josef chladek

on photobooks and books

Christian Reister - Pressure, Self published, 2025, Berlin

Softcover, front & back cover debossed, manual staple binding with three hand coloured staples, 12 pages are inlay smaller-format pages, printed with Indigo on recycled paper. Limited, numbered, stamped and signed edition of 250 copies.

Editions no. 1–100 feature a cover with the image of a silkscreen print; numbers 101–250 are bound in a cover made of grass paper. Both versions are manually embossed and include typographic elements that have been hand-applied using silkscreen printing. The publication is bound with three hand-dyed staples along the spine.

Its foundation lies in reproductions of silkscreen and gel plate prints, selected from a broad archive of motifs ranging from urban landscapes and portraits to other visual worlds. My aim was not to achieve perfect fidelity to the originals. Many of the prints use acrylic colors such as tin, copper, or silver – materials that create a shimmering surface only fully visible in the originals. The offset four-color printing process used for this publication cannot replicate that effect – nor was it intended to.

Just as the photographic source material was transformed through manual printmaking techniques, I wanted the prints themselves to undergo another transformation through the medium of the book. In PRESSURE, they appear in full-page format, cropped, enlarged, reduced, overlaid, or combined into new constellations – a visual remix that continues to explore and reinterpret the material.

https://www.christianreister.com/product/pressure/

Pages: 60
Place: Berlin
Year: 2025
Publisher: Self published
Size: 18 x 24 cm (approx.)