OUTER SPACE PRESS

BILD (literally Picture) is a German tabloid newspaper founded by Axel Springer in 1952 and described as mainly publishing ‘fear, tits and the weather report’ on its pages. With a daily circulation of almost four million copies, BILD has the widest reach of any German print publication. It is the best-selling European newspaper and has the sixteenth-largest circulation worldwide. BILD has been described as "notorious for its mix of gossip, inflammatory language, and sensationalism". Its nearest English-language stylistic and journalistic equivalent is often considered to be the British national newspaper The Sun, the second-highest-selling European tabloid newspaper. ‘Bild’ is printed entirely on a Risograph—exactly the same printer which Axel Springer Verlag is using to print ‘Bild’s’ headlines to be distributed daily on newsstands all over Germany. A simple A–3 sheet printed in riso–black and crimson red became a starting point for Pogo in creating ‘Bild’. Over the last 7 years Claudio Pogo collected and erased all typography from over 500 front pages of the newspaper. Starting with the very first published issue from 1952, the book gathers 444 front–pages covering 50 years of the tabloid’s history. Claudio Pogo breaks the newspaper down to it’s pure visual language, leaving only photos and graphic elements on the pages.

dead pages is a magazine, which exceeds the usual format of the other books in our catalog –both in physical size and in the fact that it will be continuously printed as an unlimited edition– as well as by not having any binding. Instead, each edition of dead pages is composed of loose 64 x 44 cm prints that are folded in half and contained in a screen printed, PVC sleeve. It is our attempt to look at and reexamine the hidden messages that exist in our library. Each issue is our (re-)interpretation of one of the books we found and collected.

Photographs gathered in the book were found in one particular image library and date back to late XIXth century. Coming from the time of industrial revolution’s phase of rapid scientific discovery, mass production and industrialization, photographs depict nature in its pure form as well as human interventions into landscapes. In the words of Ernst van Alphen found in ‚Failed images. Photography and it’s counter practices.’: ‚‚The term landscape refers to a space in external world as well as to a representation of it. In the latter meaning landscape is a genre within figurative art. In the former meaning landscape is a material reality designed by and for humans. (...) Western culture knows two traditional topoi that locate nature outside culture. (...) The first one is that of the Biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, the place of pure nature because guilt does not yet exist, the second one is the Kantian idea of the sublime as experience that is post-cultural. When man is located with his/her back to civilisation eye to eye with wild oceans or steep mountains, he/she has an experience that is supposed to be outside the familiar possibilitiess of represenation. We call such experience ‚sublime’.’ (Copyright Creative Commons: CC-BY-NC-ND). Perhaps equally if not more important than nature as a subject matter for Wysocka’s work is the medium of photography itself. ‚dirty’ is an exploration of what in photography is usually considered unwanted or can be disregarded as imperfect. Dirt, dust, blur, scratches and cracks on negatives leave an imprint of the passing of time and give the experience of browsing the book an uncanny sense of nostalgia. ‚dirty’ is a study of how photography is transformed with time, where image is, as considered by Susan Sontag—an interpretation of the real, trace, something directly stenciled off the real, a footprint or a death mask.
Faded and bleached out colors are reproduced and enhanced by combination of two printing techniques used in the production of the book: offset and risograph.