Curated by José Luis Neves
Centred on the acclaimed Portuguese photobook, Lisbon, city of sadness and joy (1959), this exhibition attempts to highlight the audacity of this groundbreaking publication. Showcasing printed and audio-visual matter associated with the three iterations of Lisbon… – its original publication in 1959, its resurfacing in 1982 and its reprinting in 2009 – the exhibit contextualizes Victor Palla and Costa Martins collaborative project in relation to a broader domestic and international photographic background.

The sharp material contrast between most of the printed matter included in this show and Lisbon… expresses almost instantaneously the singularity of Palla and Martin’s ‘graphic poem. However, this disparity is also visible in photographic terms, since Lisbon… contrasted greatly from the romanticized visual tropes used by the country’s autocratic regime, visible in several of the propaganda publications included in this exhibition. One could argue that Palla and Martins poetic realism was deeply rooted in humanist photography, illustrated by Édouard Boubat and Yan’s (Jean Dieuzaide) 1950s photographic books.

Despite its somewhat lukewarm reception at the time of publication, Lisbon… seems to have left an instantaneous, even if marginal, mark on the Portuguese photographic community, visible in this show through two volumes published in the early 1960s. In reality, Palla and Martins’ maverick enterprise faded into obscurity until its rediscovery in the early 1980s. Given a new lease of life through a commemorative exhibition organized by gallery Ether in Lisbon, the remainder fascicles of the initial serialized publication were rebound and put on sale. This event marked the beginning of Lisbon, city of sadness and joy’s international recognition, which was later intensified by its inclusion in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s pivotal study The Photobook: A History, Vol. I (2004) and its recent reprint by Lisbon based publishers Pierre von Kleist.

Marked by a somewhat troubled history, Palla and Martins collaborative photobook was perhaps ahead of its time. Intriguingly, almost sixty years after its publication, Lisbon, city of sadness and joy still maintains its originality and iconoclastic character.

Lisbon… seems to be timeless.

Curated by Anne Elisabeth Toft in collaboration with Stig L. Andersson
Showcasing the Danish architecture biennial catalogue Empowerment of Aesthetics (Venice Biennale 2014), which, in 2015, was announced ‘bookwork of the year’ by Foreningen for Boghaandværk (the Danish association for book craft), the exhibition will focus on the catalogue’s representation of architecture and landscape architecture and how it juxtaposes the aesthetic feeling of nature with rational knowledge. It will illustrate the visual culture behind the publication and it will reflect the artistic ambitions that drive the famous Danish landscape architect Stig L. Andersson in his work.

Curated by Anne Elisabeth Toft
An exhibition framing the publisher’s often decisive role in the creative process of developing the concept, the book format, the graphic design and the marketing strategy behind a book. Presentation of the seminal German publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche’s influential mass-produced book series from the beginning of the 20th century: Die Blauen Bücher – in which the dissemination and marketing of architecture and architectural typologies are radically rethought for a modern and visually-oriented audience.

Looking at the main theme for this year’s Photobook Week Aarhus, The Library Project proposes a concise selection of titles some of which are the product of diverse and interesting collaborative processes. Adding to these, visitors will enjoy the latest arrivals to the library collection.

164° On The Equator, Charles Negre and Thomas Rousset
Études Studio
A collaborative effort by photographers Charles Negre and Thomas Rousset, explores questions of authorial intervention and implied narrative. Negre and Rousset construct fictional, surrealistic realities of their own.
Shot in Indonesia over the course of two months in 2014, this unique body of work sees the pair offsetting intuitive, documentary-style shooting with the intentionality of studio-based staging, with everyday elements combined and repurposed to highly theatrical ends. Banana leaves as backpacks, miniature boats as shoes, snakes as headbands and office décor, hunters wading through rivers gone suddenly neon: as in their respective practices, 164° On The Equator finds Negre and Rousset interested less in depiction than invention, the work’s striking juxtapositions and ambiguous themes blurring the boundaries between image-taking and image-making.

