It has been a busy year since an essay on the concave city corner won the Photobook Week Aarhus Dummy Award in 2018. A long but interesting and satisfying process has passed to create a published book from the dummy. After learning what to ask for, KOPA was chosen as the printing house. This was followed by wet proofing, empty dummy checking and changing design details to match the offset printing process. Chief curator of PWA, Moritz Neumuller, helped overlook the printing and Raimundas Austinkas performed colour separations. We were very well prepared so everything went smoothly on the printing day.
The book was presented at Photobook Week Aarhus 2019 last week with an exhibition at Dokk1, the main public library, curated by Jesper Rasmussen. We also organised a psychogeographical walking tour in the city, comprising 14 concave corners for people to experience first hand. You can find the digital version of the flyer here. It is still possible to visit Aarhus and let the corners show you the city in a unconventional way. Anything can happen during your walk. And if you are in Aarhus, you can also pop into Galleri Image and get a copy of the book. More photographs (credit: Emily Beresford) of the whole weekend can be found here.
Two weeks ago, the book was also soft launched at Unseen Book Market at the table of Tipi Bookshop. Thank you to everyone who came by and of course Andrea for hosting me, which he’ll be doing again at Polycopies in Paris (November 6-10). Maybe I’ll see you there! He will have my book too this weekend at the Institut Pour La Photographie in Lille.
Meanwhile, the book is also available on my website (see about) and the dedicated concave city corners website (see info). For those who didn’t know, prints are also for sale. So if you like a particular corner, let me know.
The Photobook Week Aarhus dummy award has been featured in issue 104 of the European Photography Magazine, it includes three short features of the top 3 finalists and some background about the award and the festival. It is available here.
Last spring and summer my dummy an essay on the concave city corner got shortlisted at Self Publish Riga 2018 (winner of the audience award) and Unseen 2018. And last but not least it has won the Photobook Week Aarhus 2018 dummy award! I’m very honoured and happy the jury selected an essay on the concave city corner as the winner from the top 3 finalists (myself, Kensaku Seki and Jens Schwarz). The jury motivated their choice as follows:
An essay on the concave corner is a book that does very much on very little. It explores the absurdity and beauty in photographing corners, that might be overlooked, and sets up an exaggerated system of measuring and analyzing what we see. Content and form work together in a radical way. With the slim format the book becomes an object, and the design emphasizes the tall photographs of corners. The many fold-outs works well, as they actually repeat the geometry of the corners. An essay on the concave corner is not just a photobook, it is also an artists book, and it tends to bridge the gaps, that there often are between those two disciplines.
I especially like the opening sentence, as it’s what I’m aiming for. Winning the award means that the dummy will be published by Photobook Week Aarhus in collaboration with Kvadrat and the Reflektor platform. It will distributed by Idea Books in a media partnership with European Photography. And it will be available through me too. So let me know if you are interested.
Next to this I also made a dedicated website for the dummy and it’s content: the corners and the analysis. You can find it through my website or directly here. Please check it out and take your time!
(photo credit: Kensaku Seki)