Josh Kern – ‘Love Me’
Josh Kern is a photographer who’s currently based in Cologne, Germany. Kern documents his life excessively, leading to a variety of sentimental photographs. His work has a lot of tangibility, as he shoots exclusively with analog film and experiments with an abundance of expressive painting and scrapbooking around his photographs. Many of his photobooks explores the rapture, exhilaration and anguish within the experience and theme of youth.
The photobook ‘Love Me’ by Josh Kern explores the personal life of the photographer, as the photos are sequenced together inside of a journal or a notebook. Kern incorporates mixed media into these pages, applying black paint, tearing the photos, taping them down, and writing around or sometimes on the photos.
Exhibition of ‘Love Me’
These photos have been exhibited outside of the photobook; in a small shed that he built himself.
Exhibition interior:
Photobook layout overview:
Josh Kern published 1100 copies of his photobook ‘Love Me’ in May 2020, with 476 pages, 12,5 x 16,3cm (portrait), and Japanese binding. This photobook has many different textures. For example, there are different types of paper used all throughout the book, these colours being the pages of the notebook or paper the artist has included himself, these are primarily off-white or yellow.
Josh Kern has stated about this photobook ,‘By doing all these book attempts I realized that I’m mostly interested in the feeling that the actual act of creating provoked … A few months and a lot of notebooks later, I showed my work to my professor and he asked me to try to make a book only with scrapbook pages. It was such a relief to finally allow myself to work with my notebooks. For some reason I didn’t even dare to think about doing a book only with scrapbook scans before – probably because I was way too afraid to repeat myself after my first book. And by doing so I completely suppressed what I actually wanted to do and what needed to get out of me.’
UNDERSTANDING PHOTOBOOKS:
NARRATIVE, EDITING, SEQUENCING, DESIGN, FORM, FUNCTION