Tupsu (V1)

Tupsu (V1) is the first instalment of Andreas Laszlo Konrath's long-running portrait of a young Finnish man named Tupsu, issued as a fluorescent orange zine by Pau Wau Publications in a signed edition of 50.

Published in Brooklyn in 2017 and designed by Brian Paul Lamotte, Konrath's partner in PWP, the zine is side-stapled at 8.5 x 11 inches. Its 32 pages, some of them cut to half width, carry 40 black and white plates. The cover is a red fluorescent full-sheet label printed with a near full-bleed head shot of Tupsu, and the interior is metallic silver stock. The pictures were taken over several years and began as C-type and gelatin silver prints. Those were scanned, duplicated on an office copier and re-scanned before being printed in one colour on a laser printer, and the colophon on the back cover lists every machine used. Full-bleed photographs with a small border alternate with the half pages, so images overlap and interrupt one another as the zine is turned. Collector Daily reviewed it in October 2017. In 2018 PWP reprinted the zine on silver stock as a boxed special edition in three colour variants of ten copies, each with a signed print on rice paper.

Konrath grew up in the UK around skateboarding and music and moved to New York in 2004, where he ran a small darkroom on Canal Street. Between 2008 and 2018 he and Lamotte published 53 zines under PWP, a press he has described as his own version of a gallery. The Tupsu series has continued since 2011, alongside Anthony No Name At Gmail Dot Com, begun in 2008. His zines are held by ICP, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, MoMA Library and Yale. The library also holds You Can Count On Me, the 205-A group zine to which he contributed.