58. Making tangible art.
and the immediate death of a photograph
Greetings comrades and a warm welcome to my new subscribers, I’m so glad you’re here, the revolution is on!
This week I’ve had the time to work on a few of the print based projects that I like to do when things get a bit quiet and which I’d like to get better at since they’re part of my bigger plan for the future. Before I show you some examples let me tell you something I found quite relevant: Only this morning I was reading a story from
in her newsletter about the idea of slow art in a fast paced world, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the immediacy of images in today’s world and how fucked up it is that almost everything that produce and consume has to be done, edited, retouched, submitted, shared and consumed in just a matter of hours or even minutes in some cases. That’s insane!When did we allow for art, creativity and photography in particular become so immediate and so disposable? Think of any photographic work for example, that is produced exclusively for social media, all of the photographer’s vision, experience, knowledge, views on a certain topic, influences, visual culture… everything that goes into a photograph has to be squeezed out in a split second, and in another split second all of these die the moment a user scrolls past that post, including the photograph. As much as I’m a big fan of digital photography, this way of consuming photography seems wrong to me. That’s one of the reasons why I started working on physical forms where we can let photography last longer than a fast scrolling.
Remember earlier this year I had a go at self publishing zines in different formats? The idea was well received and sold several copies of each zine but the problem was the printing, look and feel of these zines. I got them mass produced compromising on the choice of paper and printing method resulting in flat, even looking zines. So what I’d like to do is produce limited numbers of artist edition publications hand crafted entirely by me to the point where I can even control the printing process:
Like Roma/La Roma for example, a 12 page zine connecting two cities very dear to me through communication lines. An analogy to the miss-communication issues I had with the current wife as a result of living and working together during lockdown and a poetic reference of a DNA test that came as me being 60% Mexican and 30% Italian (though my dad is Catalan). You’ve probably seen some of these shots from the previous version on CABLES which by the way is sold out. The grain and the colour in this printing method is insane!
Next, an idea that I have for a project placing photos as cassette tape booklets. I tried with an old photo project titled CARS but I don’t think this is the right project for the booklet. Maybe something more punk and edgy, or even abstract; natural even.
Lastly, a dummy for a longer format zine about Bonfire Night, love the visual narrative on this one. It just needs a bit more edge I think.
None of these are available yet, they will be at some point once I have a few more dummies and the final versions. Possibly during the festive period, stay tuned.
Your ideas of palpable art is like fresh air in the digital bubble we all live.
What I do to slow down is to write about the photographs I make and why I made them. Doing that also “slows” down the consumption 😂.
A photograph of instagram lives half a day before it falls into oblivion.
A story about that and other photographs on that series lives at least two weeks with attention on medium or substack. Still digital, but is not easy to avoid it.
Very cool. Love the cassette tape idea too!