All Dressed Up No Place to Go — Sanne Peper — Dood Paard

‘Amsterdam-based graphic designer Michaël Snitker has created a beautiful book with photographer Sanne Peper called All Dressed Up — No Place to Go. It’s an exploration of the dialoque between the different sides of Peper’s work: on the one hand she is a theatre photographer, documenting the action of a play; and on the other she is a landscape photographer, creating images of the metropolis. Thus the book falls into two sections and can be read front-to-back or back-to-front. A middle section is delineated by two different paper stocks – a fluor-pink and a textured, semi-transparant stock patterned with a spider’s-web design. The theatre work featured is based around a performance of a play called MedEia, based on the ancient Greek myth of Medea. Parallels are drawn between the character Medea, whose story sees her caught in a series of tragic twist of fate, and the photographer as an outsider, observing het subject from the darkness of the theatre. The book also creates a narrative around the countdown towards inevitable doom explored in the play and the tensions this creates.

‘it’s about highly strung expectations versus the limitations of everyday reality – the individual person versus the invisible but powerful mass’, says Snitker. Despite being very finely crafted, the publication has a fittingly ephemeral feel, printed on nine different, very lightweight paper stocks. The typeface used are the recently designed sans-serif Galaxie Polaris (‘because of the nicely designed numbers’, says Snitker) and the serif typeface Utopia, designed by Robert Slimbach in 1989.

Grafik. Magazine 142, London

This publication was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

Awarded with the Best Dutch Book Designs 2006
debestverzorgdeboeken.nl

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