co-founded TIS books, an independent photobook publisher. He is a faculty member of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program, serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Mentorship Program, and is a co-proprietor of Distant Zine. Tim’s book-length essay To photograph is to learn how to die was published by The Ice Plant in Fall 2022.