Folks familiar with my work and this aspect of my practice are by now familiar with the most frequent playlists I share these days tending to sprout from one of two inspiration seeds: travel companion or project companion. This latest playlist started as one but ended up becoming both; the soundtrack to our trip through France, as well as the musical companion to my newest publication Windows & Doorways, with the complete essay from the book down below the track listing.
Earlier this summer, my wife and I took a trip to France to visit a number of cities less frequented by tourists, especially those from the US, with a rather niche itinerary guided largely by a special interest pursuit of mine to see all of the Marc Chagall stained glass windows. [Somehow, there is no great singular place on the internet with all of them for me to link to, but this guy’s dream itinerary his wife would not agree to is one of the most complete in regards to the European windows] . Those of you who know me in real life will not be surprised to learn that I was very hard on myself for not planning a more intellectually rigorous trip, or having a better reason to see the windows than “IDK, they’re just something I want to see”. Over those two weeks we had countless incredible meals, stumbled into art and collective effervescence, and met and talked with so many people who were at first extremely confused why Americans had chosen to holiday in Metz of all places but eventually turned to conversations of normal people sharing about our lives. This playlist began as songs we heard in bars and restaurants and I would listen to on walks and in galleries. As with all of my travel playlists, once a theme starts to gel, this one existing in a real sphere of funky jazzy ambient admittedly in no small part due to the vinyl collection of the unbearably cool and kind owners of Atome in Reims, I tend to dive in and see what else comes out of the wood work that feels right.
But of course, as happens when you are able to carve away distance from life and spend a little more time in your head, this trip I felt was essentially one of novelty, eventually spun together for me. I’ve spent the last few months thinking a lot about the state of my publishing as National Monument Press, where its been in the last ten years and where its going. The combination of a trip literally to see windows, mixed with my own habit of documenting windows and doorways, began to spark an admittedly simple but meaningful analogy for me of how I see my publishing. Once home, I quickly got to work on a new publication of images from this trip, as well as recent travel to Egypt and Greece along with some other photos from the last few years, paired with an essay that serves as a reflection and a lens of where my publishing has been and where its going. The same soundtrack to a wine bar full of friends served as a companion to the ideas I have been working with for making the difficult more approachable and collaborating on stories that are personal experiences of our shared existence. As I write in the essay, my interest these days is driven by considering how to craft a doorway and making anyone willing to enter it feel welcome.
If you’d like to check out the full publication, you can see more on my website or purchase it from my webstore. Either way, I hope this playlist helps take you somewhere or provides an environment for time with friends.
#28 Joie De Vivre / Windows & Doorways
Listen here on Spotify
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore - Stardust
Cosmic Analog Ensemble - Stereogrammes
Raffy Bushman - Renaissance
The National - Apartment Story
Minoru Muraoka - Take Five
The Vernon Spring - Mother’s Love
The Books - Fralite
Django Reinhardt - Swinging with Django
Rostam - Hardy
Build An Ark - Sunflowers in My Garden
Tul8te - El Lahze Di (Jazz Edition)
Monster Rally - Lazy Hibiscus
Madlib - Stormy
Noriko Miyamoto & Isao Suzuki - My Life
Harry Styles - American Girls
You May - Relovution
Oklou - choke enough
Bon Iver- Heavenly Father
St Germain - So Flute
Shabaka - Marwa The Mountain
The Doors - Peace Frog
Jitwam - Opendoors
Orions Belte - how long is… cold pizza good for
Tara Clerkin Trio - Movin On
Zaoui - Le Piege
Dorothy Ashby - Lonely Girl
Yelle - Tu es beau
M83 - Train to Pluton
Gia Margaret - Phone Screen
Green-House - Farewell, Little Island
Brendan Eder Ensemble - 137 Riddle
Adrien de la Salle - Lueur
Saint Etienne - Little K
The following essay was written for the aforementioned Windows & Doorways publication, but I wanted it to also exist in an online, public place, as its a new long mission statement of sorts...
Windows & Doorways
As the world attempted to pivot entirely to online teaching in 2020, I offered to be a virtual visiting artist for anyone and everyone who was interested. As someone teaching online at this time myself, I knew how badly educators needed help filling the time and keeping things interesting and just taking a break amongst the expectation to completely shift their teaching into unfamiliar territory. It was, admittedly, also a self serving act. I found that the more I talked about my practice, especially in relation to the previous five years of artist publishing, the more I understood what I was doing and could speak about it more succinctly. I got very good at explaining how the work I made, both by myself and in collaboration with other artists, aligned with the mission I set out for myself when I began publishing as National Monument Press.
