The first stall was home to students of photography at the University of Newport. One of them explained her project documenting sufferers of the skin condition Lupus. She used double exposures to blend their potraits with images of butterflies, which they hold as a symbol of hope. I then spent some time browsing titles on the Maarten Schilt publishing stand. There were some fine books on offer here and I was captivated by I Belong Jarrow by Chris Harrison.
The artist grew up in Jarrow and subsequently moved abroad. The book documents a return visit to the people and places of his youth. Harrison portrays ordinary locations in a luminescent way.
The image quality is fantastic and there some 3-image panoramas using fold-out pages.
As a bonus there is a map and overlay which can only be a good thing!
I attended the Photobook Symposium on the following day. In her book The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Melinda Gibson critiques the canonisation of accepted art photographers by cutting images out of the original book of the same name by Charlotte Cotton and assembling them into intricately composed collages.
They are presented as photographic prints stuck in a book. The pages were printed with only dots indicating where to place the stickers. Melinda described how each book took her 3 hours to assemble and first one took her 7 hours. image of mg working on book. I would agree with her that the process of putting a book together can be therapeutic. In this case however some might question the sanity of such a single-handed endeavour! The foreword to the book explains the work in more detail.
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| Edgar Martins |
Large format images depict the futuristic yet retro engineering in extraordinary detail. One mesmerising image looking up into the bowels of a power station necessitated the modification of the camera to prevent the bellows collapsing.
As well as being visually impressive, I was drawn to this book because my father was a civil engineer who worked on construction of the dam at Mangla in Pakistan in the late 1960s. I have also visited the vast Itaipu dam on the border of Brazil and Paraguay.
A key feature of artists books is how their cover and typography often reflect the contents and theme of the work.
Martins used documents found in the power stations such as time sheets and technical manuals to inform the book design. Some publishers prefer the use of a photograph on the book cover as this works well on Amazon. However Martins resists this as it can lead to a single image being seen as defining a project. Despite being an established artist he spends much of his time identifying possible source of funding for photobook projects. In the case of The Time Machine, external funding meant that the books cost £100 - £200 rather than £200 - £400. I look forward to his next project on the theme of Space.
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