Tummelplatz

On 2 November Ivorypress presented the artist’s book Tummelplatz, by William Kentridge. The book, printed in an edition of nine (plus four HC and three AP), comprises two volumes, each of which contains ten stereoscopic photogravures by the artist.

Tummelplatz arose from a wish to make, in the most analogue way, a virtual reality pop-up book: to play with three dimensions and the essentially flat format of paper and a book. The idea was to use stereoscopic photography to give an illusion of depth in images, of layers coming forward towards the viewer from the book.

For this project, nineteenth-century processes of stereoscopic photography and particularly photogravure printing were used as a way of reproducing the photographs. The format of the book was informed by the historical format of stereoscopic aerial photographs used by mapmakers.