Tuttle, Richard. Snow. Bari, Italy: Galleria Bonomo, 1985. Print.
This book immediately caught my attention with its extremely minimalist design. The book is a fairly small, glossy, pamphlet-like collection of images. The title is not printed on the book's face, but is discretely stated and explained in modest font on the back. Each two-page spread is completely white with a single color photograph of a sculpture taking center stage. By organizing the book's layout this way, Tuttle succeeds in making each sculpture seem like the very center of the universe, the single-most important subject he could choose to feature. At the same time, the scale of the images is so slight that these sculptures seem like tiny treasures that would have gone unnoticed were it not for his active choice to reveal them. Almost all sense of their scale is lost outside the context of the book. The combination of these two elements of the book's design, along with the simple black pattern on its cover and the brief descriptive paragraph on its back, made me feel like I was holding a priceless artifact of humble glory as I turned its pages.
Breuer, Marco. SMTWTFS. New York: Roth Horowitz, 2002. Print.
SMTWTFS takes the appearance of a weekly planner or date book, with its simple black, spiral-bound cover and inner pockets. The back pocket contains the book's accompanying reader, which includes various essayists', poets' and other writers' interpretations of the images contained in the main book. The abstract photographic images were created without the use of a camera (I cannot begin to guess how some of them were created) and are dominated by strong patterns and a minimal color palette. These images cover both sides of each page completely, with each set of facing pages featuring similar images/patterns, as if they might be a two-page spread of the same image, in most cases. I was fascinated by Breuer's decision to organize these pictures into a kind of planner or field notebook, as if the images contained therein were more like the collected discoveries of a field researcher than the creations of a practicing artist. This "datebook," then, becomes not just a published collection of the artist's investigations, but the actual specimens themselves.
Dan, Wynn. 100 Pages: Words + Pictures. New York: Wynn Dan, 1996. Print.
This book drew me in with its beautifully contrasting bright orange cover and grey-blue monochromatic imagery. The subject matter consists mainly of urban imagery, from storefronts and signage to commercial furniture and landscaping. The images follow an intriguingly non-logical layout, bouncing from full-page spreads to marginalized series (leaving the rest of the page blank) to a collage-like combination of the two. The images have also undergone varying degrees of manipulation, resulting in some that are highly stippled, like the shading technique found in a vintage graphic novel, to full-resolution photographs to high-contrast text blocks. This layout facilitates the book's fast-paced and slightly turbulent but equally systematic sensibility, much like the urban environment it records. I also greatly appreciated the way the monochromatic design helped to unify the images, even when they seemed unrelated (such as the facing pages of a mottled tree trunk on one side and the blocky, contrasty letters "OPA" hovering in the center of the page on the other), which causes the viewer to examine and interpret each image in the direct context of every other and in the book as a whole.
Dine, Jim. This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning. Gottingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2004. Print.
Of all the books I investigated, Jim Dine's This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning stood out as my favorite. The book is bound in an orange cloth cover with the title "scrawled" across its surface in black, as if it was written there by hand. This design choice perfectly echoes the subject matter of the book, which is a collection of the artist's photographs of his hand-written poems, which appear on a variety of surfaces: walls, bedsheets, photographs, and chalkboards, to name a few, sometimes several at once. All the photographs are in color, though most possess a limited chromatic range. Each image bleeds to the edge of the page, so that there is not a single blank space throughout the book. This crowding of images heightens the psychologically jarring words of the poems, their unnerving contexts (mussed bedclothes, for one) and the correspondingly breakneck pace of the book. As a holistic art object, I found this book perfectly executed and utterly engrossing.
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