THE LOST LIGHT RECORDINGS
A photobook is more than a book of photographs.
It encompasses a series of images that work together, often in a sequence, that communicate a feeling, a narrative, a story, a message or a combination of those. Text and other elements including design, format and materiality can amplify the experience between the photographer and the reader in a complex dialogue.
The Lost Light Recordings is based in a small, unassuming blue workshop at the bottom of a garden in Somerset and is dedicated to creating distinct and fascinating photobooks. The books are produced in collaboration with each photographer with the design developing from the concept and the subject of the series.
Each book that is published is carefully hand-crafted in the United Kingdom and produced as a limited numbered edition.
LEE ELKINS
Lee Elkins is the founder and Creative Director of The Lost Light Recordings. Established in 2018, Lost Light Recordings is an independent publisher that works with photographers to realise projects through the medium of the photobook. The books he has created under the imprint since 2018, including Cian Oba-Smith’s Andover & Six Acres, Sadie Catt’s Woodstock and the forthcoming Harrowdown Hill by John Spinks, explore the political landscape and its effect on people and place.
Passionate about creating authentic expressions of photographers’ work, Elkins collaborates creatively with both established photographic artists and new talent to create distinctive photobooks. Elkins manages the whole process of creating a book with intense detail: from the editing down and sequencing of photographs with the artist, the graphic design, materiality, personally overseeing the printing, to hand binding the books. This attention to detail calls on Elkins conviction that a photobook is more than a book of photographs, which in the right hands can become a complex intellectual dialogue between photographer and reader and his experience as a master bookbinder in the printing industry. Elkins worked as a bookbinder for twenty years in Frome, Somerset, for one of the UK’s most significant printers before gaining a first class BA (Hons) in Photography from the University of the West of England and an MA in Photography and the Book from Plymouth University.
Lee Elkins is Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of the West of England, Bristol.