Description:

TEMPORAL presents a contemporary photographic survey, documented over five years that spans across fault lines, islands, and coastlines throughout Aotearoa. Imposing landforms and outlines of mountains and tidelines are pictured–inviting us into these formidable sites. Delicate facades, rendered in acute precision via the photographer’s lens, reveal geologic timescales, climatic weathering, tectonic uplift and glacial drift, etched into a landscape in flux.
The brief was to produce a photobook as an object of beauty, yet within specific budget constraints, without compromising on the quality for the photo plates.
The self-published, limited-edition photobook (125 copies) was produced to accompany the photographer Johnny McCormack’s exhibition; also titled TEMPORAL, that employed an aligned visual identity system throughout aspects of the photobook and the exhibition collateral.
Printed locally in Tāmaki Makaurau using three different printing processes, including screen-printing on the cover and text pages, it was then hand assembled and bound by McCormack using pamphlet stitch with linen thread. The paper choice, specifically the colour tones, and gsm were carefully selected, with a total of five environmental grade paper stocks used throughout. There is a fold-out concertina insert, that reveals ephemera from the photographer’s archive, a reinterpreted geological topographic survey map of fault lines across Aotearoa from GNS, text by artist and rockhound Meighan Ellis, an illustrated cross section of a glacier, and a Whites Aviation photographic record of an expedition on Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere, Franz Josef Glacier, taken in the 1930’s, from Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Alexander Turnbull Library.
The wide format and small margins allow the photographic plates to be undisrupted, the scale, proportion and weight of the photobook was also a significant consideration to allow the pages to be flipped through effortlessly, yet large enough to showcase and settle on an individual landscape as it opens completely flat, preventing any image loss due to tight binding or gutter disruption.
The design and sequence of TEMPORAL was fundamental, the subtle narrative reveals deep time and as a journey across the Te Ika-a-Māui and Te Waipounamu unfolds, the reader is drawn in to slowly scrutinise these meticulously detailed landscapes.