Trecho de uma entrevista:
DD: Cover to Cover (1975) is not only considered your best artist’s book, but is widely thought of as
the best artists’ book, ever.
MS:
Well, I certainly go along with that. (Laughs) The Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design began a press with Kasper Konig as the director, and
they put out some really wonderful things, which were mostly artists’
statements about their work. I was asked to do something, which was very
nice but I thought, I don’t want to do that. I want to do a work. I
didn’t want something
about my work, but something that was an
example of it. So, I proposed it to them and began looking at books for
their, well, bookishness. One thing is that the pages are two-sided.
There’s always an ‘other’ side. That led me to the idea of having two
cameras take a subject, placing one image on one side, and the other
camera’s view on the opposing side, exactly the same size. Then, you get
a true physical contact with the two-dimensionality of photographs, and
you experience the compression that’s involved in photography, which
mostly vanishes in the face of the realism of it. Just that basic formal
principal led to a variety of things – the recto-verso, for example.
The whole story is of me leaving my house and driving someplace, which
was the Isaacs Gallery, to pick up a copy of the book. So, the book is
presented as a
fait accompli by showing the book to the reader.
Para ler a entrevista completa:
http://www.magentamagazine.com/10/features/michael-snow
Vídeo mostrando o livro:
http://youtu.be/cdvjlJx1E1w
