Back in 2006, skateboarder Jerry Hsu got a Blackberry. He began taking notes, snapping visual one-liners, jotting down locations and references that he’d send by BBM to friends.
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“By today’s standards, those photos are really bad but back then it was like, ‘Ohh these are pretty good!’” Hsu remembers. “It was a fun new technology. Many of the photos are personal messages for specific people or a specific group of people. It’s that shorthand language of photos that we use now.”
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Three years later, Hsu started his blog, NAZI GOLD, a chronological feed of work curated from the thousands of photographs he was taking on his phone. He has no clue exactly how many there are in all: “On the phone I’m holding right now there are 45,000 photos. Over a 10-year period, it might be double that, or more.”
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From this vast archive, a vision emerged, one that became shaped into the new book, The Beautiful Flower Is the World (Anthology Editions). The publication takes its name from a photograph of a t-shirt made in Asia. “The t-shirt is obviously mistranslated,” Hsu says.
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