 

Ants, Youngdon Jung
Self Published
The rhythm made by all different human beings in the same space. This is the scenery which we can see from the top of a high-rise apartment. Every person seen form their own movement, within their own clothes and steps. Jung caught particular patterns from it. There are images of gathering and scattering of diverse crowds, alongside detailed images of concentration and dispersion of people from their own bodies. These images show people’s lives and the direction of their bodies. However, like soil which scatters away when it becomes dry, the movements of people are also hard to use to define a clear outline.
The image which disappears from our sight as soon as we take it, is crumpled like a clod of dirt in our hands. If the particles of the frame, or the photo disappear,  a lot of these images would be scattered in all directions. Then where can the particle go and what rhythm of image can it make?

 

AMC2 Journal Issue 8, Thomas Sauvin
AMC Books
Issue 8 of AMC2 features a selection of full-length portraits, some black & white and others hand-coloured, made in Chinese studios between the 1930s and the 1980s. This serendipitous reunion of 60 anonymous portraits reveals – through the dress codes and behavioural mores they present – fragments of the history of Chinese society and ideology.

 

As Long as it Photographs/It Must be a Camera, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs
Self Published
As Long As It Photographs It Must Be A Camera is the title of a series focusing on the construction of cameras and photo-esoteric experiments with camera bodies of all different types. For this project, the artist duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs made a selection of books of collected essays published by Aperture.
In their own words: “We wanted to build a camera that is constructed from words about photography, not photographic equipment. The idea is to be able to photograph through a collected body of knowledge. In Tibet, newborns sleep on a bed created by laying blankets over holy books, so that they can soak up spiritual knowledge while they sleep. Similarly, perhaps, this camera osmotically transmits the wisdom of decades’ worth of thinking about photography.”

 

Athens Love, Ren Hang
Session Press
Hang’s work in Athens Love includes casual snapshots taken of friends in various locations in Athens and Attica, Greece, such as the beach, woods, cliffs, streets, and apartments. Expressing his awe of the dynamics in nature, Hang responds to it in high spirits, his sense of humor reflecting in the composition and colors of his work. Away from his more politically strict and constraining home in China, Hang enjoys the more relaxed and playful energy in his photographs, and renders his abundant creativity in new avenues of expression. As a result, both the diaristic pictures and the stylized nudes in Athens Love are imbued with an undeniable sense of discovery and joy, and thrillingly document one of contemporary photography’s most exciting young artists taking bold advantage of the new and unfamiliar.

 

Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, Ryan Thompson & Phil Orr
The Ice Plant
The Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona protects one of the largest deposits of petrified wood in the world. Despite stern warnings, visitors remove several tons of petrified wood from the park each year, often returning these rocks by mail (sometimes years later), accompanied by a “conscience letter.” These letters often include stories of misfortune attributed directly to their theft: car troubles, cats with cancer, deaths of family members, etc. Some writers hope that by returning these stolen rocks, good fortune will return to their lives, while others simply apologise or ask forgiveness. “They are beautiful,” reads one letter, “but I can’t enjoy them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry…” Bad Luck, Hot Rocks documents this ongoing phenomenon, combining a series of original photographs of these otherworldly “bad luck rocks” with dozens of facsimiles of intimate, oddly entertaining letters from the Park’s archives.

 

Crude Metaphors, Roger Ballen, Todd Hido, Edgar Martins, Mayumi Hosokura and Esther Teichmann
Hotshoe
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Crude Metaphors, a prominent and celebrated section of Hotshoe magazine since 2005, Hotshoe published a very special limited edition collectors box of five books featuring a selection of the most renowned photographers of today, including Roger Ballen, Todd Hido, Edgar Martins, Mayumi Hosokura and Esther Teichmann.
Crude Metaphors brings together photography and fiction writing, pairing a photographer and a writer to produce a narrative, written in response to a chosen series of images.
The beautifully designed collection of books combines the greats of photography with established and up and coming writers such as the National Poet for Scotland Liz Lochhead, and Joe Ahearne, director of Doctor Who and co-writer of Danny Boyle’s Trance. With stories ranging from a female bounty hunter to a world of artificial intelligence and a father’s suicide, readers will be taken on five compelling journeys through the words and images of ten different creators.

