Useful Photography #001

Useful Photography #001 opens a series devoted to functional pictures by anonymous makers: the photographs in sales catalogues, instruction manuals, packaging, brochures and textbooks.

The editors, Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessels and Hans van der Meer, take these images out of their original setting and put them in a new one. The publisher’s note argues that photographs we meet daily without noticing, like the meat shots in a wholesale butcher’s brochure, can hold our interest for a surprisingly long time once they are moved into a new context. The issue runs to 60 pages in color and black and white, softcover.

The series reached issue #017 in 2024, edited by Aarsman, Germain, Kessels and Frank Schallmaier. Each issue takes one kind of functional image as its subject, and #017 is given over to ex-votos.