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Privet, Provintsiya

Bild-, Wort- und Tonkunst, ein volles Haus, und Wodka für alle – bei der Veranstaltung zur Buchrolle PROVINTSIYA im Haus der Poesie mussten keine Wünsche offen bleiben. Hier ein paar Impressionen vom wirklich rundum gelungenen Abend mit einem herzlichen Dankeschön an alle Beteiligten & Gäste!

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Mit ihrer transmedialen Präsentation von Fotografien, Gedichten, Texten und Tönen nahmen uns Hendrik Jackson und Heinrich Völkel mit auf ihre Reise durch die russische Provinz. Danach gab’s fröhliches Zusammensein mit Musik von DJane Svetomusika. Ein großer Spaß, so ein russischer Abend! Man bekam gleich Lust auf mehr – es würde uns nicht überraschen, wenn noch in derselben Nacht ein paar Flüge in Richtung Provintsiya gebucht wurden. Wer dafür weder Zeit noch Geld hat, dem legen wir ersatzweise unbedingt die Buchrolle ans Herz!

Um mehr über die Buchrolle zu erfahren, klicke hier!

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Round not Square On The Rugs

Weil man bei Design aus dem Iran gerne an Teppiche denkt, haben wir uns für die Premiere unserer BEYOND CURTAINS Buchrolle mit Anna Wahdat von On the Rugs in Hamburg zusammen getan. Autorin Lena Späth reiste extra aus Barcelona an und setzte sich mit Antonia und FAZ-Redakteur Christian Meier zum Gespräch über ihr Projekt auf den Teppich.

Ein großes Dankeschön an Anna und ihren Vater Herrn Wahdat, die uns so herzlich begrüßten, dass uns trotz echt Hamburger Wetter gleich ganz warm ums Herz wurde.

Hier ein paar Impressionen von diesem rundum gelungenen Abend – inklusive Schnelldurchlauf durchs Buch!


Because we imagine carpets when we think about Persian design – and it’s true, though there’s so much more to it! – we paired up with Anna Wahdat from beautiful carpet lable On the Rugs in Hamburg for the launch of our latest scroll, BEYOND CURTAINS. Author Lena Späth came all the way from Barcelona and sat down on a stack of carpets with our own Antonia and FAZ-journalist Christian Meier for a diverting talk about her project and a Q&A session.

A huge and heartfelt Thank You to Anna and her father Mr. Wahdat who were so very welcoming we felt all warm and fuzzy in spite of real authentic Hamburg weather.

Here’s some impressions of this lovely evening – including a quick tour all through the scroll. Enjoy!

 

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In retrospect: “Eurylochus” – Vernissage

We celebrated the opening of our exhibition of Simon Becker’s photographs from our art book „Eurylochus“. This was special to us for various reasons. One obviously being that we are able to show one of our artist’s work to a broader audience. Another one is that with this step we set our foot in the field of high quality art print – which you can easily get excited about!

Eurylochus Vernissage

Luckily finding the right location for the exhibition wasn’t a challenge at all. When we got to know this beautiful french wine bar „oui, madame“ in Mitte, we fell in love right away. With lots of black and wooden elements the atmosphere of the bar is very cosy and stylish at the same time. Simon Becker’s mysterious and equally inviting photographs were the obvious choice for this place – it was a perfect match!

We decided to pick up the black and wooden theme and create frames from natural wood to contrast and also complement Simon’s black and white pictures. We found the perfect material in old attic doors and upcycled them into these handmade frames.

Eurylochus VernissageObviously none of the photographs we showcase at oui, madame is round and all of them are very square, but we nonetheless stayed true to our concept, which stands for an extraordinary format. We enable our artists to give every picture its very own, individual dimensions at the highest quality – in our books as well as in art prints. Thats why the photographs at our vernissage are everything but standard format. The largest exhibition piece is over two meters long, the smallest only 40 centimeters.

In the end we are beyond happy with the outcome of this evening. We had a fun time at the vernissage, enjoyed fine wine and beautiful live music by „La petit mort“. We can only recommend everyone who is into photography (and french wine) to pay oui, madame a visit (Almstadtstraße 43, 10119 Berlin). There you can still keep Simon Becker’s framed photographs company, admire them or even – if you feel the urge – decide to purchase a piece of art, printed and handmade in Berlin.

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Larry Yust on Round not Square

It happened like this. I got an email out of the blue from some people who called themselves Round not Square. The name intrigued me and so did their proposal. They wanted to use some of my images to make a book in the form of a scroll. You know, with sticks to roll a long piece of paper from one side to another, rolling pages past your eyes instead of flipping them. Like an ancient Chinese scroll. It was completely out-of-the box and it caught my imagination.

So I emailed back asking for more details. We exchanged emails several times and the result was that I pulled a new book project of mine from an established publisher (who was taking too long to get the book into print, I thought) and gave it to Round not Square.

I’m glad I did. The result is everything I hoped it would be, still way out-of-the- box. Unique, beautiful, fun, crazy and the best way I have seen yet to present my long images in book form, albeit a book of a very different sort.

I love it.

Larry Yust, Los Angeles, 2015

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A completely new level of freedom

I love books. Especially photo books. They are collections of visual knowledge and perspective, and photographs can do things words could never do. I love turning a page and stumbling into a new and surprising scenery, another look, other living and inanimate things than on the page before. But with every read-through, a book loses some of its ability to capture and surprise, you see the pictures on one double page, you have an idea what’s coming next and the relation of every page to another becomes at the same time more obvious and more detached. It is also very tedious to fumble around the edges of a page in order to turn just one and not several at a time, and then they insist on tearing just because you are too passionate a page-turner, and I won’t even start on large-format pictures in traditional books or the distorted horror that is a photograph stretched over one double-page. Or playboy centrefolds. Let’s be honest, we’ve all had it with those devilish stacks of paper from the ninth circle of hell. I hate books.

Enter the good old scroll-format book. The solution to all of our problems. In a sexy shiny new dress. I will admit that I had a minor mental breakdown the very first time I started to layout this book for Round not Square, I didn’t know what to do, where to start, how to structure… but it soon dawned on me that the trouble I had stemmed from what was so great about this format, a completely new level of freedom. It was all up to me, the only limitation being vertical. Quite the challenge. It led me to design a way of story-telling that I had never had the opportunity to realise before, one chain of thought, or block, or chapter could be 30 cm long and consist of ten pictures, or it could be 90 cm long and consist of just two, and I wasn’t forced to implement any clear breaks where I didn’t want them. Even better: ultimately, it’s the reader who decides what is shown at once, whether it’s just one picture, a set of three, or the entire book (provided the premises in the west wing of your château allow for it, because it is quite long indeed). There are hundreds of different ways to look at such a scroll.

Quite honestly, the scroll won’t be able to replace the cookery books you inherited from your grandmother. It won’t replace your first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Les Européens” and it won’t replace your Bible, or your Quran. I also doubt it will replace anyone’s Torah, but that’s another story. In any case, there are quite a few things that a scroll-format book can do that “normal” books never will, and the same is true the other way around. They will never replace one another, but it’s high time the scroll took back the space that is carved out for it, and that place is round, not square. I love books.


Simon Becker

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Want to learn more about Simon Becker?

Scroll along here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/simonsawsunlight/

And here: https://www.facebook.com/simonbphotography?fref=ts

And here: http://www.simonbephotography.com/about/

Enjoy!