 

Del Norte, Ellie Berry
Self Published
Del Norte is a collection of photographs made on a 1,100km walk from the French town of Bidart to Finisterre (once thought to be ‘the end of the world’) on the eastern Spanish coastline. Primarily walking along the Camino Del Norte, Berry aims to convey the feelings and ideas of emptiness, curiosity, repetitiveness, and reflection.

 

Discharge, Petra Collins
Capricious
The highly-anticipated monograph by New York-based artist and photographer Petra Collins presents images of self-discovery and femininity that explore the emotional, complex intersection of life online and off. Responding to the ubiquity of social media, Collins offers images of unflinching honesty, exploring the privacies and publicities of growing up as a woman in an era where female bodies are constantly hyper-mediated by Photoshop and social media.

 

El Diari Indultat, NOPHOTO/efedePhoto/fotoDios
Diari Indultat is a missing art project. A photobook in newspaper format that was created, edited and burned during the Fallas in Valencia 2016 in a unique and unprecedented event.
More than 50 national reference photographers of different generations, including several National Awards for Photography, and creators from other artistic disciplines participated.
They created for three days the content of  The Journal Indultat  just before being burned in a failure on March 19, the day of the Cremà .
The publication had a unique and numbered 5,000 copies. The only way to pardon a copy was buying it before March 19 at 12 pm. It is no longer possible. The rest disappeared forever in the fire, leaving the Diari Indultat discontinued. Diari Indultat will never be republished.

 

End., Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney, and David Donohoe
D1
Created as both installation and publication, End. is a collaborative work by Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney and David Donohoe. Built around the photographs of Doyle, it also features drawing and sound by Sweeney and Donohoe.
End. gives equal significance to the city and its population, their combined forces continuously shaping each other. Individual journeys of everyday life are compacted repetitively into the same streets. Dubliners wear away at the autonomy of their city, while the streets themselves become a kind of sculptural civic mental State. Dublin, its light and its people, carry out dance-like actions, swapping roles in a series of short plays. End. unfolds as a sequence of events — loops of time and place — revealing a city whose concrete is as plastic as the movement of its inhabitants.

 

Flaneur: New Urban Narratives International Conference
Procur.arte
Flâneur – New Urban Narratives is an International art project which encourages photographers and writers to explore the urban territory with a new approach to enable a fresh look on the dynamics of European cities and their geographic and social landscapes.

 

 

IRL (Landskrona Foto: View Ireland)
Landskrona Foto
The photography from other countries that is shown at the major Swedish institutions often comes from the USA or countries in Western Europe. Landskrona Foto intends to devote a summer exhibition each year to the presentation of interesting photography from countries that are rarely seen in Scandinavia. Ireland is Landskrona Foto’s choice for 2016.
Ireland – the island on the north west edge of Europe – has had a history that is dramatic and in many ways unique. For this presentation Landskrona Foto have chosen to highlight some themes. Such as the concern of how Irish photographers have tackled and interpreted the serious political conflicts that have affected people’s lives in the last hundred years, or how people relate to the idyllic tourist image of “the Emerald Isle”.

 

J.W., Clare Steele
Self Published
J.W. is a documentation of the life of John. These works are a collaboration between the subject and photographer, focusing on how ageing affects routine, interests, what’s prioritised, and how one offers oneself to be captured in an image. Turning the camera towards such themes as nostalgia, ritual and ageing, the subject, John, reflects upon his own image archive, objects he’s collected, and the stories attached to such things. Accessing the day-to-day life of a retiree in his home, in the places he chooses to visit and effects he surrounds himself by, J.W. traces a life that would otherwise go unseen.

