The cover of the book Sight-_Seeing.
tags
landscape photography, photobook, print, spatial montage, Tirol
role
graphic designer
responsibilities
archive search + selection, design concept, graphic design, layout, spatial montage
client
Wolfgang Scheppe Associates for Tirol Werbung
team
Andrea Buran, Jörg Koopmann, Wolfgang Scheppe
prizes
Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2012, November 2011
A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.

The project started from an extensive image archive consisting of approximately a thousand raw pictures taken by photographers Michael Danner, Dominik Gigler, Monika Höfler, Jörg Koopmann, Verena Kathrein, Andrew Phelps, and Matthias Ziegler.

How could the correlations between the pictures in such a heterogenous1 set be maximized within the “constraints” of the book form?

A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.

The source of inspiration for the innovative layout of Sight-_Seeing came from a couple of misprinted photographic books, where the pictures—due to an incorrect imposition of pages on press sheets—slightly crossed the fold. This printing error served as the starting point for the book’s layout design.

A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.
A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.

Firstly, after a careful collaborative selection, the pictures were reduced in number and divided into twelve thematic groups, with a 16-pages signature allocated to each group.

Secondly, the layout of the pictures was designed to consider not only the two pages of a single spread but also all others within the same 16-page signature. This approach ensured that the images related not only to those on adjacent pages but also to those on subsequent pages through the crossing of the fold, creating a new multi-directional flow of reading in addition to the usual one-directional sequence.

Making of the photobook Sight-_Seeing.

The adopted strategy enabled the creation of multiple, otherwise physically impossible connections between the images in such a heterogeneous set.

A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.
A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.

By peeking out from the fold, the main picture on p. _09_11 is related not only to the photos on its own spread but also to those on pp. _09_06–_09_07.

A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.
A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.
A double page spread of the book Sight-_Seeing.

One of the various 16-page signature mock-ups used during the book’s design: an essential tool for laying out images without going crazy.

A picture of one of the various 16-pages signature mock-ups used during the designing of the book Sight-_Seeing.

  1. heterogeneous due to the different photographers’ approaches. ↩