A recent favorite photobook of ours is historia, memoria y silencios by Lorena Guillen Vaschetti. We are daily occupied in the preservation of vintage photography & much of that is in slide format. With each new group of photos we acquire, there is the initial question of how are we to best treat these images, a question Vaschetti herself asked upon finding a number of slides that recorded her family’s past vacations. “What is the role of photography in a family’s history?” she asked, “And what do I do with that gift?” The resulting answer is this wonderful book, a selection of slides presented not as direct scans, but photographed in such a way that resembles a projected slideshow. The presentation is quite successful, with each photo slightly blurred to resemble not only a projected slide but also the fading of time itself. The pages smell richly of ink & bring to mind the heated dusty smell of the slide carousel as it makes its rotation in a projector. The back section of the book is given to photographs of the slides & film canisters as objects. The design of the book here incorporates french folds, the extra substance of which makes one pause & contemplate the photos longer, trying to imagine, as Vaschetti noted she did, what remarkable images from the past they contain. 

Get a copy at Ampersand or order it from our online store here.

- Inventory -

02.04.2012