NOTE: THIS ARTIST'S BOOK IS HELD IN BALTIC ARCHIVE NOT THE LIBRARY. Please email archive@balticmill.com or see staff to view this book.
"Long Story Short was published in 1999, though the book was conceived and put together during a month-long residency at Yaddo Artists' Colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, in the Spring of 1997. The book is semi-autobiographical. It uses images of hands as a connecting motif throughout the book. I have alwys found hands to be particularly expressive. For some time, I had had the idea of taking on the challenge of trying to tell a story through the use of aphorisms or truisms. The collection, editing and positioning of these little cliches so that they told a narrative story took a great deal of time yet was fun in the way that a puzzle is fun.
The book continues my interest in using large halftone dots in my books and pictures. I first became interested in them, and used them extensively, during my years in graduate school in the seventies. During that time I was learning how to make lith film for offset lithography at the Viusal Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, and spent many hours looking at halftone negatives on a darkroom light table. I also trained making color separations when I was working with Harry Christen at Christen Litho Lab, a color separation shop in Rochester.
All of the images are from tiny sections of Look, Life, and other magazines from the fifties –the time period when I was born and was growing up. I wanted all of the blown up half-tone dots to be the same size, so I used a screen angle indicator to determine the line ruling of the originals and then used a calculator to determine the blown up size of the dots of the final image. I had a small rectangular mask that I would then place over the printed photo images to determine the crop. Then I scanned them in at very high resolution so that they could be blown up."
Philip Zimmermann |