Tropus [ˈtʁoːpʊs]. German for: Trope. A word or expression used in a figurative sense.  

Tropus and his double pictures... Why not individual ones, as usual? Here is a little story.

It all started with Tropus. After pictures over pictures were collected on the hard disk, the question came: And now? Shall they just collect digital dust? Upload them to the World Wide Web? (God forbid on Instagram??...)

In a moment of despair, Viktor came across an article in The New Yorker Magazine about Gerhard Steidl, a specialist in publishing photo books.

A photo book! That's what it should be! And why not go straight to the best publisher in the world: Steidl Verlag. You have to start somewhere. And what's especially great is that Steidl's books have dozens of different scents, each more fragrant than the other. So there we were: We would have a wonderfully scented photo book published by the best publisher in the world. Printed on the unique 6-color house-made press. Beautifully local and seasonal.

The plan was there; we only needed an implementation. Hmm, how could we convince the good gentleman to start our career in fine art photography? We wanted to send him a photo book that we've already designed. It could simply be adopted one-to-one without any corrections. Doesn't take much work, is done quickly, and everyone is happy.

As a reader, you're probably wondering what all of this has to do with double pictures. Well, here's the solution

When designing the first one, we quickly discovered that you have to pay for each page, printed or not. With 60 pictures, 120 pages. Pay for 60 blank pages? Ouch! Hence one picture per page. And now came the most difficult task: which pictures fit together, which do not? In which order? Which size? Questions upon questions led to months of discussions. For weeks, our living room floor was plastered with pictures that were not to be moved or touched under any circumstances (explain that to a six-month-old child). But after three months of parkour, the pictures were gone, and the book was on the desk in all its glory. Nice! And the best part was that we liked the pairs of pictures much better than the individual pictures. We never wanted to separate these pairs of pictures again. That's why the collection now contains mainly doubles.

Now the only thing missing was the name. What should we call this collection? For us, the pictures had a strong emotional link, but in terms of content they had no direct connection. There was only a figurative one. Almost a metaphor. Ok metaphor is very direct and much overused, maybe something more subtle like metonymy or synecdoche? Hmm... trope! That one covers everything. So the book should be called Tropus (German for trope). 

But now, back to our attempt to become famous.

A nice little cover letter, a lovely envelope, off to the post office and wait. After just a few weeks, the rejection arrived... But at least, according to his reply, Mr. Steidl had personally looked at our book. So we made it past all the gatekeepers to the law. (Kafka would have been pleased.) The first step was taken, and now we knew that our pictures were good enough to be rejected by the great master himself.

Anyway, after further research, we had to realize that you have to become famous before you can publish a photo book (mainly since many of the photo books are financed by the photographers themselves and serve as advertising for the galleries). That's why we're going to try galleries first. Wish us luck!

Next project: Waterline