 

Junior Magazine
Junior Magazine is a new photographic journal that provides a platform for emerging talent in Irish documentary photography. It seeks to foster a new photographic community and shine a spotlight on outstanding work that is too often overlooked. In showcasing the work of Dublin photographers, the magazine also serves as a de-facto love-letter to the city they call home. This issue features the work of six photographers each of whom provide a totally unique perspective on the world around them.
The theme of the first issue is ‘youth’. The result is a thought-provoking document that explores questions of home, identity and growing up.

P h o t o b o o k s

Chen Haishu,  Zona Rossa, 2015
Taking Volcano Vesuvius as sample, Haishu Chens photo book Zona Rossa discusses the question: how is the concept “danger” defined, sensed, represented and manipulated by our human society? Using different visual materials, Zona Rossa reveals the multiple characters of Vesuvius: it’s not only a natural object, but also a figure interpreted by politics, religion, history, culture and science. The photographs of Zona Rossa resulted from Chens several trips to Vesuvius between 2012 and 2015. The background of the book is an attachment of the emergency plan of the Vesuvian area issued by the Italian Civil Protection Department in 2001, which lists out the different alarm levels of eruption of Vesuvius, the populations of the red zone, yellow zone and blue zone, the traffic situation and escape route as well as the evacuation plan after an eruption. The movie stills are from different media materials about Vesuvius such as documentaries, commercial movies and TV-Series. The text pages quote two letters written by the ancient Rome politician Pliny the younger, which described the whole eruption in 79AD and is considered to be the first document about volcano eruption in the history. The last part of the book quotes the interviews with the inhabitants of Zona Rossa by Chen.  Yin Jiang undertakes the graphic design.

 

Chen Xiaoyi，Koan，2014
In Koan, Xiaoyi selected abstract landscape photographs for creating photo-etchings. The resulting pieces are poetic and full of imagination. The works use only black ink and are printed on multiple Japanese papers. The colour is derived from an atmosphere of desolation and melancholy and is influenced by the expression of minimalism in ancient Chinese poetry and ink painting.

 

Chen Zhe, Bees & The Bearable, 2016
Best Photobooks Kassel 2016 – Winner
Unseen Dummy Award 2014 – Shortlist
Dummy Award Kassel 2014 – Shortlist

The book is Chen Zhe’s closing statement to her long contemplation on the disquieted souls, the wounded bodies and the elusive link between the two. Presented as a layered notebook which weaves in and out of images and texts, the book restores Chen’s practice as an ongoing process of exploration, discovery and research. What happens when actions that can jeopardize one’s existence, such as hurting one’s own body, in return serve the purpose of understanding existence itself? Should we see it as a fluky escape or as a relief from the weight of modern life? While the individual response may differ, the book illustrates that there still is psychological connectedness that undoubtedly link each of us together. Everything else follows from there.

 

Cheng Xinhao，The Naming of a River，2016
In the beginning of 2014, the photographer went back to his hometown Kunming and found a “Pictures of Six Rivers in Yunnan’s Provincial Capital” drawn by Huang Shijie, an official of the Qing Dynasty. Inspired by the book he started to take sample photos of Panlong River and tried to identify it again with old memories. At the same time he was researching the relationship between time and space beyond the river.

The book was made as a long gatefold with two sides. On the front side, scattered perspectives of riverside sceneries, show every section of the river as it originally was, while on the back side there are pictures related to the river in different times: humans met in a time in a place, rocks showing huge changes over millions of years, or eucalyptus leaves renewing every year. The two-sided design shows the artist’s practice of seeking relations between external scenery and the inner logic behind it. At the end of the book, a picture of sedimentary rocks expresses in images the issue the artist was discussing: time must be characterized in a space, and space must be shaped in a time. Their intertwining relationship will not be changed forever.

 

Fang Meiwen, Blue iris, 2015
When Meiwen first got in touch with photography, she considered it as a convenient and direct way to record life. It was this original interest that helped her explore different angles of objects and preserve their shape and my emotion with the camera. Blue iris is a self-published book by Fang Meiwen.

