Landscapes

Landscapes is Lele Saveri's photobook of nude and botanical studies pushed through months of Risograph experimentation, treating the printing process itself as much a subject as the bodies and plants it depicts.

Saveri and designer Brian Lamotte spent months running the same photographs through a Risograph press, layering ink passes until the images broke down into grain, color shift and overprint. Rather than bind the unstable Risograph sheets directly, the pair scanned the results and reproduced them by offset, so the finished book carries the texture of the Riso experiments at the scale of a 120-page paperback. Dashwood Books published the softbound edition in 2015 on Finch Vellum paper, in a run of 500 copies, alongside a ten-copy box set that enclosed a set of the original Risograph prints.

Saveri, who moved from Rome to New York, is as well known for the platforms he built around other people's books as for his own: The 8-Ball Fair, the artist-run book fair he started in a Chinatown pool hall in 2012, and The Newsstand, a decommissioned MTA newsstand he leased as an exhibition space. Landscapes carries the same interest in printed matter as a physical, degradable medium that runs through those projects.