Title: Prague: a notebook

Photographer/s: Graeme Vaughan

Date of publication: June 2011

Place of publication: Manchester, UK

Dimensions: 210mm x 150mm x 5mm

Edition size: 100

Type of binding: paper wrap-around cover, stab binding

Number of pages: 50

Type of paper: 100gsm Mondi

Number of pictures: 34

Type of printing: digital

Printer: PDC Manchester

Publisher: self-published

Designer: Graeme Vaughan

Editor: Graeme Vaughan

Language: English

Category: artist book

Price: £15

Summary: I’m interested in how we get to know a place, in how place comes to mean something in our modern, constructed, urban environments. Some theorists say that we can find meaning in cities through everyday practices; that people in the course and movement of our everyday lives define the spaces that they use and inhabit. So as I follow people, this is what I pursue: the meaning of place created through our daily spatial practices.

I visit places that I’m not familiar with. Without reference to maps or books, people in cities become my guides. They stop me from going my own way, from being guided by a road layout, or signpost, or any of the other ways that we find our way. It’s like a situationist’s technique for subverting our everyday. In a way, I’m creating the conditions for serendipity to happen. I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for, but following these strangers as they go about their daily lives I am led to the subjects of these photographs. I don’t follow anyone for long, not long enough for me to become concerned with them as an individual. Instead I’m interested in the places that they take me to, acting as a collective of city dwellers who define their city and show it to me.

In the end, the work is a product of chance encounters within the rigour of a framework that I set for myself. It is a contiguity of fragments, each one observed and extracted from its moment in the course of someone else’s life. Through these photographs we are taken closer to the place where meaning is created; somewhere between the marks of official intentions, their histories and our daily footsteps.

PRAGUE: A NOTEBOOK
Working with the format of the book for this publication made me consider the relationships that exist between the various discovered spaces within the city, to present the work as a journey that connects these different elements and forms that exist within the city. I enjoy the playful element of this kind of editing, almost like working through an imaginary jigsaw to find those elements within the photographs which lead the reader through the book. Almost it seems, in a similar way to how I was led through the city by those people I followed.

Date and place of birth of photographer/s: 16/June/1970 Liverpool, UK

Website: www.photogas.com

Book link: http://www.photogas.co.uk/index.php?/works/prague-a-notebook/

Donated by: Graeme Vaughan