phot(o)lia

Two Thousand Light Years from Home. Pietro Mattioli.

Two Thousand Light Years from Home. Pietro Mattioli.

Photographs by Pietro Mattioli
Text by Urs Stahel (in English and German)
Designed by Winfried Heininger

Published by Kodoji Press, 2012. First edition of 700 copies. 

[Purchase: Spaces Corners, Dashwood Books]

Beautiful and creative publication from a small Swiss publisher Kodoji Press. The book is a collection of photographs by Pietro Mattioli, taken while he was strolling around his neighborhood, all within easy walking distance. A young father at that time he had to remain close to the house. There were hardly any light in his quiet quarter, so he used a flash light to isolate and photograph things around: gates, fences, trees, rocks, flowers. Mattioli focused on the objects that are mostly ignored in our everyday life, - banal, boring, ordinary.

As a book this is a wonderful object. It has a plain cover of light-pink with the title type around the cover’s perimeter (a reference to Mattioli zigzagging his neighborhood). Folded sheet of the book remain uncut on the edge, revealing deep pink. Photobook printing and binding also offers tactile experience. 

More:
Watch book video
The Photobook

 

10x10 American Photobooks Team.

And here is our 10x10 American Photobooks team:
Matthew (ICP Library), Olia (photolia), Shiori and Victor (bdp); and of course Russet who is traveling at the moment. 

photo by Mathieu Asselin

Make-Up Girls. Ed Templeton. & N/E/S/W. Clint Woodside.

Make-Up Girls. Ed Templeton.
N/E/S/W. Clint Woodside.

Photographs by Ed Templeton
Photographs by Clint Woodside

Self-published, 2012. Edition of 400. 

[Purchase: currently sold out]

A joint project by two Los Angeles-based photographers. Half of the book features black and white make-up girls by Ed Templeton. The other half, landscapes and journey by Clint Woodside. Two very differnt styles create dynamic and an interesting shift.

Watch the video

10x10 Studio.

Saturday at the ICP Library!
We set up our 10x10 photo studio and spent the whole day photographing books for the catalog. A long but productive day with books and wonderful people. If you love photobooks, pre-order 10x10 catalog now and follow updates on upcoming exhibition in NYC and Tokyo.

Luigi Ghirri.

Exhibition: Kodachrome by Luigi Ghirri
Location: Matthew Marks Gallery (526 West 22 Street)
Dates: 5 March - 20 April 2013
Opening: Tuesday, 5 March 2013, 6 to 8

10x10 American Photobooks.

10x10 is taking 100 contemporary American photobooks to Tokyo this year (with pre-view in NYC). We’re also producing a photobook: a unique, experimental and creative project to document 10x10 American Photobooks show.

You can pre-order 10x10 catalogue here.

Ten specialists (x2) from the photobook community are each selecting 10 contemporary American photobooks for the reading room and online. The catalogue will feature all selected photobooks, along with essays (not previously published) on American photobook culture by noted artists, writers, publishers, curators and bibliophiles. 

Specialists selecting the books for the 10x10 reading room:
1. Shannon Michael Cane / Printed Matter
2. Lindsey Castillo, Rebecca O’Keefe, and Grant Willing / The Camera Club of New York
3. Bruno Ceschel / Self Publish, Be Happy
4. Christina Labey / Conveyor Arts
5. Larissa Leclair / Indie Photobook Library
6. Leigh Ledare / Photographer
7. Harper Levine and John Gossage / Harper’s Books and Loosestrife Editions
8. David Senior / Museum of Modern Art Library Bibliographer
9. David Solo / Photobook Collector
10. Alec Soth and Brad Zellar / Little Brown Mushroom

Specialists selecting the books for 10x10 online:
1. Adam Bell / Photographer and writer
2. Tom Claxton / Claxton Projects
3. Joerg Colberg / Conscientious
4. Matt Johnston / The Photobook Club
5. Melanie McWhorter / Photo-eye, Bookstore Manager
6. Eric Miles / Photo-eye, Director of rare books and online auctions
7. James Pomerantz / Photographer and Photo Researcher at The New Yorker Magazine
8. Heidi Sanders / 6 Decades Books 
9. Douglas Stockdale / The Photobook
10. Philip Tomaru / Arts & Sciences Projects

Writers for 10x10 essay collection:
1. Bryan Formhals / LVP Magazine 
2. William E. Jones / Artist, filmmaker and writer 
3. Evan Mirapaul / Photobook collector, writer
4. Andrew Roth / PPP Editions + Roth Gallery
5. Michael Saur / Writer
6. Ken Schles / Photographer
7. David Levi Strauss / Writer
8. Miwa Susuda / Dashwood Books
9. Tony White / Maryland Institute College of Art
10. Bernard Yenelouis / Writer

The project is sponsored by the International Center of Photography Library, the Tokyo Institute of Photography, and the Photobook Facebook Group.

