OUTER SPACE PRESS

Each issue of the ‘dead pages’ is our (re-)interpretation of one of the vintage books, magazines or print ephemera we found and collected. It’s format is reminiscent of a magazine and exceeds the usual size of the other books in our catalog. 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 an open, but numbered edition. ‘dead pages’ has been created as an attempt to look at and reexamine hidden messages that exist in our library.
Issue no.4 combines spreads from a polish photobook about dogs from the 70’s titled ‘Mój pies’ (‘My dog’) with a collection of found large format negatives from an american photo studio from the 80’s. It’s all about portrait photography and hair.

‘dirty’ by Magdalena Wysocka is a collection of found photographs that were categorized as ‘schmutzig’ (eng. ‘dirty’) by an artificial intelligence software called ‚Clarifai'.

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.

Preview spread from the new title, to be launched this Spring:

'This extraordinary project began when we stumbled upon a peculiar archive on eBay – collection of handmade zines containing rephotographed images from a 1920s pornographic film. This cryptic find sparked a deeper investigation into its origin, setting the stage for the photobook’s haunting narrative.

The photobook by Claudio Pogo and Magdalena Wysocka presents a fascinating journey into the mysterious life of so called a “Vampire from Dachauer Moor” whose story teeters on the boundary between myth and reality. By recontextualizing the found zines and integrating them with other archival material, the photobook transcends the realm of a traditional historical record. It becomes an exploration of identity, obscurity, and the power of narrative construction.'