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[tonifoto]

Hello - here are some photos I take during my (mostly) night walks.

[tonifoto]

Hello,  I have exciting news: my zine “Leap!” will be exhibited at an event called Booked 2022 in Helsinki! “Leap!” is my first photography focused zine I put together back in January 2022 and it is a project I’m very proud of. Its interesting to see something so personal make its way into a public space. In this week’s post I wanted to share a little about this zine without giving too much away. 

To put it simply, Leap! is about my permanent move from Canada to Finland to live with my partner after five years of semi-long distance relationship. In other words it attempts to celebrate a new chapter in my life. Here is some info about the book:

48pages / 210mm x 133mm Thread sewn binding Matte paper 130gm

All of the pictures in this book have a dark tone but I think that reflects Finnish winter pretty well. I wish there were more light but it is what it is (I like this saying).  By contrast, I always get a warm feeling when looking at them since they are essentially ordinary everyday things that me and my partner enjoy doing, one of those being long outdoors walks in nature.

You might be wondering about the hare on the cover. There are pictures and paintings of hares scattered throughout the book. I noticed when I was looking through my archive for the initial selection of images I noticed how many pictures of hares there were. They were mostly shot through a window since, if I were to open the door it would skip away instantly. I noticed them quite often, so it probably meant something right? I sometimes like to look up symbolism and meanings for things and I read that the hare represented new beginnings. I thought it fit and I rolled with it.

This project made me realize how much I enjoyed putting images together into a book. I’ve been a book collector since my early teens, collecting books from artists I like, old and new as well as picture books. Aside from the art itself, the image placement, end paper selection, paper weight, the binding and much more are what excite me. It seemed like only a matter of time before I started making my own. I wondered for a long time why I enjoyed books so much - I haven’t come to a conclusion but it is probably has something to do with it being tactile. 

For those curious about cameras - I used my trusty Fujifilm XT1 with a 23mm F2 for all the images (I think). To my surprise it survived daily use in sub-zero temperatures as well as heavy snowfall!

Lastly, as much as I doubt anyone in the right area will see this (It always feels like I’m speaking into the void), here’s the information for the event just in case. The event will carry some copies of Leap! for sale as well.

26 November - 18 December 2022 MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1 C, Helsinki

If you’re not in the area but are interested in buying a copy. Just send me a DM! The money will go to printing costs on future books or zines since I’d like to keep this ball rolling. 

One day I’d like to talk more in detail about how the idea developed the picture selection process as well as inspirations behind the sequencing and design (My favorite part) but for now this preview will do.

Thanks for reading my ramblings.

[tonifoto]

Hey! I’m going to try to make posts like these once a week and see how it goes. I’ve never written my thoughts out like this before, so this is feeling a bit odd. I suppose I’ll get used to it eventually.   So an update from the last post... this is going to take forever. There are about 50 pages of contact sheets so far and I’m not even close to being done! I’m thinking I should pick sequences of images more arbitrarily so I don’t spend forever on this project.  I took the snippets above from a random page; I said it in the last post but I love seeing images this way, it paints a much clearer picture of the particular day in the photo rather than a single nicely composed picture. This set is from 2017 and after looking at these I’m remembering little details like how the weather was like or how much my partner and I filled our bucket with blueberries. I used a heavy Pentax DSLR back then with a loud shutter sound, it’s pretty funny thinking about it now as my cameras have only gotten smaller throughout the years.  More paintings/drawings! I was looking at William Klein’s New York 1954 photobook (1995 english edition) last week and liked how he broke up his spreads with bold numbers. To me, they seemed a way to add variety to the book since all the pages were pretty much full bleed. I took inspiration from that and did something in the same vein but instead of chapter numbers it was drawings of different weather condition. That said, they won’t necessarily introduce contact sheets that have specific kind of weather. Soon one of my zines will be included in an exhibition, which I’m pretty stoked about. It’s called Leap! I’ll talk about it more next week and show a few process pictures. Here’s a little preview in the meantime.  Images:

1. Snippet from Lenkki  2. Snippet from Lenkki 3. William Klein’s New York book 4. Weather drawings for Lenkki made in Procreate on the iPad. 5. Leap! preview

See you next week :D 

[tonifoto]

Hello! I’m Antonio, an artist based in Finland (I also have an art blog) I’ve always loved Tumblr’s blogging format so I thought it would be fun to start a new page and blog my process and thoughts when making photography zines/books. Its a fairly new venture for me and something I hope to get better at as I go.  I painted the image above for a book I am working on at the moment. “Lenkki” in this context means Loop and it will contain photos I took in my daily walks during my time in Järvenpää (2017-2022), a city in the south of Finland. The book will serve as a nice memory of my time there. I plan on presenting the images as digital contact sheets, showing the good and “bad” pictures equally. I was inspired books like Daido Moriyama’s Labyrinth as well as Rinko Kawauchi’s Sheets where they only contain unfiltered series of images. I found them so fascinating because it feels like looking into their thought process when approaching a subject to shoot. You could tell when the photographer wanted to reframe their composition, approach the subject from a different angle or when they move on to the next thing. Similarly it feels like looking at an artist’s sketchbook. I think the idea is easy to execute but it’ll take me a while to export all these photos... we’ll see. This is my fourth book project so I’ll try to share some thoughts on previous ones I’ve made when I can.  Images: 1. “Lenkki” book cover made in Procreate on the ipad. 2. Excerpts from “Labyrinth” and “Sheets” 3. Intro page illustration 4. Lenkki Image layout preview