This is my new artist book called Mali Monuments. 16.5”x10.5” (or 16.5”x21” when open) Limited edition of only 15 copies bound in the Drum Leaf form. Cover and endsheets are hand made papers by Mary Hark, and the book is expertly bound by Rory Sparks. The cover text, title page and colophon are all handset letterpress, also by Rory Sparks.

Interior Relations

Photographs by Ian van Coller

Essay by Sindiwe Magona

11.5 in. x 13.25 in. / 68 pages / 27 full color plates / Casebound in Japanese saifu cloth with French fold dustjacket / Edition of 500 /

ISBN 978-0-9818770-3-7

Publisher’s Description:

While Ian van Coller was growing up in the 1970s, the black women working in his parents’ upper class home in a whites-only suburb of Johannesburg were valued as members of the family. Nannies and maids who helped raise the children and run the household, they were ever-present confidants and friends. And yet they were conspicuously absent from family vacations and photo albums.

Apartheid, though it has been officially consigned to history, continues to live on in nearly a million South African homes where blacks still serve the needs of the white minority. Ian van Coller’s first monograph, Interior Relations, deftly probes this enduring racial fault line with a simple yet elegant premise: he has asked black housekeepers, nannies and maids to wear their finest clothes, and to sit for formal portraits in the homes they care for.

Though the subjects’ white employers are never shown, evidence of their privilege crowds around the women, forever out of reach: every portrait a cameo of apartheid in redux.

For Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa’s most celebrated black writers, working as a domestic in her youth provided a desperately needed but meager income that she was forced to supplement by selling sheep heads on the street. Serving white families represented a constriction of the soul that was broken only by the force of her will to become a writer.

Magona’s introduction channels the voices of van Coller’s subjects through her own years as a domestic worker. Ian van Coller’s delicate and reverential portraits, coupled with Sindiwe Magona’s searing essay, offer a starkly original view of the intersection of race and class in post-apartheid South Africa.

(via Charles Lane Press | Interior Relations)

• 3 October 2011

World Cup 2010 | Ian van Coller

Makarapa and Vuvuzela

128 Page Book, 10 x 8 inches (25cm x 20cm)
100 color photographs from the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
Printed 4 color offset, perfect bound.
Limited Edition of 250, hand numbered and hand signed.

ISBN 978-0-9845001-1-6

Project Description:
In June and July of 2010, South Africa hosted the largest and most popular sporting event in the world. This is the first time that the FIFA World Cup (European Football) has been held on the continent of Africa. Sixteen years after the end of apartheid this event represents a particularly important time in South African history, where South Africa was able to stage a massive “coming out” party for the rest of the world.

This series of photographs focuses on South African national identity expressed through portraiture of football fans as well landscapes of football fields around the country. South African soccer fans are particularly “colorful” and are known for their trumpeting of Vuvuzelas and their outrageously adorned headgear. These incredibly artful creations, known as Makarapas, have their origins in the mining hardhats that were once synonymous with black migrant workers of the apartheid-era. Today, these mining helmets have been transformed into colorful symbols of national identity now donned by both blacks and whites.

• 25 February 2011

between 2 worlds: Final Version of Interior Relations Artist Book

Interior Relations

by Ian van Coller

Contributor/s: Amy Thompson: Book binding and letterpress
Date of publication: 2010
Place of publication: Bozeman, Montana
Dimensions: 17″x21″
Edition size: 30 + 5AP’s
Insert: Limited Edition 11”x14” C-Print
Type of binding: Cloth, Noble
Number of pages: 31
Type of paper: Museum Rag
Number of pictures: 27
Type of printing: Inkjet
Printer: Epson 9800 Pro Stylus
Publisher: Doring Press
Designer: Ian van Coller
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-9845001-0-9
Category: Artist Book
Price: $900

Summary:

Interior Relations: Portraits of Domestic Workers in South Africa

This project focuses on the intersection of post-Apartheid black and white identities via photographic portraiture of black domestic workers who work in homes owned by white South Africans. Though separated by an enormous gulf of inequality, the domestics and their employers are wedded by an intensely intimate, personal, and awkward interdependence. Interior Relations explores the discrepancies between the country’s public democratic ideals and the ongoing racial and economic inequality that affects a large majority of black South Africans. The women were dressed in their favorite clothes and photographed in the homes of their employers.

• 23 September 2010

Please, Take Photographs

Poems by Sindiwe Magona, published by Modjaji Books.

Look for Sindiwe Magona words with Ian van Coller’s photographs in his upcoming book Interior Relations, going to be published by Charles Lane Press next year

• 2 September 2010

between 2 worlds: Maria Mosima

Ian van Coller is making a large, limited edition Artist Book from his work on South African domestic workers! I love this body of work and I think that an intimate book, with the text and images of the workers, will really impart the significance of the work.

• 18 November 2009