 

Huang Dongli，Beyond the Surface，2014
This project presents a kind of non-linear, narrative documentary based on how Huang Dongli observes memory, reality stack, truth and fiction. It explores the question of what can be found beyond the surface, and the connection between what she has seen and what is in her mind. The series, “Beyond The Surface” is a handmade book; it presents the subtle strangeness hidden behind everyday reality and utilizes the freedom of editing like a memory, to repeat or jump through time.

 

Huang Shisi，FreeFalling，2014
FreeFalling is a personal photography project; through it, Huang Shisi records how photography, the most important part of her life, has been a process that healed her psychologically over the past several years.

 

Shh!, 2016
Making huge amounts of pictures and abandoning them – this is a typical life of modern human beings. Shh! comes with a fully hand-cut/folding/binding photo book, the handmade process maintains the book as a random, blunt look within my consideration.

 

Jimu，In Nowhere，2015
Photography is a method of recapturing the representations of lives. Shooting a photo is an act to capture non-existence, yet the image has a lasting existence. If someone affectionately took a photo of a blank and empty scenery, would this photo still be worthy of meaning or existence? In the seemingly meaningless pursuit of nothingness, Jimu created these photos that possess existence.

 

Ka Xiaoxi，Never Say Goodbye to Planet Booze，2015
In the past few years, Ka Xiaoxi has been taking a lot of portraits of the young Chinese generation, who are designers, musicians and artists, while some are just cool fashion kids. They party at bars, night clubs, music festivals and in private spaces. Some of them are Ka’s friends and others are just strangers, creating the moments in his film. His creations are connected to his growth environment. In the past 15 years, the subculture situation in China has continued to exist as a kind of observation. But after he started taking photos for eight years, the subculture has become main stream. The people in his photos actually show the changes of the times – music festivals, E-dance music and fashion scenes, doing whatever they want to have fun and speak to the world.

 

Lanyue Li，Unacquainted Land，2015
Unacquainted Land investigates the composition of industrial and post-industrial terrain in South Wales. The work captures the ambiance of the setting by organizing the formal elements of the surroundings, finding nuances in texture, shape and line and restructuring the image into a romantic world with oriental elements. Using the camera as a guide, the audience are invited into a visual, perhaps unfamiliar and bleak industrial world, which is anti-utopian. In this work, the terrain in South Wales is more like the state of a nation undergoing fundamental industrial change on which the photographer hypothesizes.

 

Lin Shu ，Qu Jing，2015
Qu Jing means shrew. This book tells about growth. After moving to Beijing for five years, Lin Shu wanted to put his pictures taken during his life and travels into a book. He tries to express through these personal images everyone’s experience of loss and gain, letting go and possession, sorrow and joy, during their growth. Brought up in Southeast China, Lin Shu was obsessed with animals in his childhood. Once, occasionally, he found a shrew (“Qu Jing” in Chinese) in a garden, and tried to catch it, but failed. His girlfriend, who appears a lot in this book, is also a “shrew” he tries to catch all the time.

 

Ni Liang ，Memory of the Lake，2015
After having graduated from ICP, Photographer Ni Liang started to photograph his hometown, especially the Lake “ Tai ”. He shot with a large-format camera and iphone 4 simultaneously. Eventually, the phone works became the work Memory of the Lake.  This series was selected by Berlin Photo Festival 2013, and was also exhibited at several international photo fairs.

 

Ou Chiacheng，Expiration & Stockholm Syndrome 2016
“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” – but I just want to let “the relationship” be what it should to be. The combination of two projects “Expiration” and “Stockholm Syndrome”, citing the words of Yukio Mishima as the main line of book. Inkjet fine art print, laserjet print, handmade binding.

