Catalogue art direction for the inaugural Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) in 2008.
While working closely with the curators and the festival organisers; having an intimate view of the source material and the stories behind the images, I proposed — what better way to house the photographs, and in the way that the photographers wanted to share these images: to be in their shoes, looking through their lens — to make the book a camera. An object, abstracted yet literal, something desirable as well as a tool for documentation and expression. And this camera was to house all these shots, like a spooled roll of film inside an analogue rangefinder (the page numbers rotated like the film counter on the camera, as one read on).
Set in Garamond; the navigationals for the book were camera knobs and parts (the f-stop switch clicked correspondingly as the sections wore on, and the book was bookended with the "rewind" spool lever on the final page) modelled on the iconic Nikon FM2 and Leicas, an easter egg to the photography afficionados who would recognise the homage. The book was designed as seen above, with clipped edge (a nod to the SIPF's first festival logo), and flushed edges, so as to remove visual connotations to a book, and more toward a "camera object". Alas, only 30 of these special copies were produced, as the printer said it was damaging her guillotine, and refused to cut more. The ones that you'll see in museums shops today (like the ArtScience's), are the regular "hardcover book" versions without the trimmed edges.
