Stephan Keppel began collecting Amsterdam in 2018 — its works and its stories — and the city he lives and works in kept slipping out of fixed form. Soft Copy Hard Copy gathers his own photographs alongside re-photographed archival material, texts, and other found matter, online and off, building what the publisher calls an organic index of a place whose visible, invisible, social, and historic structures are always being rewritten. Buildings appear, but they serve as vehicles for talking about the culture that produced them.
The photographic book has been Keppel’s instrument for this kind of attention before: Reprinting the City (Den Helder, 2012), Entre Entree (Paris, 2014), and Flat Finish (New York, 2017) each took a different urban subject and a different method of reproduction as its premise. Amsterdam is the latest subject in that sequence. Hans Gremmen designed the volume, continuing a collaboration that runs through Keppel’s earlier books; the book’s 240 pages are the field on which Keppel’s photographs, archival re-photographs, and textual fragments are arranged into sequence.
This softcover edition follows the 2021 original, which is now sold out, and it is made in an edition of 100 copies at 22 by 30 centimeters. For a collector, the relevant questions are formal rather than speculative. Keppel’s project is an argument about reproduction itself — about what happens to a city when it is copied, recopied, and circulated — and the book is where that argument takes visible shape. Its structure rewards close looking at how image, text, and found material are placed in relation to one another, and the design is integral rather than decorative.
The edition is small, and the earlier version is no longer available from the publisher. That combination makes this the current form in which the Amsterdam body of work can be obtained. It should interest readers who follow Keppel’s long-running research into public space and urban structures, and collectors of contemporary photobooks concerned with the city as subject and with reproduction as method.
