At a recent visit to Dashwood Books I picked up their lovely self-published book, Carl Johan De Geer’s Long Live the Large Family. I was excited to feature this excellent book here, but 5b4 beat me to the punch.
So instead I’ll show another book by De Geer: Pengar Eller Livet (Money or Life). I purchased the book because of my interest in photo novellas, but unfortunately can’t read Swedish. Nonetheless, I’m a sucker for this kind of loosey-goosey comic book design.
More images here.
I’d never heard of this guy before, but this is intriguing.
You’re certainly missing… something by not being able to read the text, but from these pictures I can’t really make out what it is. I’m guessing it doesn’t make much sense even if you have all the pieces. The text on the first pages says “This is the Earth. Slowly, it’s being filled with places and people. Most of the people who live here must sell their lives to survive.” Then there’s a story about a guy who’s lost his job, looking for money, so he starts making art… Then he reads a story in a magazine about “Little Marx”, who gets beaten up by a gang of retirees looking to cheer themselves up. (The guy with the mask in the top right picture hereis described as “one of the countless dealers of dog food to retirees”.) Then this jobless guy hears his family are prostituting themselves, so he smokes some pot… And so on. The story is as bleak and weird as the pictures.
Thanks a lot Simen. And really happy to learn about your blog.
Do you know Ricardo Bloch’s photo-novella called “The Incredible Servant and the Master of the Unknown”? It “stars” Zoran Mojsilov, George Reid, and Barb Schubring, with writing by Kevin Kling and additional photographs by David Goldes? It was a warm-up, of sorts, for his later book Terremoto, which deals with an earthquake in Mexico.
This is another wide-open genre for collecting, FYI. Look up “fumetti”–this is the Italian word for comics, and an unsafe Google image search will pull up all sorts of interesting drawings, but outside of Italy fumetti are comics illustrated with photographs. One to check out is A Softer World (http://www.asofterworld.com/).
gs