Chilean Book Covers

This was a strange and almost haunting discovery. In 2003 A Chilean publishing company used several of my photos on the covers of their books. I am virtually certain no one requested permission to do this but the publisher did have the courtesy to credit me by name and web site URL.

It is mysteriously weird seeing something of your own creation incorporated into another work, especially when you never knew that other work existed. It’s like someone has been reading my mail and responding to it as if they were me.

This photo of a payphone from the West 4th Street subway station appears on the cover of El pianista que mandan llamar, by Luis Domínguez Vial. This book was reviewed at elperiodista. That photo actually appears to have been taken from this page at the old Payphone Project site, though it may have resided at sorabji.com earlier. This happened to be the first of these book covers that I found, and I was taken aback by the fact a pianist and a payphone appeared in the same context. As a pianist with a particular interest in payphones I initially imagined the connection was deliberate, but that seems unlikely.

The Hammacher Schlemmer window display seen on Jorge Diaz’s Ciertas Criaturas Terrestres was “The Big Picture” for December 5, 2002. That’s a photo of which I had no memory whatsoever, and which I find unpleasant to look at.

I discontinued “The Big Pictures” 4½ years ago, after Chinese hackers blew out my web server and nearly sent me over the brink. I was ready to stop doing a daily picture anyway. The idea of presenting a single daily image as some kind of marquee piece of content made less and less sense on an Internet that is drowning in images.

Nueva Narrative Cubana‘s cover uses a photo from Coney Island (they spelled it “Conney Island” in the citation) that was the “Big Picture” for August 26, 2002. The cover image from the publisher’s web site is hard to make out but that’s definitely the same shot, just cropped at the upper right.

The cover of Cuentos perfectos, by Antonio Rojas Gómez, has another photo of a Hammacher Schlemmer window display, though I cannot seem to find where it is or might have been at sorabji.com. The weird thing about this shot is that I would have bet cash cash money I took it later than 2003, when this book was first published. From what I can piece together from the book’s Amazon.com page the title was reissued in 2008 and more recently issued again in a Kindle edition. If they changed the cover for the Kindle Edition that might explain it, though I’m not bulletproof certain that the picture postdates 2003.

The cover of Diego Muñoz Valenzuela’s Flores para un cyborg
looks like a cropped version of the “Big Picture” for December 12, 2002, though I seem to remember posting other shots of that graffiti. On account of this particular title I have an entry on record at the Tercera Foundation. I’m sure that doesn’t mean a damn thing but it’s an unexpected and strange discovery.

There are others, too. I think I found 8 or 9 books out there with my photos on the covers. Normally I might take offense at this sort of thing but I can’t. It’s been so long since it happened, and I don’t think this publishing house meant any harm or made cash money on account of the images. I also like the way the covers look. The mutual amateurishness of the books’ designs and my images complement each other. I also appreciate the clear citations.

Not being fluent in Spanish I cannot tell what thematic connection might exist between the content of these books and the photos on their covers. Probably there is none. I did find it striking that a pianist and a payphone appear on one cover (El pianista que mandan llamar), but it seems far-fetched that the choice of photo was based on knowledge that the photographer was a pianist with an interest in payphones.

This all reminds me of a time I had a photo printed and framed by a professional purveyor of such services. I sent the framed print as a gift to somebody who, upon receipt and installation, sent a photo of where she had placed it on a wall in her dining room. Seeing it there felt vulgar to me, though not overwhelmingly so. It felt like a piece of me was trapped in a glass box and put on display against its will.

I would not feel so selfish about that scenario today. There is something to be said for being seen if you learn something new about yourself because of it.