A Lifelog of the Platform
This colourful little hand-made book by artist KD Xia is a
nugget of understated fun and philosophy. It documents the life of an
Underground Platform (Old Street Tube, a stone’s throw from our shop) through
photographs taken at the same second each morning – 8:37:01. And so we form a
picture of the life of a platform – the people that wait on it, the arrivals,
the destinations...
Nestling in the centre of the book is a colour postcard of
the platform, a blurred memento of a place that the artist describes as an
‘isolated dreamworld’. Xia ruminates on the meaning of this non-place with no
phone signal and the act of photographing it in this digital age where virtually
every facet of our life is logged on social networking websites.
Couple
We have recently acquired and restocked books by French
Canadian comics group Milleputois. My favourite work is the new mini-book Couple by Pascal Girard (pictured
above). Only 16 pages long, and entirely wordless, yet each little square page says
so much. Each page shows a different scene, with different people, some are
obviously couples in the conventional sense, whilst others are merely strangers
interacting in some quiet way on the train or in the park – the little glances
and shuffles that form our day, yet are totally forgotten a second later.
Girard shows us the moments between moments, the tiny sparks of energy that
fizzle between people silently all the time.
A Lifelog of the Platform costs just £3 and Couple costs something similar....they are both available in the bookartbookshop now.
- Jon Lander
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