 

Ren Hang, Food Issue, 2015
“Those who are reading this article might have heard of Ren Hang. After his intensive exhibitions and media exposure around the world, his works can be seen online or in magazines. All of those public photographs were selected among tens of thousands of pictures, which he considers to be perfect. During our daily contact with Ren Hang, we have seen Ren Hang’s many unpublished photos. Some of these exposed his feet by accident, or he used his feet to feed and tread on male models. This kind of insignificant act got our attention, and then it occurred to us to edit a compilation of photos about feet.” －Same Studio

 

Wang Jing，The Coil，2014
The Coil is comprised of 71 black and white photos taken in 2009-2010 and in 2011-2014; the author, Wang Jing, printed all the photos in his own darkroom. The series is heavily influenced by post WWII German expressionist painting and French existentialist literature.

The photobook is a semi-biographical work; the author sought to insulate himself from modern Chinese society during his youth because of his distaste for a place characterised by overbearing and omnipresent social control, rife with social conflicts and promoting the degradation of humanity. Modern China’s societal crisis combined with the author’s inner conflicts have led him to develop an uncontrollable angst; this angst is the primary motivation behind the creation of the images that make up The Coil.

 

Yang Yuanyuan, 10 Days in Kraków，2014
2015 Shortlisted, Author Book Award, Rencontres d’Arles
2015 Shortlisted, Best Photobooks, Fotobookfestival, Kassel

10 Days in Kraków is presented in a format between a travelogue and a scrapbook. Although the book does not have a content page, within the seemingly fragmented structure, three chapters unfold themselves – War, City, and Connection (from there to here / from I to you). The book consists of snapshots, diaries and found images that Yang Yuanyuan created or collected during her 10-day stay in the city as well as fragments (film stills and text excerpts) from three existing works: The Sky Crawlers (2008, directed by Mamoru Oshii), Invisible Cities (written by Italo Calvino) and 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her (1967, directed by Jean-Luc Godard).

 

Zhang Lijie，Midnight Tweedle，2014
Through sequences of fragmental scenes, Midnight Tweedle explores the diversity of the Chinese collective memory from a personal perspective. Either in a narrative or at random –conscious or unconscious— these images seem potentially connected, yet coincidental: the way memory works. The book employs various forms, from documentary photography, to collage and poster to staged imagery. Midnight Tweedle aims to introspect on the human race, especially the Chinese, and symbolizes the dilemmas that exist in the context of the cultural and political history of China.

 

Zhang Wei，Artificial Theater，2014
In real life, people who are eager for success often become frustrated by failures, however, the virtual network game can give players a successful experience through identities. The game starts from a basic identity, “people”, for whom you can set the gender, the general shape, and the personality. Likewise, Zhangwei virtualized the identities of temporary performers and used them in an exaggerated way to create myth-like roles for the Artificial Theater series.

 

Zhang Xiao，Coastline，2014
Zhang Xiao started his journey from 2009-2013 along the coastline of China. China has a long coastline stretching from the mouth of Yalu River in Liaoning province, in the north, to the mouth of Beilun River in Guangxi province in the south. A total of eighteen thousands continuous kilometres. There have been great changes every day in China since it began opening up 30 years ago. The cities are like big construction sites accelerating their construction pace to catch up with the rest of the world. All of this is particularly prominent in China’s coastal areas. A multitude of countrymen leave their native places to go there. Urbanization drives continually accelerating growth while people’s spiritual lives are left behind.

 

Zheng Longyihai，Air Chrysalis，2015
Air Chrysalis is an imagery emblematising evil power in the novel 1Q84, written by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, which has several meanings in my interpretation. The topic discussed in the work Air Chrysalis is not “copying”, but “evolution” in the long time of culture spreading, which is like a journey of cultural archaeology striding across characters and images, during which the photographer finds that the “evolution” of culture is sometimes very absurd. It is like the words of the philosopher Socrates: “in the city he could learn from men, but the fields and the trees could teach him nothing.”

