Walter Pfeiffer: Cherchez la femme!, 2007
Karen Kilimnik: Photographs, 2014
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Edition Patrick Frey was founded in 1986 in Zurich, Switzerland, as publisher/editor. The house provides young artists with a platform for a first publication, as well as engages in long-term collaborations with artists including Walter Pfeiffer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, and Andreas Züst. Today, the house publishes 15-20 books a year (“Too many!!” as Frey says), with a staff of are two full time and three part-time collaborators.
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Each book is wonderfully considered on its own terms, conceptualized and conceived as an objet d’art befitting its subject. Publisher Patrick Frey has graciously agreed to speak about book publishing today.
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Miss Rosen: Please talk about the mission for Edition Patrick Frey (EPF). How do you approach visual book publishing as a medium to communicate and explore larger ideas about the culture in which we live? What themes and motifs occur in the list as examples of this vision, and in what way?
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Patrick Frey; I guess the term mission is missing the point a little bit. It sounds almost religious, as if I had have a message as a publisher. In German, when asked your message, there is a nice answer: messages are for carrier pigeons. When I started in 1986, it was all about artist books, books with artistic content, beautiful books. First of all, books were a medium to translate an artist’s work in a very direct way. The book could be considered a condensed body of the artist’s artwork itself, autonomous, not to be modified and not to be mediated or even explained. These years left its marks on my attitude as a publisher. That is why, from the beginning, every single book of EPF looked totally different, specific. And why there were very few or no comments. It was a sort of the contrary of a branding strategy.
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With the years, my vision or maybe perspective – because vision is another one of those suspicious-looking terms – got broader and the books more diverse. Now we publish all kind of non-fiction books, some of them even look like ordinary photo books or even coffee table books, and still – there is this unchanged urge to keep our concept of a book absolutely non-ordinary, to maintain a specific and highly artistic approach.
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Miss Rosen: What I love most about your list is the energy each book holds, the way each title is an exploration into its own world, and in some way, each is like a visual poem that gives us a new way of perceiving the ways in which photography can be used to tell stories. I am particularly interested by the way in which photographs are used to create a narrative in book form. It is the photograph that one meditates upon after (or in lieu of) reading the word. As a publisher, what are your thoughts on how the photograph connects and imparts ideas, energies, experience? How do you think the book does something that other forms of photography (the print, the scan) can not?
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Patrick Frey: A photograph can be a narrative by itself. But this narrative is entirely different from the narrative it takes in a book. It is non-sequential, non-directional. Looking at a single photography, one experiences more something like a narrative field, creating a multitude of associative possibilities, fragments of stories, narrative paths and crossroads. A print on the wall of an art space is a free-floating piece of art. There are some references, maybe a reference to the print next to it, to a certain body of work, to the history of photography, or to certain trends in contemporary art, but the contextual references are rather coincidental and mostly rather weak. A book is and always was by its nature a medium of storytelling and reflection. That is, if you put photographs in a book, you sort of force them into a strong contextual reference, and you expose them to a specific kind of reflection, for instance into the dialogical structure of the double page. And most of all, you force them into a totally different kind of storytelling.
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In a book – if it’s not just a simple collection of pictures, a typical catalogue, so to speak – the narrative power of photography becomes directional. Somehow, a book tells a story always in one and the same direction: from a beginning on page one to the end on the last page. Books do not just tell stories sometimes, like a novel for instance. Books are embodiments of narrative, they are narrative blueprints, they lead you on a journey, or through a man’s life, or follow somebody’s trains of thought. Books will always be mementos of odysseys or Bibles or Madame Bovarys. That is the referential impact photography always will encounter if it is published in a book.
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Miss Rosen: Where did your love for books begin? Do you recall some of your favorite illustrated books? What made them alluring to you in your earlier years? Do you see a connection between the influence of certain authors, art directors, or publishers on your work as a publisher today?
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Patrick Frey: I grew up on the countryside, quite idyllic, and I think my first love in the kingdom of illustrated books was Beatrix Potter. I adored The Tale of Peter Rabbit or The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, and in my eyes everything was totally real and highly animated. I was really terrified each time I saw the Mr. McGregor, the evil gardener, coming round the greenhouse, knowing that Peter hadn’t seen him. I loved these kind of strong feelings, mostly the fear – or Angstlust, to use a German term, that were triggered entirely by the illustrations.
