Leporello 1 + 2
This project was my first collaboration with Ines von Ketelhodt. I had known Ines for a few years as a member of the group Unica T, and I appreciated her photography work, which was as unusual as it was unique in the book arts scene of the late 1980s. Ines had the idea of doing a black-and-white photo series in which I would move around in front of the camera with a two-meter-long wooden stick while she took pictures with long exposure times. We found a sports hall where we could carry out our experiment, and chose 18 out of the many resulting photographs as the basis for our project. Each person was supposed to respond to the photo series with an overprinting process. Our ideas were very different, so in the end we decided to put out two volumes with the same photo series, each with its own overprinting. Ines chose a typographical solution based on a text passage from Joachim Schumacher’s Leicht ’gen Morgen unterwegs. Eine Philosophische Reise. For my version, I had the stick in mind, even though it is barely recognizable in most of the shots due to the long exposure time. I chose an overprinting with colored lines, and set a text citation from an 18th-century book: Natürliches Zauber-Buch, Neu-eröffneter Spiel-Platz rarer Künste on the first page as the motto. Ines handled the bookbinding for the two accordion books, and the perfect result marks the beginning of our bookbinding collaboration that continues to this day. The title we chose for the books comes from the term leporello, which we use in Germany for an accordion binding. The name comes from Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello and his long list of the women his master seduced in Mozart’s opera.
36 pages, Zerkall mould-made paper, hand-set, letterpress printed, Photographs offset printed, 2 accordions, 15 x 20 cm,
60 numbered and signed copies. Lahnstein & Offenbach 1989.