 

Zhong Hualian，TWENTYSIX QUICK PRINTING STORE，2016
Zhong Hualian photographed twentysix quick printing store with my mobile phone, within 5 kilometres from where I lived, and came to the first graphic quick printing store that I shot to print this book, this book also becomes “a product” belonging to the quick printing store. The theme of the works and book design were affected by Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

 

Zhou Yue，Glass Matrix，2016
In the winter of 2015, Zhou Yue went to the eastern coastline of the US and lived there for two and a half months. Except for the days she spent at her print station in Norwalk (Connecticut) the artist spent most of her time in New York and Jersey. She lived in Newport, a community of Jersey, but near New York City. Through her window, she could see Manhattan Island across the river. The structure and pattern of the book were inspired by the cubic buildings and square windows. A large paper was printed, cut and folded into cubes and squares.

 

Liu Wenting, 3.00 pm – 4.00 pm 20/02/ 2014 Conversation, 2015
This project represents the reflection of people’s relationships through hand gestures.
By documenting unconscious hand gestures during a conversation between two acquaintances from 3.00pm-4.00pm on 20/02/2015, the work presents the subtle variation of emotions and the content of conversation between the two people and their relationship. The artist explores the project as a book to make an intimate connection between the work and the audience. The audience joins the conversation of hands by browsing the book with their own hands also.

 

Shi Zhen, Memories of Things Past,
Memories of Things Past is a photo book project inspired by a diary of 19^th century that the artist found by chance at a flea market in Brussels. The author of diary was a lady signed Laure Lorthioir De Mot. In the diary she recounts the stories from 1872 to 1954 of her big, brilliant family and their good old times: stories of a single lady who travelled around the world a hundred years ago, before the two great wars, and of a life filled with deep love and passion. Letters, photographs and papers are well kept, as they would be.

 

Yang Yuanyuan, Nearly There, Nearly Concrete, Chongqing, Dummy book, 2014－2015
This dummy book was selected as the second prize by Martin Parr on Lianzhou Foto Festival for Gucang Dummy Award Martin Parr Edition.
Before a visit to Chongqing in 2014, Yang purchased an old photo archive that documented buildings belonging to a Chongqing-based telecommunications company in the 1960s (Cultural Revolution was from 1966 to 1976). Returning to Chongqing some 50 years later, Yang attempted to locate the buildings depicted in the photo album. While a marginal few still remained, most had been bulldozed to accommodate visions of modernity. Some of the streets with antiquated names, such as “Anti-Feudal Street” had vanished after 80s. Their stories are now just a figment of its historical narrative. For those addresses that were still locatable, Yang juxtaposes photographs of the current buildings with those from the past, strengthening its historicity and continuity of the metropolis’ story.

The work leads itself to its second chapter when Yang encountered an old factory while searching for one street during the process, the second chapter is focus on two other types of locations: factories that played an important role in Chongqing’s recent development, but are currently abandoned or in disrepair; and large construction sites in the city center. Further, she juxtaposes portraits of workers that possibly belonging to the construction teams who built some of the historical buildings with the workers met upon her recent excavation of these regions, ultimately weaving a narrative that transcends a temporal-scape.

 

Sun Yanchu, Ficciones, 2016
The artists found the photographs in this series in antique markets. They were taken in China of 1970s or 80s. He used collaging or drawing to destroy or bring out the stories in the photos, using simply his imagination or restoration based around his knowledge of the social changes in recent years. Maybe the original photos recorded real things which happened, but were the new plots through his changes completely fabricated?

 

Deng Yun, Pale Fire, 2016
Pale Fire is a collection of Deng Yun’s work that explores daily sparks of his life in Japan.

Every year, Fotobookfestival Kassel invites all photographers to present their so-far unpublished photobooks to an international public and to eminent experts. In 2016 Fotobookfestival have received 476 book dummies from 51 countries. Their shortlist jury selected the best 52 books. These will be exhibited at international photo events. These shortlisted photobooks, and the winners, will be presented to the public at The Library Project, during July, at PhotoIreland Festival 2016.

From these 52 titles, three winners were chosen by an international jury of experts during the 8th Fotobookfestival Kassel at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. The winner of the first prize will be given the opportunity to realise their dummy as a “real” book in cooperation with their production partner, Verlag Kettler, Germany.

