Riccardo Miotto – Tents
In the 1911 Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys, there’s a diagram showing ten different tents that can be created from a single piece of canvas. The diagram resembles something you might find in a geometry textbook, carefully marked with lines, semicircles, angles and numbers. Contained in a single rectangle are the plans for ten unique shelters, each one designed for specific conditions.
Creating a tent requires the mind of an architect, the eye of a geometer, and the precision of a good seamstress.
My parents first took me camping when I was 18 months old, and I’ve been fascinated with tents ever since. As structures, tents fall somewhere between architecture and clothing. All three are based on similar principles: they begin with two dimensional drawings which are then transformed into three dimensional structures scaled in relation to an imagined body or bodies. Tents, however, must satisfy the conditions of both buildings and garments, sheltering their occupants with nothing more substantial than fabric. Creating a tent requires the mind of an architect, the eye of a geometer, and the precision of a good seamstress.
Tents is based on a selection of acrylic paintings by artist and architect Riccardo Miotto. It’s a follow-on publication from his 2019 exhibition ‘Out of Frame’, which featured fifty paintings – some single images, others in the form of diptychs and triptychs – of tents. Miotto’s paintings are simple schematics of basic tent designs, from marquees to gazebos to pyramid tents, rendered in black acrylic with choppy brushstrokes, slashed through with the white lines of seams and guy ropes. They’re simple images, exploring the elemental forms of triangle, semicircle and rectangle that make up the structures themselves – but flattened and thickened by Miotto’s treatment, which collapses their volume while endowing them with a kind of fuzzy solidity. An index at the back of the book lists all of the works in the exhibition.
Rather than a container for images (with the linked expectation of presenting them in their unaltered form), Tents uses the book as a medium for transforming them.
It’s not a photobook, but Tents embodies something that I’ve come to appreciate in recent photobook design: the use of images as raw material in the creation of a new object. Rather than a container for images (with the linked expectation of presenting them in their unaltered form), Tents uses the book as a medium for transforming them. Designer Federico Barbon has cropped into Miotto’s original paintings, rotating and re-orienting them on the page, transforming a passive codex into a dynamic object. The gutter becomes way of creating a bridge between one image and the next; the blank page, a means of asserting the mass and dimensions of paper; the paper’s edge, an invitation to imagine what extends beyond it.
While it’s not necessarily the right treatment for all photographs, I find designs like these engaging precisely because they approach the book as something adjacent to architecture – as an object activated by its users, a living thing with mass and space and time of its own. There’s something very satisfying about the way that this relationship plays out in Tents – something not unlike a tent itself, with simple elements brought together to conjure a living volume out of flatness.
Riccardo Miotto
Distanz Verlag 2022
