5th International Photobook Festival

Kassel Photobook Festival har netop afholdt sin femte internationale fotobogsfestival, og vanen tro har organisationen i forbindelse med festivallen kåret en “International Photobook Dummy Award“.

En dummy er i forbindelse med fotobøger en betegnelse, som henviser til en skitse, et forstudie til en fotobog, ofte lavet af fotografen/kunstneren selv, som f.eks. kan vises til forlag eller gallerier. Hvis projektet ender med en officielt boggivelse, kan der sagtens være blevet ændret i layout, billedudvalg osv. i forhold til den oprindelige dummy.

Der er både uddelt en første- , anden-  og tredjepris, og vi har fornøjelsen af at kunne vise alle tre præmierede dummies som Issuu-dokument herunder. Tjek også den officielle præsentation af festivallen i form af Issuu-dokumentet herover med billeder af Todd Hido, Dirk Braeckman og Jason Fulford.

Førsteprisen og guldmedaljen går til Dagmar Keller og Martin Wittwer‘s  “Passengers“, om hvilken et af jury-medlemmerne, jeffrey Ladd, skriver:

The top honors for the 2012 Photobook Dummy Award went to a remarkable body of work from Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer and their collaborative book Passengers. During a residency in Poland in the winter of 2011-2012, Keller and Wittwer were initially looking to start a project photographing Socialist architecture but discovered instead a tangential subject: a bus station in Kielce and its passengers awaiting departure within dozens of regional buses. Framing their subjects from outside, looking in through the frost and mist of the bus windows, the couple photographed individually but combined the results into a sequence of images that seem to have a completely unified voice. Calling upon the long traditions of portraiture and documentary style work, the images are stunningly intimate and beautiful but without the trap of sentimentality.

Andenprisen og sølvmedaljen går til Carmen Catuti for bogen “Liebe Grüsse aus 18.500 m Höhe, MICHELLE“. Om bogen skriver Jeffrey Ladd:

The second place winner is much harder to pin down in a few words. Liebe Grüße aus 18500m Höhe, MICHELLE (Best Wishes from 18,500m High. Michelle) from the Italian photographer Carmen Catuti is about a man who calls himself Michelle and says he’s a professional model. Catuti photographed her subject as he wished to be photographed according to his own conceptions “as a modern man” posing among arrangements of trees and shrubbery, cleanly drawn from darkness by flash. Mixed in are very brief texts, possibly letters from Michelle challenging the collaboration; “Plain backgrounds are often too boring. A picture must immediately be elegant, exciting and original.” This book is a U.F.O. (Unique Foto Object?) and the world of photobooks needs more sightings like this.

Tredjeprisen, bronzemedaljen, går til Andrea Botto‘s “19.06_26.081945”, og Jeffrey Ladd siger om bogen, at

Third place went to Andrea Botto and her book 19.06_26.08.1945. Created in the memory of his grandfather Primo Benedetti, the book traces his journey through Northern Germany to his home in Tuscany after being released from a Nazi prisoner of war camp on June 19, 1945. Botto’s approach was to compile images from the internet by searching dates in tandem with the names of cities through which her grandfather passed. Pages of historical images are combined with 1:1 scale personal documents and letters sent to his family during his imprisonment. The resulting book feels as if the reader has discovered an encyclopedia of war filled with tender personal documents slipped between its pages.

Renato D’Agostin – Tokyo Untitled

Renato D’Agostin‘s bog Tokyo Untitled er så vidt vi kan se ikke så let at få i Europa (men kan naturligvis købes fra USA over nettet – f.eks. fra Photoeye – hvorfra vi har lånt bogopslagene – med den sædvanlige risiko for pålægning af fordyrende told- og momsomkostninger)

Ifølge Azurebumble skriver Renato bl.a. i bogen:

In 2007, I turned my attention to Japanese photography, which inspired me to explore what my point of view could be in a city so far from the world that had always surrounded me, but so close to the photographic imagery towards which I was addressing my attention. Longing to break the unconscious, immediate and easy processes of the known and the predictable, I traveled to Tokyo for the first time. I was immediately struck by a sense of disorientation and an inability to quickly locate my own position within the geography of the city.

My lack of precise references to the external world created in me feelings of isolation and detachment from my previously known realities. I was bewitched by the essential and monochromatic geometric forms, so delicate and precise, of the experience of street life, where these forms cause sounds to fall into a deep silence, muffling the interaction between architecture and human figures. I was impelled toward a quest for the unseen, for details and hidden elements. My perception of this outside world lost all sense of time, revealing an essence described by a language of the surreal and the abstract.

I later returned to Tokyo to repeat the experience. Guided by the same quest, but with a greater awareness of the cultural separation, I let isolation become introspection. I sought to recreate this world that belonged to me, as it is reflected by the city’s reality, while appropriating images and moments that delineate the “me” within its boundaries. It’s become my Tokyo. These works represents a visual record of my journey and its invisible elements diluted in visible everyday life.

Tjek flere billeder fra serien på hans hjemmeside, og tjek også hans Tokyo-video herunder – samt hans Moleskine-video, som vi også lige har taget med.

(af Renato og Kiki Allgeier)