The meeting of two personalities – the photographer Bownik with Honza Zamojski, an artist, graphic designer, and publisher – resulted in the creation of an orgiastic whole, an artwork in its own right, completely focused on the visual layer – the text materials were printed on a separate insert included in the book. The illustrations fill entire pages, without any margins or even page numbers. Juxtaposition of beauty and artificiality, which is typical of Bownik, also emanates from the pages of this book. The twenty-four photographs that originally formed the series were somewhat multiplied here in order to create a new entity – an art book. Bownik and Zamojski play with conventions, assemble and disassemble images, twist the convention of a book, forge a construction that is as beautiful as it is sophisticatedly synthetic and frowsty. The point of reference is not so much nature (represented by plants), as art and photography itself (an obvious reference to Karl Blossfeldt, but also an astounding amount of botanical albums from the times of the Polish People's Republic), as well as the format of a photographic series and of a photobook. The nearly ostentatious totality of this project, refined both when it comes to its conceptual structure, as well as the typographic and printed details, is also a kind of editorial manifesto. The book was released as one of three titles inaugurating the activity of the new publishing house founded by Zamojski and a contemporary art patron and collector, Grażyna Kulczyk. The visual quality of Disassembly is indeed radically different from most of its contemporary Polish photobooks, which are dominated by textual narrative to a much larger extent.
texts: Andrew Berardini, Jakub Śwircz, and Bownik
graphic design: Honza Zamojski
publisher: Mundin, Poznań
year of publication: 2013
cover: cardboard hardcover