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Like in Struwwelpeter, a famous German educational book, a collection of quite sadistic stories about misbehaving children that are severely punished. Like Konrad, the thumbsucker. He is warned by his mum: Stop sucking your thumb, otherwise the evil tailor will come and cut your thumb. But Konrad continues sucking his thumb. And then comes the evil tailor and cuts Konrad’s thumb off and you see the blood dripping on the floor. Over and over, I checked the thumb falling to the floor and the dripping blood. Or the history of the Suppenkaspar who is not eating his soup and gets thinner and thinner from picture to picture, until he is drawn like a matchstick man and then you just see the soup bowl sitting on the grave of most probably the first anorexic (a boy!) in literary history.
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I don’t know if there are any connections between the book experiences of my early childhood and my preferences today. I know that I still love and that I am still looking for very powerful emotions, triggered by images, be it photographic or otherwise. It may seem a bit of a naïve concept, but it is not because it is always combined with an intensive need or even desire for qualities like complexity and referential ambiguity or extreme precision. Because it is telling me a lot about the relationship between the author and his / her object or subject of desire – for me one of the most important issues in photography at all.
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Like for instance in Mom/Dad by Terry Richardson, published by Mörel Books, one of those books I would have died to publish myself, a highly unsentimental and hilariously funny book on the author’s parents that reports on this relationship in such extreme, brutal and tender intensity that it makes you cry.
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Miss Rosen: As technology takes hold, we are relating to image and text in new ways. How do you think digital media informs our experience of print? How does this impact the publishing industry? What aspects of digital culture have made work in books more exciting?
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Patrick Frey: As digital publishing has almost completely conquered the news and information market, the analogue book is shifting from an informational medium towards a more artistic medium. There is a growing consciousness for the book as a physical object, for the book as a work of craft or art, a feeling for the book as a fetish. Among artists, there is definitely a growing desire to publish a printed artist book. Our concept and our experience of printed matter will become more aesthetical. Even if you look at average hardcover books nowadays, you will already find an intensified sensitivity for aesthetic values. Many ordinary catalogues or fictional books look like artist books now. There is even a growing consciousness for the experience of reading a real printed book, for the smell, the touch, the paper, the binding. Printed books are pimped and pushed towards physical fetish-like objects with added value, collectors items. What has been already true for artist books like ours for quite a while, will become a general rule: Printed books will increasingly be bought by book collectors. Or by people who are looking for a gift.
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On the other hand, digitalization created growing sensitivity for the waste of paper. Not only if I look at a book proposal, if I look at any printed book, the first question now is: Does this REALLY need to be printed? Because the problem is: To print a book doesn’t MEAN that much anymore, everybody can make his own totally okay looking artist book online or create an evenly nice looking 800 pages non-fiction book with Wikipedia texts in less than 15 minutes and get it printed in ten days for about 30 bucks each. Digitalization means speeding up analogue processes, digitalization means self-publishing, and both naturally is a blessing and a curse. Ten years ago, book proposals looked like book proposals, bundles of copied material, stapled or glued together by hand. Now book proposals look like state-of-the-art printed books. I call them phantom books because they look like books but they aren’t really, they are just first ideas from which the editing and publishing work starts. Editing is the key word here. One could say that digitalization caused a radical shift in perception: I think in the near future publishing a book means you have to deal much more with editing skills and coaching processes.
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Maybe I have to correct on sentence from above: Among artists there is definitely a growing desire to publish a printed artist book with a publisher. Some of those authors are only hunting for distribution (they don’t really know that distribution in the tiny niche market for artist books is a disaster anyway!) but some others are looking for an upgrading of their editing process, for an intensive professional dialogue between author and publisher, who is not so much a distributor, rather than a curator – or even a midwife ! – in order to assist in creating and customizing this cultural high-end object named printed book.
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Miss Rosen: There are a great many projects out there, and so many stories to be told. With the wealth of content made available today, how do you select books for publication? What kinds of stories appeal to you as a publisher? This is a big, broad sweeping question, but what do you think makes a book timeless?
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Patrick Frey: No idea, I rarely think about publishing a “timeless“ book. Books are fashion victims like all other artifacts. Attitudes and styles come and go in waves, even content does. The best you can do, is try to be as radical and true to the cause as possible. And to be contemporary at least, or, as Rimbaud puts it, one must be absolutely modern. Which means you have to keep a sharp eye on everything that is out of fashion, fallen out of time. And then time will tell. As I said, no mission, no vision, just wide-open eyes and this everlasting love for intensity and for the eccentric. Try to learn from the authors. And what selection concerns: no method and no recipe. Even in times where the so-called “freedom of choice“ seems to become overwhelming.
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For more information, please visit
Edition Patrick Frey
Roswitha Hecke: Irene, 2011
Patrick Frey, photograph © Daniel Ammann