Marc Karzen has spent his career in rooms most photographers never get near. Born in Paris and raised between Louisville and Los Angeles, he came up as a magazine photographer before chance landed him on the set of Saturday Night Live, shooting the show’s logo written in wet cement in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. That led to 12 seasons at SNL, and then, in 1982, to Late Night with David Letterman.

For 11 years, Karzen was the man behind the bumpers—those iconic photographs that flashed on screen before and after commercials, integrating the show’s title into late-night New York street scenes. Shot on Kodachrome, entirely pre-digital, the Emmy-nominated work became one of the most recognizable visual signatures in television history. Millions of people saw those images for three seconds at a time. Almost none of them knew his name.

Decades later, Karzen brought that archive, and now a new project rooted in an equally unlikely origin story, into print. In this conversation, he discusses why he walked away from traditional publishers twice, how he approaches finding an audience, and what it means to give work that once lived on a screen a permanent home on the page. Read the interview and buy his books, Late Night Bumpers and Kentucky Derby 1984.

***

Want more inspiration like this? Sign up for emails to get a new Behind the Book delivered every month.

For anyone who doesn’t know you, how do you describe yourself and your work?

I’ve been a photographer since I was a teenager. I’ve had a camera on my shoulder and in my pocket forever. I started in the film days and now have my work in the digital world, but my career has moved across every medium. It started as a magazine photographer, then I got a gig working for Saturday Night Live, and that changed my life. I worked in television for many years, then moved back to L.A., did more in television, and, over the last fifteen years, have been in the movie business as well. 

My career involves a camera in one way or another, whether it’s on the printed page, on television, on the big screen, in advertising, or on social media. My experience in photography is a secret weapon. Someone who’s just a numbers cruncher is not going to have that same point of view. 

How to make an image or a spot connect with people and come to life creatively is the key to it all. It’s not just about cranking out materials—it’s about creating materials that connect. 

How did Late Night Bumpers come to be?

From the early days of shooting on Letterman, we did not know if we even had a show. The morning show he did in 1980 was so strange that it got canceled after several weeks. They put him on hold for another year while NBC decided what to do with him.

When I got hired to do the photos that would go before and after commercials—the bumpers—we had a six-week pickup, then another six-week pickup, then another quarter pickup. It wasn’t until we were one year in that we even knew the show was going to continue.

Early on, people would come up to me and say, “Marc, these photos would make a great coffee table book.” But I was 24, 25 years old. Getting the rights and clearances, taking images that were on NBC, and turning them into a book—it was really complicated. It took me years to get it all organized.

Everybody signed off finally. Then Dave announced he was leaving NBC for CBS, and my deal was dead. I didn’t revisit the idea until Dave announced he was leaving CBS. I went back to Dave and his team. 

This was like moving mountains, believe me. I also asked Dave if he’d write the intro, which he did. That was also a time-consuming effort. But persistence pays off.

I put together decks and PDFs and started pitching publishers. A really big publisher said, “This is amazing, let’s make this book.” But they told me it would take 18 months to two years to get going. We were coming up on the 40th anniversary of the show, and I couldn’t wait that long. I had done some prototype books with Blurb, so I said, “I’m just going to go independent on this.”

You are about to release a book on the Kentucky Derby. Tell us about this experience.

I was doing a podcast interview about Late Night Bumpers, and we started talking about this photo I did of Hunter Thompson, who was on the show one night. 

He wanted to take this box of explosives and blow up the set. And Dave’s like, “Obviously, no, Hunter, I think we’re going to take these explosives and move them.”

I went home and started to read his materials, especially the story that he wrote in 1970 about the Kentucky Derby called Decadent and Depraved.

That story coined the phrase “gonzo journalism,” the concept of making yourself and your experience the story, which is a journalistic line you don’t cross.

I’ve photographed the Derby in ’84 with this gonzo point of view. I shot everything on Kodachrome, so I had no idea what I was getting until I got home.

And, days later, I’m looking at slides, and it worked. I pitched it as a story to Rolling Stone and Esquire. But the horse that won the Derby ended up having a heart condition and a few months later died, which was super sad. It took all the wind out of my project, and I didn’t revisit it. 

