Something I picked up from an email from the publishers MACK yesterday, the announcement of the winner of their First Book Award for 2020, 45 by Damian Heinisch. This caught my eye for a couple of reasons.
First, and foremost, it is based on a train journey between Ukraine and Oslo, all pictures taken through the train windows. This resonates not least because the subject of my project for Assignment 2 was a train journey, albeit a much shorter one, and the pictures were taken through the window (though I was more concerned with landscape than people, as in Heinisch’s case). I did though undertake a similar, small scale, project of photographing people on station platforms (though it did not get very far with it at all) as part of the Decisive Moment assignment for EYV (https://markrobinsonocablog.wordpress.com/2017/05/31/assignment-three-the-decisive-moment-part-3/). It also has something in common with Obara’s work (2018), which coincidentally is set in Ukraine, and uses a physical journey to tell stories about people. Given time and an opportunity to travel (neither of which are likely to happen soon) this is very much a strand of work that I would like to pursue further on a larger scale.
The other thing is the binding. I am often attracted by different styles of binding and this one is “Japanese fold”, which I understand to be a form that involves printing a long sheet of paper that is then concertinaed, one set of edges then being bound. The result is that each page is effectively two pages folded back-to-back. Barachini’s book (2019) follows this mode, as does the Dog Man section of Kimura (2019), though that one differs in that it is also printed inside the folded pages, making the inner bits hard to look at properly! Eiji Ohashi also used a version in one of his vending-machine books (2017). I also have in my general library a beautiful old book (I am not sure of its actual age or publisher) of brush and ink drawings of, mostly, botanical specimens, interspersed with some poems, that unfortunately I cannot read, and a few landscapes in a Chinese style, housed in a silk covered folding box. It all makes an aesthetically pleasing change from the standard form of binding and can add an additional layer of interest to the photographs.
Barachini, V, (2019). Cuore Velato. Livorno: ORIGINI edizione
Heinisch, D, (2020). 45. London: MACK
Kimura, H, (2019). Snowflakes Dog Man. Italy: ceiba editions
Obara, K, (2018). Exposure / Everlasting. Cordoba: Editorial RM / RM Verlag
Ohashi, E, (2017). Roadside Lights. Tokyo: Zen Foto Gallery
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 