Long Story Short book
Long Story Short

By Phillip Zimmermann
Atlanta, Georgia: Nexus Press, 1999. Edition of 750.

10.5 x 8.5", 145 pages. Printed by offset lithography in Korea. Optical plastic title sheet. Fold-outs. Wire-o binding.

Nexus Press: "Tells the story of early 50s American consumer culture through its own visual and verbal clichés. Quoted to abstracted, fragmented ways by means of extreme magnification of photographs (emphasizing and exploding the dots of the color separations) and jigsaw-like, segmented catch-phrases, the result is a poignant life-journey."

Phil Zimmermann: "The book is semi-autobiographical. It uses images of hands as a connecting motif throughout the book. I have always found hands to be particularly expressive. For some time, I had had the idea of taking on the challenge of trying to tell a story through the use of aphorisms or truisms. The collection, editing and positioning of these little clichés so that they told a narrative story took a great deal of time yet was fun in the way that a puzzle is fun.

"All of the images are from tiny sections of Look, Life, and other magazines from the fifties – the time period when I was born and was growing up. I wanted all of the blown up half-tone dots to be the same size, so I used a screen angle indicator to determine the line ruling of the originals and then used a calculator to determine the blown up size of the dots of the final image. I had a small rectangular mask that I would then place over the printed photo images to determine the crop. Then I scanned them in at very high resolution so that they could be blown up."
$50