504 - Type in Context - Publication Research

After a visit to Village bookstore in Leeds city centre, I found a very relevant photobook to my project, called Blokovi: Novi Beograd by Lola Paprocka.

Blokovi is a photographic series exploring the New Belgrade apartment blocks and their residents, predominantly shot on medium format in August, 2015. Lola’s main source of inspiration comes from her interest and admiration of architecture and portraiture. These two themes frequently present themselves throughout the project. She intends not to focus on any particular group of people or subjects but has allowed the interactions with strangers in everyday situations within the Belgrade’s brutalist architecture to inform the overall narrative. 

Although this does not have reference to type in context it is a perfect example of a photobook which reveals Belgrade, Serbia to our westernised world in it's true light which can often come as a shock to people. The books very simplistic page layout and glossy stock gives off this coffee-table book feel, even though it is a paperback, which is something to consider for my publication. Still retail priced at £25 even as a paper-back, it does direct its target audience at photography lovers and provides an insight into Eastern Europe and how lifestyle differs, which is definitely something that it has in common with the focus of my project. Mine will be slightly more informative with some opening text pages, rather than just images left to provoke the discussion. The fact that the first edition has only had 300 copies published does allow the price to creep up slightly in comparison to other paper-back publications. This would be a similar sort of first batch size that I would consider using if my publication were to be officially published and printed for sale.

It features a pink cover following a similar trend to the publications I have been inspired by in my research. The sizing of the book is 24 x 28cm, this simplifies to 6/7 which does fit within the golden ratio (quarto) that Tschichold states as graphically correct in his book that we looked at previously. It makes use of a clean perfect bound, which is an appropriate method to hold together its 96 pages without creasing/manipulating the pages and spine of the book.