Studio Tillack Knöll, Design Practice

Ricarda Roggan, an artist and passionate cineaste, frequently went to the cinema between 1994 and 1999 to photograph American films on highly sensitive 35mm film. Working closely together, she assigned her pictures to different categories: landscape, car, street, disaster, hotel while we kept putting the images in the right order.

This way, she could relive the scenes of the movies as often as desired. She collected the photos in a stamp album, arranging them horizontally. Using them in the exact same order, we took the pictures beyond the pages to achieve a more cinematic feel.

While using the original scans from the stamp album that the photographic reproduction institute scanned, we were able to achieve a bootleg feel. Using the brochure as a viewfinder we chose not to crop the scans, which enabled us to show the air entrapment of the adhesive tape pieces she used as the scuffed edges of her original images.

The digitalised scans are a selection of images that show American landscapes, diners, conversations, as well as explosions in American action films from the pre-digital age, an escape into a different world and time.

The result was a softcover brochure that often referenced bootlegged Soviet literature, as well as makeshift publications that had been photocopied and glued together, contrasting the purpose of copyright and image ownership even more.

The book is published with the help of funding from the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen.