Flat Finish takes New York as its subject, but not the skyline or the street life that usually accompanies it. Made between 2015 and 2017, Stephan Keppel’s book examines the city’s walls, architectural references and urban structures, building a subjective databank of his own photographs alongside re-photographed archival material and other found images. The clichéd myth of the metropolis is set aside in favour of texture, repetition and the evidence of use. What holds the sequence together is a persistent question about reproduction: how an image of a surface becomes an image again, and what is gained or lost in that transfer.
The book is substantial in every sense. Fw:Books issued it in 2017 as a 400-page paperback, 21 by 29.7 centimetres, in English, designed by Hans Gremmen. The printing combines black and white with seven PMS colours and metallic inks, and the publisher notes that these high-pigmented inks are part of the argument rather than decoration. Colour and sheen interrupt the grey flatness they describe; the object examines its own making. Flat Finish belongs to Keppel’s longer inquiry into public space and urban structures, a line of work that includes Reprinting the City, Entre Entree and Soft Copy Hard Copy, and it gathers his photographs with borrowed and re-photographed material into a single loop of recycled images.
That loop is where the book’s weight lies for a collection. Keppel does not treat New York as a backdrop for authorship but as a site of circulation, where surfaces are recorded, printed, scanned and recorded again. He assembles a subjective databank rather than a neutral survey, and the sequencing rewards slow reading rather than browsing. For collectors interested in the photobook as a designed object and in practices that interrogate the medium from within, Flat Finish is a considered addition: a large, deliberately made volume by an artist whose subject is the image as much as the city.
Stephan Keppel, Fw:Books, 2017. 400 pages, paperback, 21 × 29.7 cm. ISBN 9789490119553.