Dennis Stock.

Exhibition: Dennis Stock Photographs
Location: Milk Gallery (450 West 15th Street, New York)
Dates: 2 April - 17 April 2013
Opening reception: 2 April 2013, 7 to 10

La Emblematica de Gerd Leufert.

La Emblematica de Gerd Leufert.

Concept and Graphic design by Alvaro Sotillo
Photographs by Paolo Gasparini

Published by Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas, 1984. First edition.

[Purchase: bdp]

La Emblematica de Gerd Leufert is an exceptional visual book. The book has few photographs by notable Venezuelan photographer Paolo Gaspirini (as illustrations), but its focus is graphic design. The book was produced and designed by Alvaro Sotillo, another key figure in Venezuelan world of art and design. Incredible work by Leufert brought together in a book format by Sotillo created a beautiful and visually powerful object.

Gerd Leufert was born in Memel, Germany (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). He moved to Venezuela in early 1950s and spent there most of his life. He was married to Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), a modern Venezuelan artist and sculptor (who also moved to Venezuela from Germany). Leufert is considered one of the pioneers of graphic design in Venezuela, his work covered design, photography and art. He created identity for International Airport of Maiquetía, Logo for the Venezuelan Pavilion, N.Y. (World’s Fair, 1964), The Simón Bolívar University,Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas.

As Victoria de Stefano noted in her introduction, the works reproduced in this book are “the outcome of Leufert’s long interplay with signs in his game of expressing abstract concepts, from the dynamic, the organic, the exact, the inexact and transparent, to the not yet possible”.

This book earned the Goldene Letter price in Leipzig, as the most beautiful book in 1985. Álvaro Sotillo has also obtained the Gutenberg Price in 2005 for his trajectory as a graphic and layout designer. 

More
Video of the book by bdp

New York Antiquarian Book Fair 2013.

Exhibition: New York Book Fair 2013, by Sanford L. Smith and Associates
Location: Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Avenue, New York) 
Dates: 11 April - 14 April 2013
Preview: Thursday, 11 April 2013 from 5 to 9  

The Last City. Pablo Ortiz Monasterio.

The Last City. Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexico).

Photographs by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
Design and edit by Jack Woody, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
Text by Jose Emilio Pacheco

Published by Twin Palms, 1995. First edition, 3,000 copies. 

[Purchase: Twin Palms, photo-eye, bdp (Mexican Edition)]

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio is a Mexican photographer, also known for his editorial work (Río de Luz and Luna Córnea). Pablo Ortiz Monasterio spent years wandering in Mexico City, capturing isolated moments of the megapolis, its inhabitants, crimes, corners, energy, misery, surprises. The photographs are exceptional: iconic jump picture, dramatic personifications of Christ, a boy with a dog, a guy looking through the shades, turkeys walking in debris. Ortiz’s project started as a documentation but turned into a symbolic journey. Guns, poverty, yet the city is still full of life and smiles.

“The city keeps transforming itself so much that a description seems futile,” Ortiz said. “The size of it is so immense. I had to change my plan and work more in terms of evoking it. What does one feel to be in the streets of Mexico City?” The last picture in the book is a tree: life goes on.

This is a good book. A red clothed cover with an illustrated jacket adds a strong red to the book. It also has beautiful end papers. The photographs are reproduced using the sheet-fed gravure method on uncoated Japanese paper. Black and white images are reinforced by extra black colour. The book won a prize for the best photo book at the Photographic Spring Festival in Barcelona (1998) and Gold Eye of the Festival Des Trois Continents in France (1997). 

Second edition of this book, published in Mexico City by Case de las Imagenes (with printing by Nissha Printing Co, Kyoto), was included in The Latin American Photobook.

More
Planeta
Short video on Pablo Ortiz Monasterio