Offprint

On Saturday the 18th May I visited the Tate Modern turbine hall for the Offprint book event that was taking place over the weekend. It hosted publishers from 17 countries and involved individual publisher tables, book signings, talks and workshops. There were lots of books and different publishers to look at and it took me quite a while to get round most of it but It really helped me when thinking about the different styles that books can be and they don't have to be all the same. One of the books that was particularly interesting was one that was in the style of a newspaper print. This was called 'Stories from the migrant trail' by Brett Gundlock. It was about a group of migrants who met on the 12th October 2018 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras and they got together and formed a caravan. They were men, women and children all committed to helping each other travel towards the United States looking for a better future. Portraits of the migrants were taken and put alongside their testimonials and stories. The format of this book was something I hadn't really seen done before and I thought the style really suited the content of it with all the real and powerful stories from the migrants. 

Another unique book I found was another handmade book called 'Punching Air' which was literally like a folded leaflet. It was really simplistic and unique way of making a book and I thought that would be a really use full idea to make a book in a cost effective way for this project if the format fitted with my photo story. A detail I liked about this was that it also had a handmade dust jacket/book jacket folded around the outside of the book, like most hardback books would usually have which I thought was a nice touch. 

I also looked at Alex Soth's most recent book 'I know how furiously your heart is beating. I loved the material texture of this book and how it felt to hold however it was a bit too large in my opinion but the size suited the content well. I liked how the text was arranged on the front cover and how simplistic it was with just the pink text and no images that revealed what the book was about. The first two inside pages were a nice shade of pink which wasn't too bright and didn't distract from the overall content. This book wasn't about any subject in particular. Alex Soth wanted to get a glimpse into people's interior lives and simply just spend time with them and strip photography down 'to its primary elements'. '

"Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth

I thought the images in this book were really beautiful and raw and I believe that a certain image can tell you a lot about a person which is what Alex Soth has done and he has achieved what he set out to do and that is briefly glimpsing into their lives.

Going to offprint was a really good experience to have a look at a wide variety of different books in all shapes and sizes. As it just shows that you don't have to go for a standard book format and you can be as creative with it as you like.