Once the art world returned to something resembling normalcy, I was extremely fortunate that the practice I grieved as being over 2 years earlier had actually shifted into something even bigger and busier than what I thought I lost when the world shut down. A return to academia and a self sustaining publishing and printing practice provided me the ability to create work with greater output and reach than I had ever imagined when I first began to make this type of work. Along with that, the opportunities to share and speak about my work continued to grow. While my catalogue grew and expanded alongside, the way I talked about my work was so tight and rehearsed I could switch entirely to auto pilot when presenting my practice.
Earlier this year, while giving an artist talk to a graduate Book Arts class at the University of Alabama, a student asked, or more accurately stated, something that had been in the back of my mind for awhile but I had been ignoring. They qualified their inquiry by explaining they found all of my work really beautiful and moving, but then got to the point: they couldn’t see how most of my recent publications had anything to do with my declared mission statement for my press. As I remember it, I responded “Yeah, no, you’re not wrong…”, because they were completely correct to point out this quandary. How are aging and ailing parents, harm reduction, protest movements, and natural disasters “uniquely American experiences”? This of course is to say nothing about all of the work I’m creating about travel, meta photography publishing, and my own increasingly esoteric projects about time and memory and the sacred.
The speed of previous years’ publishing had me following projects I was interested in, often juggling multiple at once, without the time to stop and look at what it all meant. In 2024 alone I published 18 projects alongside teaching, co-curating a Risograph publishing survey, and spending four months abroad. While the number of projects sensibly scaled back in 2025, the success of those projects combined with an unexpected museum commission of significant scale and an increased teaching load, the scope of work did not exactly lessen. I had intentionally decided to scale back my publishing commitments at the beginning of 2026, largely to dedicate time to finishing multiple lingering personal projects, but also, to hopefully be able to find the words to explain this thread I have been sewing with.
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I’ve been publishing in some form my entire creative life, from being the editor of my high school newspaper and writing for punk zines in my youth, to putting out music and designing merch for bands in my early 20s, to several years in the early 2010s in which the bulk of my creative time was dedicated to running a collaborative online art publication. In 2015, halfway through my graduate studies, I fully committed to the book as my artistic medium. The small, personal, format for experiencing work combined with the romance of democratized multiple made sense to me for the work I was making.
Equipped with the type and letterpress I acquired in graduate school and, shortly after, my first risograph I acquired with the last $400 remaining from my mother’s life insurance policy after paying for her funeral, I began working under the name National Monument Press. My first attempts at making sense of what I was doing were steeped fully in reaction to the 2016 election. Forced to confront that our country was not entirely on the progressive inclusive track my elder millennial optimism had believed possible, I wanted to prioritize work that was somehow speaking about America, in an admittedly elastic framework, ideally from under-represented points of view.
For the first seven years, I think I succeeded in this mission, publishing work about such topics as the complications of first generation identity, converted military architecture, diversity and assimilation, neighborhood oral histories, and national elections. These projects were primarily by women, people of color, and immigrants, each projects I’m still so wildly grateful to have been trusted with. My personal work tended to be something that existed alongside these projects, as opposed to another side of a completed whole. Many of these projects were also very much my collaborator’s stories to tell, and while I was part of bringing them into a physical world, my personal inclusion was rarely integral to the project and honestly probably would have made the work worse.
2023 is when my publishing began to shift. Nearing the completion of Like things go away with my dear friend and collaborator Alyson Provax, she insisted that my name also be included on the cover, an infrequent act within my publishing. To her, we had been working on the book together for two years at this point and my part in its creation was integral to the work. Simultaneously, Sara Winston and I were at work on a project she had been thinking about for years and asked me to be a part of trying to figure out based on qualities she liked from my previous publications. Projects all began to take more time, often reflecting the years behind those mentioned, and the end result inherently more collaborative.
