Arthur Tress, gatefold pages, Barcelona Unfolds

The inventive U.S. photographer Arthur Tress has recently been using Blurb Books to get out a series of photographic projects in book form. These are for old and new projects that may not otherwise be seen. He’s been busy, there are about twenty of them, all available for sale on the Blurb Bookstore site: http://au.blurb.com/search/site_search?page=1&search=arthur+tress

My favourite is the ingenious Barcelona Unfolds (http://au.blurb.com/b/997813-barcelona-unfolds-arthur-tress).

This book is about a week I spent wandering around the streets of Barcelona. I mostly took pictures of old and new architecture plus small accidental details of urban life and people, often including my own hand. I shot them all at an angle of 45 degrees to give a more dynamic effect.

He invites the purchaser of the book to fold the pages creating multiple connections of images. I ask the person who buys the book online to take about ten minutes and work on transforming the book into a new physical creation. For “Barcelona Unfolds” this means that all the forty pages of the book must be neatly folded, either to the right or left, down the center edge in the middle of the page.This will create a series of twenty “gatefolds” that can be carefully opened or closed as you turn all the pages in sequence.

Arthur Tress, Barcelona Unfolds, Blurb Books