After the podcast, I pulled out my Derby project, started camera scanning images from this book, put together a prototype, and pitched it in PDF and printed form. I got a publishing deal quickly. 

There’s an addressable audience. It’s vintage film. It’s got a real point of view. It’s got a story. And obviously, the Derby’s Evergreen. 

So I get into the development process with a publisher, and we’re a year into it, and we’re fine-tuning, rewriting, and editing, and all of a sudden, they have budget cuts and logistical issues, and want to extend the publishing date from 2026 to 2027.

With my experience doing Blurb books, I said, “I want to break this deal, and I’m going to self-publish.”

What’s your take on the difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing for photographers?

There’s an understood element within the photography world now that if you want to make a portfolio book or a personally expressive book, you can go to publishers and pay for the printing. With that, you’ll get some marketing built in from them. You can say, “I published a book with X publisher, I got to go on press, it’s available in bookstores.”

That’s become the new normal.

Depending on what your needs are and whether you have a project that is mainstream, to pay a publisher tens of thousands of dollars and maybe you recoup a couple of thousand, because you make about $3 per book when they sell them, and you could be in the negative with a bunch of books in the garage.

Or you can go the Blurb approach as I did with Late Night Bumpers. I designed it because I’ve been a designer for all these years, as well as a photographer. I am able to sell that through the Blurb Bookstore and on Amazon, and this is the third year I’ve made money. And it’s profit—straight profit.

Talk us through how you use prototyping and testing in your process.

I’m a big tester with Blurb. I test all the time. I test fonts, I test paper stock, I test formats.

I take a stack of 100 images and, in the course of three weeks, have a prototype book. Three days to scan them, a week to fine-tune them, a few days to sequence them, and upload to Blurb. It’s just test, test, try, try, fail, learn from your failures. You have to blow it a bunch of times to learn. 

As a photographer, the first thing you learn is no. “No, you can’t shoot me. No, you can’t shoot here.” So it’s all about trying, testing, and experimentation. Make some tests and show them to people. 

I have a friend here in L.A. who has the L.A. Book Club, and we meet every month or so at the farmer’s market. It’s 10 or 20 photographers, and we all bring things and show them. Does green look stupid? Is this too thick? Where did you print that? Are you camera scanning? Showing and getting feedback is a great way to build a community or become a part of one.

How do you think about format and size when designing your book?

Go to a bookstore and buy ten books that inspire you and live with them. I have two.

The Americans, by Robert Frank, is 8×10. The same size as the Blurb format. The most successful documentary photography book in the history of the medium. Everything’s one-sided, right-hand pages only. Introduction by Jack Kerouac. This was the worst-reviewed photography book ever—the entire art community rejected it. And over time, this became a historic landmark project.

William Eggleston’s Guide is 9×9. I realized small was what I wanted—large just didn’t make any sense. My images look good small. Some images want to be large because they’re landscapes, and some images hold up small.

I look at books that inspire me and use them to make some simple decisions in terms of format.

How do you talk about your work to get it seen?

The key to success is learning how to talk about your work. An agent told me that years ago. People who can talk about their work effectively and efficiently rise to the top of their profession, whether you’re a director of photography, writer, producer, actor, or photographer.

When you go to an art gallery opening as a creative person, everybody asks the same question: “What do you have coming up?” And if your response is uh, then you’ve lost them. 

“You’re a photographer?” 

“Yeah, I’ve got a Kentucky Derby book coming out this spring.” 

They know the Kentucky Derby, they know it’s a book, they know it’s coming out this spring. “Here’s my card.”

You learn over time how to pitch on your toes, even in a loud, crowded place.

Go to art galleries and get to know them. But don’t go to the ones that you really want to be in. Go to some other art galleries and just try to practice. No response is the common thing. But over time, you start to create some awareness.

***

Blurb supports creators like Marc Karzen. Whether you’re revisiting an archive that’s been sitting on a shelf for 40 years or building a new project from scratch, Blurb provides the tools to design, test, refine, and bring your work to the page. Get started today.