🏅  SECOND PLACE in BOOK COVER DESIGN (2022)

Catalogue design for Photographic Occurrences

Client: Osamu James Nakagawa, Center for Integrative Photographic Studies

Photographic Occurrences celebrates the 2020–2021 photography exhibition of the same name. The book highlights the history of Fine Art photographic experimentation at Indiana University and tracks the artistic legacy of Henry Holmes Smith—artist and founder of the first US graduate program in photography and co-founder of the Society of Photographic Education. While his contribution to photography in higher education is well known, less well known is his avid experimentation in the darkroom and his ground-breaking, cameraless photographic images.

The Photographic Occurrences cover and interior design references both the breadth and impact of Smith’s photographic oeuvre, alluding to the expansive influence of his work and a teaching legacy that challenged photography’s representational underpinnings, demanded that photography be taken seriously as an artistic medium, resurrected “dead” 19th century processes, and expanded the physicality of the photographic print with unconventional materials. The illustration of celestial orbits, focusing rings, and aperture scales all allude to the connections, across time and media, that Smith’s work has created since the 1940s. Thus, the illustration also signifies the two essential elements central to the art of photography: time and light. Without both, photography would not exist.

Connections to Smith’s creative experimentation wend through the illustrations, layout design, as well as the represented artists. Some of the included artists make lens-based images, but create prints with the antique processes that Smith championed. A cadre continue to expand Smith’s experiments with camera-less, non-objective abstractions, while others combine textiles, books, and surprising media to create one of a kind photo-objects that demand to be seen in-person.

The catalogue showcases the historic retrospective of IU’s legacy of photographic experimentation. Multiple connections to Smith’s creative experimentation can be seen through the group exhibition, which features the work of over twenty artists. While some of the artists make lens-based images and create prints with the antique processes that Smith championed, others craft cameraless, nonobjective photographs, and others are combine mixed media to create photo-objects.

This work is supported by Indiana University’s Arts and Humanities Council.