After twenty years of having his photographs published in small circulation magazines and displayed at out-of-the-way art galleries, James Radke felt it was time to do a book. But rather than go through a traditional publishing house, the 42-year-old Colorado-born artist decided to publish it himself over the Internet.
The first five of fifty pictures that will comprise Radke's digital photographs from the web went up this week at his www.indenturedpress.com site. Five more will be made available each subsequent week, and all will remain online for a year.
His concept is that Web surfers will download the color photos, which document Radke's trips between his central Oakland home and the Center for Electronic Art in downtown San Francisco, where he's been studying Web design for the past eight months. When all fifty have been downloaded and printed out (he recommends using very high resolution paper), he invites people to mail him the complete set along with $50. In return, he will bind them and send back a numbered first-edition book. If the prints are not bound, Radke says, "they'll just have photographs for their wall."

MAKING BOOK

"It's an experiment in interactive publishing," he adds. "I'm publishing a book where there is no money in inventory, there is no money in printing costs. It's there for whoever wants to print it. As far as I know, there really hasn't been just a monograph of a person's paintings or photography or any genre published on the Internet."
The fifty shots were made with an Olympus 600L digital camera . "All the information was recorded digitally," he explains. "There was no film involved. It's all on a little chip. It's captured electronically, it's output electronically, it's seen electronically. It's just part of the evolution of what photography will be like."
Digital photographs from the web begins with a shot of a dog peering straight at the camera as it stands between a wooden fence and a brick wall at the corner of East 34th Street and Park Boulevard. Another, taken a few blocks away, frames the white-and-green foliage across the street from Oakland High against a curvaceous freeway offramp guardrail. Others capture scenes aboard buses, including one of a woman reading an Examiner with a photo of a nonchalant Bill Clinton and a headline reading "Acquitted" on the front page.

WHAT I SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

"These are the images that I have seen and encountered on my daily commute," the photographer explains. "There is no other point of departure. I just photographed what captured my eye. You see the passage of time, even though it was only done in six months. I've been doing a lot of things that are basically reportage my whole life, and they continue to have that feel."
The walls of Radke's home are lined with some of his earlier work. Two large black-and-white shots of crumpled cigarette wrappers are mounted in frames to which a variety of actual wrappers have been affixed; Radke found all of them on the street. A series of Polaroid shots chronicles the Gulf War as seen on his television set.
Radke, who over the years has sold bicycles and jewelry in order to support himself and his photography, calls his new company Indentured Press. "Indentured servants had to work for seven years with very little money to earn their freedom," he says. "I see myself at that point right now-just trying to get ahead. I'm hoping this will get me out of my indentured status, so to speak."