OUTER SPACE PRESS

We are Berlin based artist duo—Magdalena Wysocka and Claudio Pogo, running Outer Space Press together since 2016. Created from a dream of being truly independent—OSP is a small press which publishes hand crafted artists’ and photobooks in small print runs, sometimes in collaboration with other artists and photographers. We are a hybrid of sorts, unique in the field of photobooks studio not only designing, editing but also printing and binding most of our titles entirely in–house. Our approach to publishing is slow, as we produce and finish each and every book in our catalogue by hand.

The focus of our practice is a reinterpretation of a classic photobook through experimentation with printing, often delibrately using an imperfect printing processes, like risograph or other stencil based mediums, which we modify to fit our concepts.

Claudio has a background in publishing and photography (running PogoBooks since 2010), and Magda completed her education in printmaking and design (MA degree in Printmaking at Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland).

wysocka / pogo, dead pages, Outer Space Press, 2023 © wysocka / pogo

covers of dead pages no 1, 2 and 3.

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.

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Claudio Pogo, Bild, Outer Space Press, 2023 © Claudio Pogo

A page from our upcoming book 'Bild' by Claudio Pogo

(the books is still in production, to be released spring/summer 2023)

„BILD“ by Claudio Pogo gathers 444 front-pages of the newspaper covering 50 years from 1952-2002.

Through erasing all headlines, texts and any other written elemets from the scans, Claudio Pogo breaks the newspaper down to it’s pure visual language, leaving only photos and graphic elements on the printed pages. German Punk Band „Die Ärzte“ summarized Bild's content as "fear, hate, tits and the weather report".

Axel Springer Verlag, (the publisher of BILD newspaper) prints an A3 sized everyday headline for newsstands all over Germany on Risograph Stencil printers, using their corporate colors crimson-red and black. Claudio Pogo´s book is printed using the exact same 2-color Risograph and the same set of inks.

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A spread from 'Studies of falls' by Magdalena Wysocka.

At 2:46 PM on November 30, 1954, 34–year–old Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was napping on her couch. Suddenly a nine–pound object bashed through the ceiling of her home, smashed into her radio, ricocheted off and hit her in the thigh, reports the Smithsonian. The object was a 4.5–billion years old meteorite and it left a nasty bruise in the only well–documented case of a person being struck by a rock from space. A piece of that meteorite, worthless at the time, recently sold at auction at Christie’s fetching more money per gram than gold.

The book is inspired by a theory, that collisions don’t destroy, but create things. As Lucretius said—’If (the particles) would not swerve, then everything would fall straight down like raindrops through the void, no collisions would take place and Nature never would have produced anything at all.’ The visual material collected in this book comes from: ‚The Project physics course handbook. Concepts of motion.’, the Google image search and from ‚Out of the sky. An introduction to meteoritics’ by Harvey Harlow Nininger.

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