Atem.

Photographs by Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza. Text by Paola Paleari.

Yard Press, Rome, Italy, 2016. 300 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 9¾x13¼".

Selected as Book of the Week by Christian Michael Filardo

In agreement with the author, who does not feel his production strictly related to the book format and who thinks photography is a mutable and manifold matter, we publish a book free of the precepts that habitually regulate the flux of its content and the usual relations between the photographs and the pages. The volume’s content does not derive from a sequence of images designed according to aesthetic rules, based on formal and conceptual balance, but it has been obtained through a purely random process lacking of any type of selection refinement.

All the photos in the book rigorously respect the numeric order of the photographic source, that is the author’s archive made of thousands of images, and are presented consecutively respecting their original format regardless of the book’s page dimensions. At a later moment in the book’s design, the individual pages were randomly shuffled without caring about the page bleed or the overlapping between the photographs. The book that results from this process becomes a container that houses the images without any control over them but granting them the uncommon freedom to create new ones.

“To let the photographs present themselves as they are, without any editing nor graphic intervention, and to allow them to interact autonomously within an uninterrupted flow of pages, demands us to accept that they may decide to fight against one other and even to hide from our sight on the basis of pure chance.
Atem is the logical result of a pursuit of coherence from intention to translation, and at the same time it is an act of responsibility, a demonstration that casting doubt on given solutions in favour of the independence of the image is not only possible, but necessary.” — Paola Paleari.

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