[Click here to read the previous article in this series.]

In the beginning of 2006 I had completed the first series of photographs for the Domestic Landscapes project. I had made over 350 images and I decided to try to get it published. My dear friend and art director Erik Kessels made a dummy to present to the publishers. Eventually Aperture in New York became my publisher.

My gallery in Amsterdam, Art Space Witzenhausen, also decided that it was time to present my work more prominently at the art fairs. He wanted to do a solo show with my work, but that meant there needed to be some kind of publication to go with it. I asked another dear friend who is also a graphic designer, Sheila Wicherink (Desperado), to think of a kind of catalogue that would express the large number of images that fill the archive, and also to make clear that whenever somebody like an art director, a curator, or a publisher wants to curate an exhibition or make a book, there is always the difficult task of selecting and editing from a pool of three hundred fifty images. (And of course this will only get more complicated as the archive grows.)


 





Images of putting the book together:






















She came up with the idea of putting a catalogue together with only blank pages. The book is spiral-bound with stiff card pages, and each page has been cut in such a way to take one picture. The book has to display fifteen images. But there are twenty pictures that come with the book, printed single-sided onto sheets of paper sized to fit the book. The idea is that you will then able to arrange the images in any order you desire, but you must also edit, making a decision about which pictures will NOT appear in the book.

We gave it the title: Domestic Landscapes: An Instruction Manual. We made four hundred copies. We had to put the whole book together by hand and all my family and friends came to help. It took us a full two days and eight people to put the books together, but it was a big success. People just loved it.