Winner of the Photography Catalogue of the Year: The Production Line of Happiness and Printed in Germany

Winner of the Photography Catalogue of the Year: The Production Line of Happiness and Printed in Germany from Paris Photo on Vimeo.

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
Edited by Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky
Publisher: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2014
Designed by Petra Hollenbach
and
Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany
Publisher: Walther König, Cologne, 2014
Designed by TK

Two perfectly matched, separately published volumes by Christopher Williams successfully meld artist book and exhibition catalogue. The Production Line of Happiness, which accompanied an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Modern Art, contains relatively few photographs. But it does include a collection of curatorial statements, excerpted writing from select influences, old press releases, footnotes, and a smattering of didactic, instruction-manual-style texts, including a list of “basic rules for the design of a catalogue,” a definition of the barcode, and colophon and usage guides for each of the co-publisher’s logos. The second volume, Printed in Germany, is a thick book filled with a slew of blank pages and images pushed into the gutter, bled around pages, or repeated, with nary a stitch of text save for the words “Printed in Germany” on the back page. Both are scaled to the same trim size, come in multiple colors, are based on the same system and format, and offer interlocking systems for viewing the work. “This is a maddening, compulsive set of books,” comments Lesley Martin, “obsessive and self-conscious, perfectly in keeping with the material-obsessed nature of Williams’s work and the opaque but beguiling experience of the exhibition itself".

More about the Paris Photo- Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards > po.st/pba14