【ZM-561】Fotobook DUMMIES Day

Area | ZINE’S MATE

Country | TAIWAN

Fotobook DUMMIES Day, founded by Liu Chao-tze and Lin Junye, is an artist-led initiative diving into photobook and self-publishing since 2018, currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. Fotobook DUMMIES Day is an annual photobook fair, as well as curated exhibitions, events, and discourses. We began a field research project in Southeast Asia in 2019. In 2022, we published Tropical Reading: Photobook and Self-Publishing, and this project is still ongoing.

https://www.facebook.com/fotobookdummiesday

https://www.instagram.com/fotobookdummiesday/

https://fotobookdummiesday.com/

Tropical Reading: Photobook and Self-Publishing is divided into three parts: a) artists; b) art bookstores; c) photobooks and self-publishing scenes; plus, an appendix and an index of ten cities.

The first section illustrates the photography practitioners and artist collectives from each city in Southeast Asia, examining why they chose to get into self-publishing. The second section explores the ways in which independent art bookstores came to be the social parlors of the self-publishing crowd. The third section island-hops between the photobook and self-publishing phenomena of recent years, observing how the outsider artists, archives and arts initiatives of Southeast Asia came to shape the face of photography and self-publishing in their respective cities.

The final part of the book, the index, is a compilation of our project field research, condensing the profiles of all the interviewees – from people to bookstores to organizations – to make a kind of alternative Yellow Pages for the Southeast Asian art scene.