MIDDEL, Cristina de. Party. (London / Barcelona): (Archive of Modern Conflict / RM Verlag), (2013). SPECIAL BLUE EDITION

EDITION OF 25 WITH A PRINT

MIDDEL, Cristina de.
Party.
(London / Barcelona): (Archive of Modern Conflict / RM Verlag), (2013).

12mo (125 × 89 mm), pp.[viii], 316. 40 colour plates bound in. 78 colour photographs. Plain card perfect bound wrappers. Blue plastic cover, spine and sides titled in gilt. Signed by De Middel in black ink on first page. Colour inkjet print (128 × 89 mm), de Middel's initials and a star embossed to recto at lower margin, signed and numbered in pencil to verso. Print contained in a folded piece of gold card, presented with the book in the publisher's fabric-lined gold paper-covered board box, titles in gilt to front. Fine.

First edition, one of 25 boxed copies issued in a blue (as opposed to red) plastic cover, together with a signed print. Cristina De Middel conceived this book following her first visit to China in 2012. Whilst there she committed to photographing anything that caught her attention without pausing to analyse why. She returned with a set of photographs that proved difficult to categorise, as her astonishment was the only strand that ran throughout. Deciding that this resistance to classification was the key to their ability to portray contemporary China, De Middel proceeded to alter a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book with corrective fluid to provide a framework for the photographs, censoring and hiding parts of the text that are no longer in force and stressing other, redesigned phrases, that she felt were a more accurate portrait of the People's Republic of China in the twenty-first century.

De Middel was awarded the PHotoEspana Best Photography Book Prize 2014 for this work.

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