The Making of "Girls" by Shannon Brooke

Make no mistake: Shannon Brooke is an artist. Not some stuffy, confuses-privilege-with-depth-of-character artist, but your classically punk rock, mini skirt with combat boots, lives in a crazy bird nest, wild-eyed adventurer artist, who channels disregard for self-preservation into good times and amazing photographs.

Fun at the Sacramento Airport

I wasn’t fully aware of this fact when we arrived at her doorstep in November 2014, bag full of breakfast burritos in tow, to help her realize a long-standing dream of releasing a book of her images onto the world. My wife and I are the brains, workforce, and pocketbook of a little independent publishing house called Working Class Publishing. Long standing fans of her work, we were happy enough just to meet Shannon at Viva Las Vegas, never guessing that she would eventually entrust this project to us, leading us to her home on a gloomy November day in Northern California.

Proofing an early version of Girls

Shannon’s place is intrinsically cool – thick concrete walls of an old factory converted into apartments, overlooking the beauty and decay of downtown Sacramento. There’s just enough room for Shannon and her elder pit bull Jezebel, hardly enough room for her collection of art, artifacts, records, and memorabilia, and only a laughable amount of space for a giant/ clumsy fellow to set up shop for a solid week of production work.

It’s just a book of pictures, right? How hard can it be to make such a thing? Here’s a list of why making a collection of Shannon’s work isn’t easy:

1. The sheer volume of material. Shannon has been shooting for a long time, and has created thousands of beautiful fully finished and retouched images that have been circulated online and printed in the scene’s most notable publications. On top of that, there are thousands more never-seen and unfinished works of art just yearning to break free, packed terabytes of disk space crammed into drawers and cabinets – an endless supply of gorgeous images at your disposal. It’s not a matter of trying to fill a book, but struggling to find the perfect collection of photos that would become Girls by Shannon Brooke.

2. Shannon has crazy/ awesome ideas – lots of them. Gold-embossed fabric cover with a matte-finished picture down the middle? Sure, no problem. Can we insert a semi-translucent title page at the start of each new section, creating a cool visual effect where the first picture teases us from behind the name of the model? Ummm… yeah, probably. Let me call the printer again…

1. Shannon will not, under any circumstances, put out unsatisfactory work. There are a lot of pin-up books on the market, all with varying degrees of quality. This would not be a loose collection of questionably-placed, watermarked images thrown together to make a buck. Girls would be a testament to time spent: calibrating color across equipment, adjusting saturation, retouching, fixing, reimagining, scrapping everything and starting over. Going over paper samples, testing the translucency of special order sheets over pictures, and enough calls to the printer rep that you hear an audible sigh instead of “hello.” This is what makes her book so special – attention to detail, a demand for quality that sometimes lacks in a for-profit business.

By the end of our week together, we had eaten a number of pizzas and burritos, blasted some great music out of open windows into the dreary Sacramento rain, and stared at picture options until our minds teetered on the edge of sanity. It would still be months of changes, alternate layouts, and fresh ideas before we were close to done. Then add another full-lockdown week of work while fighting sub-zero Wisconsin temperatures with fresh-baked cookies and small-batch beer. It’s then that you understand how lucky you are to even know Shannon, much less get to be part of such an amazing project.

Girls by Shannon Brooke