Playing the Library
A riso book made from photos I scanned out of library books, where the further you read the further away the bird gets.
We had to build a publication entirely out of imagery from the library. I gave myself one rule: distance is the structure. I went with bird photography and scanned it all out of books by Eric Hosking, Jim Flegg, C.A.W. Guggisberg, John Marchington, Anthony Clay, Joe Firman, Barbara Eddy and Barbara Gerlach.
It opens as close as I could get. A feather across the whole spread, where the halftone dots from the original printing are bigger than the thing they're printing. Then it pulls back a page at a time: an eye, a bird on a branch, a nest, a flock, and by the end a field with a bird somewhere in it. Reading it feels like walking backwards away from something.
I scanned everything rather than reshooting it, so every image carries the dot screen of the book it came from as well as the riso screen on top. Two inks, fluorescent red and green on black. Sometimes they flood a whole spread, sometimes one layer sits slightly off-register on the photo. I also traced line drawings of birds from the decorative plates in the same books and ran them underneath. Type is Minion Pro.
A saddle-stitched riso publication in fluorescent red, green and black.
