Black Books

The black books are the more popular and cheaper line of artist’s books. They are concerned with finding patterns within the behavior of modern photography. These are books about photography but from a more “light-hearted” perspective. The editions of the black books are unlimited, the pocket-sized books are neither numbered nor signed. They are obtainable either through my shop or directly at the printer’s online bookstore. Please click the links below for book previews and orders.

Awesome Errors, Dreadful Glitches
The internet is flooded with billions of photographs, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Awesome Errors, Dreadful Glitches is about the photographic errors, mistakes, glitches, and malfunctions that so many find fascinating. Contrary to popular belief, people do not simply delete pictures when they go wrong, they often develop an affection and curiosity for them, uploading them to photo sharing sites in huge numbers and helping create an apparently booming sub-genre of photography.
20 x 13 cm, 80 pages, b&w, softcover, 10 € – preview

But Is It Art?
The internet is flooded with billions of photographs, many of which are hosted on photo sharing sites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Studying the captions and descriptions of these photographs we see a variety of reasons for their existence. “But is it Art?” is a new addition to my series of black books exploring the realm of online photo hosting sites. The book contains images that are screenshots, specifically from the website Flickr. Each image shows people’s attempts at creating photography “after”, “based on”, “in the style of” or “inspired by” well-known artists, to varying degrees of success. As individual attempts these samples may be charming, hilarious or bold (and sometimes embarrassing), as a group they raise more interesting questions of originality and authorship.
20 x 13 cm, 120 pages, b&w, softcover, 10 € – preview
But Is It Art? was shortlisted for the Artists’ Book of the Moment award 2011

Cool Pictures, Cool Stuff
The internet is flooded with billions of photographs, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Studying the captions and descriptions of these photographs we see a variety of reasons for their existence. One of them is simple, striking and apparently quite popular: “I thought it looked cool.” There is an incredible number of photographs on Fickr that people have taken because they thought something looked ‘cool’. 
The book consists of 116 images based on various perceptions of what people consider to be ‘cool’. Each picture is accompanied by the photographer’s original caption. The resulting collection of images is very revealing and often hilarious.
20 x 13 cm, 120 pages, b&w, softcover, 10 € – preview

Lost Memories
In the age of digital photography, taking snapshots has become a reliably constant background sound of everyday life, in fact everywhere we turn there is somebody taking photographs. It has got to the point that we can’t imagine life without the possibility of a camera recording it. Losing a camera, and indeed these visual recordings of everyday activities is, for most people, an awfully emotional scenario to find oneself in. And it happens more often than we may think. Perhaps unsurprisingly a number of websites have been created as an antidote for this. Their purpose? To reunite people with their lost cameras and in turn, their lost photographs. 
Lost Memories documents some of these Internet messages, or pleas of people who are desperately seeking their lost cameras. Many of them are heart-wrenching distress calls that disclose the importance of photographs in modern life. The book is a compilation of such desperate attempts to retrieve personal lost treasures. Every cry for help evokes Bruce Chatwin’s observation that “to lose a passport was the least of one’s worries; to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”
20 x 13 cm, 80 pages, b&w, softcover, 10 € – preview

Quick Response
Quick Response is a hands-on introduction into the realm of QR code applications and demonstrates a way in which two dimensional bar codes can be used to view images. People have to “read” this book by taking photos of each page using a cameraphone. The phone’s QR code reader will then decode the abstract image to reveal that each image is an encoded URL for a photograph hosted on Flickr. The series of photos demonstrates the variety of modern commercial, artistic and subversive QR code applications. In addition, the book demonstrates a new way of appropriating other people’s photographs.
20 x 13 cm, 40 pages, b&w, softcover, 8 € – preview

The Missing Pictures
Between 2006 to 2008 I completed a series of works based on imagery found on the Internet. These works are a continuation from the Archiv project, altered to suit the circumstances of modern technologies. Digital photography, Internet, and photo sharing sites have created a new visual environment and new forms of producing, distributing and using photographs. Digital multichannel photo installations such as Netzerscheinungen and Reload were my response to this new situation, researching the realm of online photography for recurring motifs and patterns. A small selection of photographs incorporated into these works have been presented on my website. Since receiving several complaints by photographers who found their images on my site I have replaced the images with placeholders denoting a removed or missing image. This has also turned into a new book. The book contains the complete set of these icons indicating that something went wrong with a photograph. It goes without saying that these were found on the Internet as well, just like the photographs they replace.
20 x 13 cm, 40 pages, b&w, softcover, 8 € – preview

When Boredom Strikes
The internet is flooded with billions of photographs, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Studying the captions and descriptions of these photographs we see a variety of reasons for their existence. One of them is simple, striking and apparently quite popular: boredom. There is an incredible number of photographs on Fickr that people have taken just because they’ve been bored. 
The book assembles 156 photographs made on account of boredom. Each picture is accompanied by the photographer’s original caption. In stark contrast to the title this book isn’t boring at all, but very revealing and often hilarious.
20 x 13 cm, 160 pages, b&w, softcover, 12 € – preview