Month of Photography's The Big Picture: It just keeps getting bigger and bigger

Denver's Month of Photography 2011, a citywide celebration of the art of the camera masterminded by local photographer and arts mover Mark Sink, was a picture-perfect success on all counts. One element, called The Big Picture, was particularly ambitious, adding an international flair and a sense of living, breathing drama to the event's spectrum. Sink collaborated with Adam Gildar and Illiterate Gallery (now Gildar Gallery) to curate a wheat-pasting adventure that shared large-scale local images with photographs submitted from overseas, allowing for a global exchange of pictures in the streets, free of the restrictions of gallery walls.

See also: - The Big Picture - Month of Photography: Nine shows to see - Street art: Pay attention to the road, not this awesome wall art on 6th Avenue

Part of the plan, Gildar says, was always to document the whole thing in a book, and that tome, The Big Picture 2011: Images Inside, Out the Door and Around the World, now lives in cyberspace at the self-publishing site Blurb.com. You can view a digital version of the 92-page book, artfully designed by Jesse Nobbe for Illiterate Media, at no cost; it includes installation photos from here and abroad, as well as a pictorial index of every work shared in The Big Picture. Or if you prefer, you can buy a bound, coffee table-ready hard copy for $67.95 at the site. Either way, it's an exhilarating diary of work-in-progress. "We want to acknowledge the fact that this is a compilation of work done by hundreds of people," Gildar notes. "It's not just images in a book." It's also a subtle kickoff for things to come. Mark Sink confirms that plans are already coming together for a biennial Month of Photography to return in March 2013, and Gildar intimates that it will again include The Big Picture. We can hardly wait to see what's in store.

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