S75 - Petra Stavast - De Best Verzorgde Boeken

Conceptually interesting and ‘simply’ a really lovely book – that’s S75. The low-resolution portraits Petra Stavast made with her first camera telephone, the S75, are shown here in all their plenitude. For Stavast, the fact that the technology is hard to control is essential to the work; to reflect this, designer Hans Gremmen chose rotary printing, a technique that is just as hard to handle. A great choice in several different ways. This creates an interesting tension between the digital quality of photos taken on a telephone, which can be infinitely shared and reproduced, alongside the mass production associations of rotary printing. In addition, the paper and the printing technique both emphasise the grainy look of the photos and lend them a soft luminescence, similar to what people try to achieve these days with Instagram filters. The thin paper is good to leaf through while also expressing the large scale of this multi-year project. The cover, printed in six colours on black paper, is also gorgeous.