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Inspiration [Emily Josephine’s Favourite Books from Paris Photo 2022 / Alumni
→ ① IF I CALL STONES BLUE IT IS BECAUSE BLUE IS THE PRECISE WORD, BY JOSELITO VERSCHAEVE / Precious attention to the photographic craft. A unique poetic voice. ‘If I Call Stones Blue, It Is Because Blue Is The Precise Word’ is Joselito Verschaeve’s first monograph. It puts order to the artist’s work that is placed between day-to-day encounters and fiction. Verschaeve’s personal experiences interweave short stories, optimism, and dystopia.
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With a simple design and all blackand-white images, this book brings together an array of subject matter, characters, and places to represent the world as what feels like a fantasy. It twists any expectations of what will come next. I even feel that some images have a Tim Burton-esc aura.
→ ② THE OKAMA PARADOX, CLARA GASSULL QUER & ISRAEL ARIÑO / The book is part of a shared journey. It is a dialogue between @israelarino’s photographs and @claragassull’s drawings. It begins
with a phrase taken from the travel notebook, a paradox about what we see and what we don’t see. The dialogue between both languages is a search around this question.
review
What I like most about this book is that it is a collaboration between partners. I find that very romantic. She is a fine artist and he is a photographer. I like that it is two perspectives on one thought or one place. both the images and the drawings inform each other and create a new summary of experience that wouldn't be possible with only one or the other.
This sketchbook like "photobook" was unique among all of the tables I discovered. Images were very small fractions of the subject matter. Mostly it was drawings and pencil marks that extended from photo clippings of female figures and what looked to me like an underwater world. It is playful and pleasingly organized compositions across the pages. I even feel that some images have a Tim Burtonesc aura.
→ ③ SLEEPING STATE OF BEING (CREATURES OF DAY AND NIGHT BY SARA SKORGAN TEIGEN / The sketchbook has always been used as a tool to study and understand nature by drawing. My sketchbooks with photographs, drawings, and collages become the physical gathering point where impressions and observations of the outside world and my inner world meet. The psychological truth takes physical form and is manifested in the pages of the sketchbook; studying and drawing structures taken from nature gives me time to reflect on how forms and rules coexist. I use myself as subject and object, playing, wondering, and questioning my own role in life, and moving between the personal and the archetypal. I map my inner landscapes through the design of 13 [Emily Josephine’s Favourite Books from Paris Photo 2022 / Alumni] the sketchbook's pages.
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→ ④ ONE STAR AND A DARK VOYAGE BY BARBARA BOSWORTH / In One Star and a Dark Voyage, we are brought into intimate communion with such things as a wound on a sun-freckled shin, a worm as stigmata in a child’s hand, a bird lying in a cupped hand, a body hovering in the darkness, the spot where an elk slept – all evoking the ephemeral nature of life. review
By using the subject matter of animals, natural phenomena, and many human hands these photographs give me a comforting reminder of the natural beauty of things and processing in life. They show death, often at the hands of humans, and life through lighting, trees, and motion.
→ ⑤ YOU FELT THE ROOTS GROW BY SABINE HESS / “is a personal project in which I explore notions of home, belonging, illness, and absence through the documentation of my family.”
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This book was a very emotional ride for me. Telling the story of coping with losing her father, I ached under the sentimental weight of even how she photographed a tree in a way that made it look as if it were in mourning. Along with the text scattered throughout, the images are sweet, soft, and careful perspectives of everyday life before and after her father's passing.
→ ⑥ MAKTAK AND GASOLINE BY ELLIS DOEVEN / The book “Maktak and Gasoline” was published in April 2018. It is a photo project about Point Hope, an indigenous whaling community in Arctic Alaska. nous whaling community in Arctic Alaska.
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I found this book intruiging for its design, and for its raw perspective of chopping up a whale. I found it hard to look at the pink flesh and the huge sheets of skin laid out on the snow but it still kept me turning the pages to see more. It is a very unique process to see so intimately.
→ ⑦ THE AUTUMNS OF SPRING BY JORDAN SULLIVAN / The book takes the viewer on a disorientating trip around Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny, with close-up photographs of acid-coloured flowers and soft focus imagery. The book comes with a signed print and is accompanied by an album titled ‘In the Garden of Sorrowful Suns’ by Jordan’s musical project The Sun At Night.
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This small-format book was sweet and made me smile. It's a book full of flowers. Sometimes it can be so simple! Sweet bright flowers in a sweet small book.
