Purepurygraphy

Simon de Pury

This project started real easy. We met Simon de Pury and got to talk about our hobbies somehow. He was obsessed with his little camera, using it as a sort of visual diary. But if you’d expect something like ‘normal’ images, you got it wrong. It was all completely abstract textures and wildly cropped photographs. So he asked us if we create a book for him with these pictures. We certainly can. The very next day he’d sent us a CDR with about 130 images on it and we started the design process by combining and grouping his works and were about to present the first draft, we had Simon on the line, telling us there was more. So we were curiously awaiting one more CDR. What we received was beyond believe. Simon shocked us by handing over 2.500 images with the request, now, since we’ve had all the pictures he’s taken in this manner, to create a book out of the material. After grouping the pictures this way around and that way, we decided to bring the lots in order and find linking images to connect them. We still ended up with way too many pictures to squeeze them into one book. It still may have turned into a block of around 1600 sheets of paper. Not a book, but a paper tower So, we created a film running 25fps to see how the images would fit together by looping them and through this process could pin-point the pictures which really were disturbing the flow. Sitting very closely to the screen and replayed and replayed and replayed until it was a smooth animation. It sort of hypnotized us for a couple of days. The final film was then projected at the opening night of the exhibition at the Corner Berlin.