The source material for Magdalena Wysocka’s photobook ‘RÓŻE’ is a compendium of roses from 1967, which consist of 150 images of different varieties photographed in full color, printed and published in Poland. Dr. Jan Augustynowicz and Inż Antoni Gładysz, the authors of the book, gave it a loving title: ‘A guidebook for those who fancy roses’ (org. ‘Poradnik dla miłośnikow róż’).

The images from the ‘Guidebook’ were rescanned and transformed into something almost entirely different. A visual trigger for this transformation was a failed offset printing process of the original photographs, which resulted in shifts of colors and distortions of almost painfully colourful reproductions. Wysocka took a step to push the print mistakes by printing ‘RÓŻE’ in 4 colour CMYK separation on a Risograph. The result of marrying these two imperfections in print is a beautiful colour study. ‘Wysocka’s choice of the Risograph printing process then gives these pictures another twist. The enlargement and rephotography would already have begun the process of breaking down the saturated colors from the original source images, and the Risograph ink layers further undermine their clarity. Between the small mis-registrations of the colors to the inconsistencies of the roller marks, the images are filled with crackling degradations, turning petals into abstract color studies. Up close, fuzziness is balanced by dotted patterns, with the color elements dissolving into topographies of texture. Each and every turn of the page in RÓŻE delivers examples of tactile strangeness, the recognizable drifting away, leaving mottled color fields that want to break down and head toward an undulating kind of printer-Pointillism. What makes RÓŻE so successful is that it systematically destroys the obviousness of its subject. The best of Wysocka’s constructions and enlargements turn the cliched flower into something unrecognizable, where edges and negative space tussle with subtleties and mysteries of color. While the central idea here may seem simple, the execution is anything but – it takes a sophisticated eye to break down single images into fragments that retain their own individual sense of compositional interest. This is a photobook that gets better with each visit, as we slow down and look ever more closely, the images reveal further layers of gloriously rich disintegration.’

Détails

Une coédition de Pogo Books et Outer Space Press en 150 exemplaires

2018

20x28cm

112 Pages

ISBN 978-3-942547-64-2