I think the simplest way to describe the shift in my publishing is that the motivating inquiry has moved from “How can I help you make this?” to “Can you help me make this?”, which is both a question I’m being asked as well as asking more myself. Publishing, to me, has become an invitation into a vulnerable and intimate relationship. This goes both for the making and the viewing, which is also a way of addressing not only “how” the creation of my books has changed, but how the “what” has been reframed. I’ve become less interested in a prescriptive mission for my publishing in pursuit of work that attempts to make the uncomfortable more approachable. Loss, grief, and time have become the driving themes behind so much of the work I’m publishing which, I think at least for the moment, I have some skill helping to share. The specifics of anyone’s grief are always unique, but we have all experienced loss; we all have the capacity for empathy if an invitation is given. My interest these days is driven by considering how to craft a doorway and making anyone willing to enter it feel welcome.
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I recognize that, on the surface, I have not addressed one of the largest categories of work I both collaborate on and produce myself: travel. Those familiar with my work for some time now will be aware of the consistency of this theme, as well as my own self conscious and complicated feelings around it. I published a book in 2022 entitled Tourist Photographs to work through some of my thoughts and grad school trauma around the topic, and yet once again, the vast majority of images within this book you are holding, exist within the vernacular. I think often of a question a fellow student and now accomplished photographer of the Midwest asked me during a critique of my work in undergrad, “These are beautiful photos, but why did you have to travel to Paris to take them? Isn’t Chicago interesting enough?”, a question as valid as the one that began this entire quest to redefine my practice.
I believe my answer then was something about how I had already taken enough photos of Chicago over the years and needed to see something new. An amusing thought for a 24 year old, that he had already seen enough, but I admit that I do still relate with a portion of my younger sentiment. I do need to regularly leave home, to get a new perspective, in order to activate the part of my brain connected to looking and seeing and thinking, and sometimes the best way to be able to see and speak about your circumstances is temporarily leaving them. This is by no means a novel thought, especially when considering the long relationship the US and France, the main visual character in this publication, have shared as back and forth havens for authors and artists of the 19th and 20th century. I am paradoxically both my most critical and my most defensive of my home while away, as if I need to look out a different window to see it clearly.
However, my own personal sensory acuity is only part of why I find travel to be a topic worth sharing and supporting. Leaving home, going somewhere unfamiliar, even on the most tightly planned excursion, is an exercise in vulnerability towards the unknown. For many, it’s the closest they will ever come to being an other, and that in this, we are able to see the ways we actually are similar. Much like the specifics of our grief, the circumstances for our perseverance are individual, but the motivation is shared: to feel safe, to feel secure, to share good meals with friends.
I think this outward view and embrace has only become more essential in our current moment. As previously mentioned, much of my publishing motivation was inward looking at my own country and its political climate. It’s become increasingly clear that our struggles in the US are the world’s struggles, and that our stories are more shared than not. I find Americans right now are especially concerned of how we will be received abroad, but over the last 10 years, I’ve generally found that anyone who arrives with genuine curiosity and care will be met with warmth and acceptance, exactly as we hopefully would receive others in exchange, because class solidarity and relationship building is something we shouldn’t just leave locked up at home. The differences between myself and someone from the other side of the planet are largely related to language and power and politics, and around the world, governments reflect their people less and less these days. As it has ever been, culture and community live within the people, and finding ways to be exposed to that is essential if we’re going to make it.
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10 years into this practice, I’ve published over 60 books and been fortunate to work with over three dozen artists I’m grateful to call friends. These books have been shown at countless book fairs and made their way into private and institutional collections around the world. They were first made in my garage, and now are produced inside Chute Studio, the studio Amy Burek and I began building the day Covid-19 shut down the world and has somehow turned into nearly 1000 sqft of printing, binding, and finishing equipment in Oakland, CA. I began making books because the form made sense to me; the ability to share a long story within the intimacy of the hand held, an alternative to the way work on a wall can shout into a void. I started making books with others mostly as a fun way to do something together, almost tricking people into being my friend. Now it’s still fun, for the most part, and the friendships are even stronger, but the responsibility of it all feels bigger and more meaningful. I honestly had no idea this is how it would turn out, and likely if you’ve read this far, you certainly had some hand in supporting all of it, for which I’m grateful.
I think in the beginning I needed a map or a reason to create the work I was making. The band keeping everything together continued to twist and expand, until eventually I remembered it wasn’t real to begin with. I have decades of photos I’ve taken of windows and doorways, a habit so engrained my wife has learned to just keep walking whenever I stop seemingly without cause. I’ll catch up eventually. It apparently took a trip specifically to look at them to realize this was what I had been interested in all along: entry ways, openings, access to a view…
Windows & Doorways.
Zach Clark
July 2026
