Visiting Speaker - Thijs Wassink (WassinkLundgren)

This video shows the editing process of the booklet ‘WassinkLundgren is still Searching’. While in Beijing and Shanghai on a grant, the artists didn’t have time to plan a book project carefully to the end, so they simply turned the production process around. WassinkLundgren Is Still Searching is a witty publication in which, depending on who is to receive the book, the artists tear out the ‘unimportant’ pictures after publication: a sort of editing as post-production. After the editing is finished, the remaining number of images and the date are written on the cover of the book.

This was definitely an inspiring talk, it was interesting to see such a different approach to editing down images from the book, contrasting to the long thought out process that is usually associated with editing down photographs. It made me think about and even reconsider how I would edit my photographs for the book; I would love to do my own process similar to this in a  future project, or come up with my own innovative way of editing.

These are some photographs from their book 'Empty Bottles' which consists of photographs that were created by the pair setting up a situation to photograph including empty bottles. They noticed that in Tokyo whenever there was an empty plastic bottle left on the floor, someone would come along and pick it up, therefore they decided to set up their camera looking at a scene, place an empty bottle somewhere in the scene and wait for someone to come along and pick it up, then take the photograph. I like this approach to creating a photograph, as it enables them to construct their own photograph in a fun and light-hearted way and almost control people's actions without them knowing it.