Design Icon Voyeur by Hans-Peter Feldmann Photography

Design Icon
This piece originally appeared in the December 2005 issue of Grafik magazine.

VOYEUR by Hans-Peter Feldmann
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln1994, 1997

This book is 165 x 110 x 10mm, 256 pages, 198 grams, the paper weight is just right, smaller than your average paperback, perfect bound (doesn’t lay flat), sits in my hand, fits in my pocket and gets lost on a shelf between flabby, super-size photography books. It’s small, modest, friendly and seems to me to be the ideal design icon for our time. It’s a re-sampled, re-issued, re-packaged celebration and confusion of the everyday. Black and white reproductions of photographs taken from photojournalism, stock libraries and art photography are presented to the reader, each page/spread with its own rhythm, one to six or more slightly coarse screened photographs per page ranging in size from 24 x 24mm to 150 x 98mm. This sophisticated scrapbook sits in the category of ‘artist’s book’, though I suspect Feldmann wouldn’t be happy with that distinction. He believes that everyone is an artist. Feldmann has been doing this type of thing for three decades. You see his influence amongst others in magazines like ‘Permanent Food’, the paperback journal produced by Maurizio Cattelan and co.,where every page is appropriated from magazines all over the world. The perfect post-modern product.

Feldmann seems to know ‘the thrill and dread of a world in which “all that is solid melts into air”’(Marshall Berman quoting Marx). Like our lives, the book is full of paradox and contradiction. It reads differently every time (the second edition has the same images as the first but in a different order). We see a complex landscape of stolen images; some violent, others pornographic, both victims and perpetrators are there: newlyweds, porn stars, a kiss, a dressing room, a car crash, a male model, a polar bear, the queen mother, a baby, a fly, a burial, a mousetrap, a lighthouse, a masked man, a seagull, an 80s model, a laughing old couple, a singing lesson, a boxer, Jamie Lee Curtis undressing, chimpanzees hugging, Princess Anne meeting dancers, a plate of sweetcorn, an empty bedroom, a girl stretching, a dog swimming, a full moon, a happy dentist and so on. The combinations and sequences of images can be playful or distressing. Each time you flick through the book you see a new image.

These are images divorced from their original text. Something I wish would happen to the Saturday Guardian, whose lifestyle supplements say nothing to me about my life. Mr public figure Smith goes to see a pop concert and in exchange his son goes to the opera. How thrilling. How middle-class. Who cares? No danger of that with this icon, this book is – as Feldmann might say – “guaranteed free of text”. There’s no guide on how to live and work in the modern world. Here the book agrees with Sontag in On Photography ‘Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

’What about the cover? It’s not exactly an example of ‘modernist good taste’ (see Phaidon press), but equally I don’t think we’re dealing with the tired, knowing wink of irony, or the vernacular (the ‘low’ rather than the ‘high’). It’s more honest than that. While this book is more than likely bought by the ‘graphically’ sophisticated, there’s no reason this book shouldn’t have a broader appeal. It’s for your mum and dad too.

A bigger question: Is it possible or even desirable to discuss a piece of ‘design’ without mentioning the content? Can you enjoy a dutch poster without knowing what it says? Could I choose a Faucheux designed bookcover as my graphic design icon, without reading French? Can you celebrate the ‘form’ without being interested in the content? You can but I don’t think that’s healthy. To sample and re-issue an idea put by Robin Kinross in Fellow Readers: ‘It is worth trying a brutally simple attitude to design: judge it by its content. This certainly helps to clear the mind – and maybe the shops and museums too.’