Grid Corrections by Gerco de Ruijter. Published by Nai010.
This book matches a conceptual aerial photography project with a unique and innovative book design. Photographer Gerco de Ruijter’s work focuses on the thousands of parallel roads that define much of the midwestern and western US landscape. When seen from above these roads inevitably contain junctions or slight bends. These “corrections,” indicate where the Jeffersonian theory of an ordered and egalitarian landscape grid meets the reality of the earth’s curved surface.
What makes this book more unique are the accompanying essays, which go way beyond the tradition of the expository text. The photographer, together with writer and filmmaker Peter Delpeut, used historic images, maps, changes in paper type and transparency, windows cut through the paper to reveal words on other pages, and other design innovations to make their contribution a parallel work of art in its own right. Together, words and pictures form a book within a book that is a model for a new kind of project monograph.
Mark Klett is a photographer interested in the intersection of places, history and time. He is the author/co-author of seventeen books, and lives in Tempe, Arizona.
www.markklettphotography.com