Supertourist

Supertourist gathers a decade of Max Pam's field trips into a single conceptual survey. It sets newly assembled sequences against archival photographs from his travels, under four paired chapter headings.

Éditions Bessard published the book in 2013 as a limited edition of 500 copies. It runs to 356 pages and holds more than 3,000 color reproductions, in a 7½ x 9 inch format. The four chapters are Bi-Fold Album v Collage, Old World v New World, Object v Artefact, and Islam v Asia. Through them Pam works back through his own unpublished archive, drawn from field trips spanning the globe, and pairs that material with new production under a single title concept.

Ramadan in Yemen documents a single three-month trip. Supertourist, by contrast, is a retrospective survey, drawing on the full breadth of Pam's travels across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond to reconsider his own working method. Max Pam (b. 1949, Melbourne) has built his practice on this kind of return to his own archive over five decades of travel photography. Supertourist was one of several titles he produced with the Paris publisher Éditions Bessard, alongside Ramadan in Yemen and The Contingency of Eye Contact: A Memoir 1970-1975.