Visible Mending book
Photography | Editorial | Print
Visible Mending – Everyday repairs in the South West (Uniform Books)
160pp book, 212 illustrations in colour, 9 in black and white, sewn paperback with flaps. 234mm x 142mm.
With an introduction by Sarah Pink and a foreword by Nick Hand.
Steven collaborated with two cultural geographers from The University of Exeter – Caitlin DeSilvey and James R. Ryan – to find and visit workplaces in the South West of England where people repaired broken things.
Notebooks and cameras were the project tools, and these tools produced an extensive archive of texts and images, a selection of which are printed in Visible Mending, the culmination of eighteen months of fieldwork.
The AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded project was inspired by an attraction to the aesthetics of these workplaces, but also by an interest in what the practices of fixing, mending, repair and renewal could reveal about the way people value things, and each other.
Reviews of the book:
“In Visible mending, the photographs of these homely settings for repair conjure up an empathetic, richly sensory encounter with a usually unseen materiality.”
– Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University
“The book is beautifully designed and produced and full of Steven Bond’s fantastic photographs, which linger on the objects and spaces and light of the workplaces the research team visited. As Caitlin and James say in their essay that concludes the book, the photographs really do focus attention on the richly textured materialities of these places, and suggest the intimate relations between them and the people who work there...”
– Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford
Client – AHRC / University of Exeter
160pp book, 212 illustrations in colour, 9 in black and white, sewn paperback with flaps. 234mm x 142mm.
With an introduction by Sarah Pink and a foreword by Nick Hand.
Steven collaborated with two cultural geographers from The University of Exeter – Caitlin DeSilvey and James R. Ryan – to find and visit workplaces in the South West of England where people repaired broken things.
Notebooks and cameras were the project tools, and these tools produced an extensive archive of texts and images, a selection of which are printed in Visible Mending, the culmination of eighteen months of fieldwork.
The AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded project was inspired by an attraction to the aesthetics of these workplaces, but also by an interest in what the practices of fixing, mending, repair and renewal could reveal about the way people value things, and each other.
Reviews of the book:
“In Visible mending, the photographs of these homely settings for repair conjure up an empathetic, richly sensory encounter with a usually unseen materiality.”
– Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University
“The book is beautifully designed and produced and full of Steven Bond’s fantastic photographs, which linger on the objects and spaces and light of the workplaces the research team visited. As Caitlin and James say in their essay that concludes the book, the photographs really do focus attention on the richly textured materialities of these places, and suggest the intimate relations between them and the people who work there...”