Photo London<\/a>\u00a0at Somerset House, the UK-pendant to the massively successful photography fair Paris Photo, a total of three photography and book fairs, as well as countless individual events, coincided this weekend, with Offprint in Tate Modern and Room and Book at the Institute of Contemporary Art. While a fair amount of digital image-making was represented, the fairs predominately celebrated the printed image, a form of image-making and -consumption arguably nearing its own extinction. This threat to book lovers, magazine-fetishists and anyone else passionate about the material world, calls for a reevaluation of photography\u2019s materiality, and an exploration as to how an umbrella term such as “photography” might prove useful in the future.<\/p>\nThe bottom of Tate Modern\u2019s Turbine Hall transformed into a hectic market space, with over 100 participating national and international magazines, distributors and publishers. Heavyweights like MIT Books, Semiotext(e) and (obviously) Tate were present, but the main focus was on the small publishers and vendors, . Book fairs trigger an almost fetishistic appreciation for print, and the unique odour of freshly printed and unwrapped books filled the air of the Tate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Offprint](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/tate_offprint_-59-copy.jpg\")
Offprint festival, Tate Modern<\/p>\n
Centrally in the fair, surrounded by congested \u2018streets\u2019 of book-stands, a structure of red boxes rose over the browsing crowd \u2013 creating a performative space of sorts in the middle of the fair, hosted and organized by the London-organisation “Self Publish be Happy” (SPBH). The group enthusiastically promotes and supports (as the name indicates) independently published books, predominately photo- and artworks. Bruno Ceschel. Ceschel founded SPBH back in 2012, and has pioneered a new way of distributing, curating and collecting photography in the digital age, with the organization’s collection currently containing over 2000 publications.<\/p>\n
For Offprint, SFBH curated a series of workshops and performances meant to activate and engage the audience with photography. \u201cWe really want to present an interactive element to the process of image-making,\u201d he tells Sleek, on Saturday afternoon, in between performances. Artist Thomas Mailaender opened a temporary tattoo-parlour, Maya Rochat invited audiences to destroy images creatively, while Tony Cairns did a live-hacking of Kindle publications \u2013 a diverse array of projects all reflecting on the image-making process. It was refreshing to encounter an interactive space at a book fair, usually structured rigidly with passive spectatorship\/buying and semi-engaged sales (the vendors, one imagines, must tire after a whole of three days for which the fair is open)\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Arvida](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/tate_offprint_-63-copy.jpg\")
Arvida Bystr\u00f6m and Maja Malou Lyse’s selfie stick workshop<\/p>\n
The highlight was certainly when Swedish photographer Arvida Bystr\u00f6m and Danish artist Maja Malou Lyse took over the interactive booth in an armour of baby pink track suits, covering the Turbine Hall\u2019s concrete ground in similarly-coloured fitness mats. To a quirky house beat and a high-energy voice-over channeling a fitness-instructor, the dynamic duo guided participants through a set of selfie stick aerobics, presented as a lesson in \u201chigh energy self-admiration\u201d. It included a full runthrough of the standard selfie-stick poses such as the slide, the spin and not to forget, the belfie<\/i> (\u201caka the butt selfie \u2013 a media\u2019s favorite!\u201d). Bystr\u00f6m and Lyse passionately explores and advocate the agency that lies in the new photographic gadget, presenting a feminist discourse that is young, refreshing and celebratory.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"tate_offprint_-87-copy\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/tate_offprint_-87-copy.jpg\")
Self Publish, Be Happy. Tate London.<\/p>\n