Well—we survived our first day at Steidl! We reported at 7:30 this morning, fulling expecting to be told that our files and photos were not up to snuff! Instead, we were surprised to hear Steidl say, “Let’s give it to the designer!”

We couldn’t sleep last night and Ken worked all night on the files. We knew that there were some files that weren’t high enough resolution! When we went there this morning we realized that we just had to go with the flow and let go!

Ken had gone to Idaho last week to help move his father to an assisted living home. While he was gone we got the news that Steidl was ready for us to come to Germany to produce the book! It became a matter of getting him home and quickly grabbing all the files! That was it! No time to make sure that everything was the latest file or the highest resolution file. We just had to find a flight and get going!

After we told Steidl that we were concerned about some of the files, we were happy to hear him say that it was “No problem.” We were quickly assigned a designer names Victor! Victor re-layed out the book in a modern and clean layout – We love it! It looks great!

We spent the day waiting for Victor to place our file in his new Steidl layout and talking to the other 4 teams who were visiting with their book projects. There was Joshua Chuang, Chief Curator from the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona; Lunetta, from Maker in Johannesburg, South Africa; Dianne and Pierre from “La Bal” in Paris; Anna Davidson, daughter of Bruce Davidson, Magnum photographer; and us!

Rudy, the Steidl cook, made us a beautiful lunch. We are asked to stay while our projects are being worked on so that we can check them as the designers and printers work, so lunch is served! It’s quite amazing! Steidl is watching over every project carefully and we are called to talk over the project with him as it is worked on.

After our designer, Victor, went home for the day, we also left and  we had a nice dinner at the local cafe around the corner–the P Cafe! It’s not too far to walk and we were glad it was so close as we’re so so tired. We’ll have no problem sleeping tonight!

We toasted the book project and all the photographers in the book!