Instagram takeover: VOID

Publisher Highlight: VOID

In an effort to collaborate with some of the publishers and artists in the ICP library’s collection, we started an Instagram takeover series to highlight exciting works that represent the vanguard in photobooks. Our first takeover was by the Greece-based publisher VOID, a non-profit organization focused on alternative publishing, exhibitions, and education engaging in a series of projects around photography and other visual arts. Their team of 3 composed by João Linneu, Myrto Steirou & Sylvia Sachini is passionately working together to promote photography since October 2016. Here we share some highlights from their takeover last month.

We are taken by VOID’s penchant for the obscure and their aesthetic which seems to always teeter between life and death.

‘Mayflies’ by Dimitra Dede, first published by Void in the form of a zine in 2016,’ dramatizes the creative process of mourning. After the loss of her mother, the artist experiences the interruption of her own timeline on one end while having to fulfill her own role as a mother to the other end.

Both the photography and design in VOID’s publications are highly experimental; the materials used seem to be an extension of the emotional content in the photographs or aspects of the physical landscape: “For ‘Except the Clouds’ we wanted a paper with a very rough feeling to remind the streets of Athens.”

In ‘Beyond the Mirror’ a high quality extra white paper was used to make justice to the contrasty black and white photos:

A central element to VOID’s ethos is also the handmade nature of their bookmaking practice. For example, ‘Meat’ by Olivier Pin-Fat, is a completely handmade book printed using 5 different printing techniques in more than 8 different types of paper (including kitchen paper). “ It took us more than two years to finish binding 250 copies of 300+ pages one by one by hand.”

VOID’s approach to photobooks transcends the photographs they showcase; the labor-intensive, handmade quality of each publication seems like an integral part of the photographic body of work itself, with the photographs, materials and bookmaking process working in unison to elucidate a larger concept.