The 'book' relates to an exhibition of photobooks at Barcelona's Centre for contemporary culture. The 'book' is actually eight loose sixteen page booklets and a fold-out poster (one has all the titles's credits) in a sealed cardboard box. You have to tear off one side of the box to access the booklets which have their cotton binding showing (it's as if they were printed but instead of binding them into a book they were left as individual sections and put in a box).
I found the contents a rather mixed bag of essays. Worth reading is Moritz Neumuller and Lesley Martin's overview of photobooks from the last few decades. Martin Parr looks at fifty seven books basically as detailed captions under a photo of each title. Markus Schaden and Frederic Lezmi essay has a go at a typographic interpretation of Klein's Life is good & good for you in New York by enlarging various words in an attempt to capture the visual pacing in Klein's title. Gerry Badger makes some good points in his essay on propaganda versus protest books. The other four books I thought somewhat elitist.
Perhaps all these illustrated essays would have more credence if they were actually presented as a proper book rather than unbound and in a sealed box. This unorthodox production is no more than a bit of designer whimsy and rather expensive, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment