Aitor Ortiz spent several years photographing the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, and this book presents all 126 pictures from that project, completed in 2018. The photographs were taken at Casa Milà, the Sagrada Família and its model workshop, Casa Batlló, Park Güell, Torre Bellesguard, Palau Güell, Casa Vicens, Casa Calvet, the Güell Pavilions and the crypt of the Colònia Güell. The original artworks were printed on aluminium plates; in the book they are reproduced in balanced gray tones.
The volume is conceived as a poem about printing photographs on paper and binding the sheets into a book, and that intention shapes its physical form. It runs to 624 pages, with 128 illustrations and 411 blank pages; the transparency of the thin paper and the blank pages are integral to the design concept. The binding is flexible faux leather with blind embossing, Smyth-sewn with black thread, with a three-sided black color cut. Santos Bregaña designed the book, and texts by the Basque filmmaker and writer Oskar Alegria add an associative level. The texts appear in Spanish only.
Ortiz is a contemporary Spanish photographic artist whose work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in European, Asian and North American museums, and he is represented by Galerie Springer Berlin. Hartmann Books publishes this edition, ISBN 978-3-96070-057-9, at 16.5 by 23.5 centimeters. Its subject is the coherence of Ortiz’s photographs of Gaudí’s buildings, Alegria’s writing and the production decisions that carry them.
