Indie Photobook Library

STUDIO

Title: STUDIO

Photographer/s: Harry Watts

Contributor/s: Aaron Schuman

Date of publication: 2010

Place of publication: London

Dimensions: 210 x 148mm

Edition size: 500

Type of binding: Cool Grey ColourPlan cover with Gravure embossing (270gsm), Metal Stitch

Number of pages: 32

Type of paper: Silk text pages (200gsm)

Number of pictures: 17

Type of printing: Lithography

Printer: Heidelberg 102CD Speedmaster Five Colour Press with coater – Jigsaw colour (www.jigsawcolour.co.uk/)

Publisher: Black Box Press

Designer: Birch

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0-9566939-0-7

Category: Artist Book

Price: £10

Summary: The photographic studio is generally regarded as an invisible space — a non-place, distilled of reality, where photographers are presented with an opportunity to ‘make’, rather than ‘take’, photographs. At the centre of this stripped-back monochrome environment sits an isolated three-dimensional void that is exclusively intended to serve the two-dimensional image, where precise, polished, elaborate and imaginative worlds are conjured up and transformed into a single plane.

In STUDIO, Harry Watts turns this environment inside out, allowing the camera itself to inhabit the void and explore its surrounding boundaries, where the means, mechanisms and ephemera of the photographic image — and the photographic imagination — reside. Remarkably, he discovers that upon closer examination the borders and tools so often used to define this space and generate sleek, idealized visions are themselves clunky, cramped and awkward. Painted cinderblocks, crumpled backdrops, crooked ladders, half-broken fans, snaking wires, crumbling styrofoam, and countless bits of gaffer, masking and packing tape encircle such sites, alluding to the hidden character and true nature of the studio itself.

Within the series, the charm of the functional trumps the thrill of the fantastical, and through clever and considered observation, Watts sheds light on both the making and taking of photographs, returning these environments — originally created for the purposes — of illusion — into places of photographic insight, intrigue, investigation and ultimately, study.

Text by Aaron Schuman

Date and place of birth of photographer/s: 18th May 1987 – Winchester, England

Website: www.harry-watts.co.uk

Book link: http://www.blackboxpress.co.uk/studio.php

Donated by: Harry Watts

Related books:

SHIBUYA

Not Many Kingdoms Left

Open Books

Ten Days in July

Satellite

Published on February 17, 2011 8:14 pm.
Filed under: Books Tags: 2010, Aaron Schuman, Black Box Press, England, Finds, Harry Watts, Heidelberg, Studio

No Comments

TrackBack URI

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

The Indie Photobook Library is TWO!

This past weekend, the Indie Photobook Library celebrated its 2nd Anniversary. Thank you to all the photographers/artists/bookmakers that have made the collection what it is today! I’d also like to thank Advisory Board members Darius Himes, Andy Adams, Shane Lavalette, and Gabe Reed and all the venues that have welcomed the iPL. In the last two years, the collection has grown to almost 1000 books. The iPL continues to promote and showcase the books in the collection through international pop-up and feature-length exhibitions, articles, conferences, guest lectures, and also preserves them as a non-circulating public library. Having a specific collection dedicated to this contemporary movement in publishing allows for the development of future discourse on trends in self-publishing, the ability to reflect on and compare books in the collection, and for scholarly research to be conducted years, decades, and centuries to come. I am looking forward to continuing the iPL mission.

Cheers,
Larissa Leclair
Founder, Indie Photobook Library