In my third research I wanted to be more concentrated on the tag “paradox” because the last two researches where more based on the focus on the object chair and the humoristic association of the presentation of a chair in those books. Anyways this research now was more extended which made it also harder to find only one book fitting to the tag “paradox” but I stumbled over one book which is besides its outer appearance, the cover work, also a really interesting book about photography. “Mapping sitting” caught my eye first of all because of the title, the word mapping sitting doesn’t make not really much sense to me, not even with the subtitle “on Portraiture and Photography”, which all start to make sense when you see the front cover, together with the back and the back cover of the book. Under the written words you can see old photography’s probably of a square in a big city where, when you take a closer look, the ghost shapes of humans are recognizable, those are overlapped over each over and seem to first build a big and hard to identify mass, on the second and closer look the mass is building a crowd. On the Third look you are also recognizing that the square is also a overlapped collage of photos of different squares which seems to be build one big picture of a square. The impression of just these photo collages on the cover, for me, means documentation, a documentation of another time (all the pictures are in black and white and obviously from the early last century), a collection of photos which have been put together in a book, one page laying over another. Therefore the word mapping start to make more sense; the photos are documented and collected as the information’s of geographical facts on a map, which is my first association of a map. Still the word sitting stays mysterious for me, at least as the title on the cover without knowing the content, because you see actually mostly portrait photos of people sitting, inside the book, but on the cover design I cannot really find a connection to the word sitting. All in all I would probably say that this is the reason why I have chosen the book, the paradox or the not understanding of the title, which makes the book to something exciting.
Rietveld Library cat.nr: 761-bas-1