 

DUMMY AWARD KASSEL 2016 WINNERS

Nordic Dummy Award (NDA) is awarded annually by Fotogalleriet, Oslo, in connection with Fotobokfestival Oslo (FFO). The winner of the Nordic Dummy Award will be announced on Friday 16 September.

Shortlisted dummies, including the winner, will be sent on tour to the following institutions: Göteborg Fotobokfestival, Göteborg (SE), Centrum for fotografi, Stockholm (SE), Galleri Entrée, Bergen (NO), Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø (NO), Galleri Image, Århus (DK), Fotografisk Center, København (DK), Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki (FI), Northern Photographic Centre, Oulu (FI), Reykjavik Museum of Photography (IS).

The winning book will be published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. Fotogalleriet oversees the Nordic Dummy Award book production and, together with The Norwegian Photographic Fund, provides production support. Additional funding might be required, relating to the parameters of the winner book.

 

WINNER 2016

Katarina Skjønsberg (NO), Be Good To Yourself

 

NOMINEES 2016

As part of Photobook Week Aarhus 2016, Galleri Image will be exhibiting a select number of the most unique photobooks from the gallery’s collections. Galleri Image is home to a large collection of photobooks, which make up a library of hundreds of volumes, spanning multiple genres. This exclusive exhibition will include both new and slightly older titles, as well as some previous entries from Photobook Week Aarhus. Exhibition curated by Helene Gisselmann.

Nicolai Howalt / ‘Light Break’ (2015)
‘Light Break’ is Nicolai Howalt’s investigation of ‘phototherapy’, a medical practice developed by the Danish doctor and Nobel laureate Niels Ryberg Finsen in the late nineteenth century. The result is a series of abstract colour images, imprinted by the sun onto photosensitive paper, which visualize the force of sunlight, both life-giving and destructive.

Astrid Kruse Jensen / ‘Beauty Will Always Be Disturbed’ (2014)
This book contains selected works from Danish artist Astrid Kruse Jensen’s series ‘Disappearing Into the Past’ and ‘Within the Landscape’. These two works have been created using expired polaroid film, which tint the images in hues of green and blue, embedding the images with a dream-like nostalgia, like a memory frozen in time.

Gabriela Machado / ‘Rever’ (2014)
Currently boasting over 100 million registered users, Instagram is the largest image sharing social network in the world. Gabriela Machado’s book ‘Rever’ is one of the first photobooks made up exclusively of Instagram photos. However, these images are not average everyday snapshots; they possess a decidedly artistic quality, which transcends the Instagram format.

Alexander Sedelnikov / ‘See You Later!’ (2014)
With this self-published book Russian photographer Alexander Sedelnikov investigates the fleeting moments that occur spontaneously in front of the camera as life passes us by. He says about this work and its title: “‘See you later’ is the phrase we use to postpone the inevitable. I don’t know if it means to see somebody soon or never again”.

Helga Härenstam / ‘Stories for an 87-year Old Lady’ (2012)
Helga Härenstam had her future revealed by a fortune teller; she would meet a tall, dark man with whom she would have two children; she would stay within the same profession; she would stay healthy, but eventually suffer issues with her memory, forget most things, and pass away at the age of 87. The images in this book act as a collection of memories for when this prophecy one day comes true.

Johan Sundgren / ‘By Lamplight’ (2012)
Johan Sundgren’s ‘By Lamplight’ is a collection of photographs that he took while working as a domestic personal care attendant in Stockholm between 2000 – 2006. He started bringing a camera to work and eventually started photographing his patients. This book not only depicts the realities of life as a senior, but it also demonstrates the importance of social work.

Katinka Goldberg / ‘Surfacing’ (2011)
In ‘Surfacing’ Swedish photographer Katinka Goldberg uses photographs of herself and her mother to tell the story of their relationship. The book appears like a visual collage, incorporating spontaneous snapshots of the two of them, apart and together, which highlights the ambivalence in not just their relationship, but in any mother-daughter relation.