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Tell us what provoked the crazy out of you last sweaty summer? For stories of grime, grit, and guts, follow Provoke: a fledgling Print Studio.

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Posted @withregram • @pen_scratch_ Fresh off the press. @pro_voke will be physically present at the @kalaghodarecords #popup opening tomorrow @poshtel.live from 4:00pm onwards.

#Poshtellive #hkv #zine #zinepopup #photographyzine #advertising #fakereal #publishing #books #delhi by @pro_voke

拆 [chāi] — to demolish, dismantle, destroy. In Shanghai, the ideogram is a death sentence written on walls: soon this house, this alley, this courtyard will vanish.

Leticia Lampert’s book doesn’t just document the ruins — it stages them. Each pockmarked wall, half-torn curtain, abandoned teacup becomes an invitation to invent. These aren’t ruins as tragedy, they are ruins as stage directions: here, imagine a life.

That’s what I love about books like this: they refuse to let demolition be the last word. Instead, they let memory (and fiction) colonize the wreckage.

Sparseeing works in the same spirit. It’s not an archive that says “look what was.” It’s an invitation: “tell me what could have been.” Because even when the city clears the lot and builds something new, we get to keep walking through the ghost architecture we made up in our heads.

Maybe the real act of preservation isn’t saving the building — it’s refusing to stop telling stories about it.

Courtesy: @leticia.lampert

#photobookjousting #artistbooks #photobook #authorship #demolition #newwaysofseeing by @pro_voke

Autobiography of a Rolliflex:

I was born in Braunschweig, 1953 — twin lenses, square gaze, waist-level charm. Don’t call me vintage, darling, call me timeless. While the Leicas ran around like boys showing off, I stood taller, slower, more deliberate. I don’t chase moments, I seduce them.

I’ve been carried through wars and weddings, stared at generals and grandmothers with the same calm face. I’ve been caressed by artists, dropped by amateurs, and once abandoned in a darkroom like a lover who deserved better.

Twelve frames at a time, I demanded attention. No spray-and-pray, no easy shortcuts. With me, every click was a contract: commit or don’t bother.

Now I rest on a shelf, hips wide, body square, heavy with secrets. But I still smell of leather and fixer, and I still remember every gaze that passed through me.

And if sparseeing is a story about memory, fiction, and the fragile archive of our lives — then maybe I’ve been its ghostwriter all along.

#camera #authorship #sparseeing #photography by @pro_voke

Reposted from @npr

Terry Gross reads like most of us breathe - relentlessly, joyfully, and with a system. “Terry the Destroyer,” they call her, moving through hundreds of books a year as if every paragrph was a door she had to open.

That’s how I want Sparseeing to be read. Not gently, not with gloves, not as a relic - but as a book that can be devoured, annotated, carried around, dog-eared, even argued with..

An archive doesn’t have to whispr; it can demnd. And if you approach it the way Terry approaches her books - as an act of hungr, curiosity, destructn even - then sparseeing stops being a photobook on a shelf and becomes a companion in the messy practice of living.

Maybe the only true reading system is this: to let the book invade your life until you can’t tell where its fiction ends and your own begins..

#reading #writing #photobookindia #photographylovers #diary by @pro_voke

Reposted from @cogey

A daughter re-maps her mother’s life through a box of photographs — turning albums into roadmaps, and grief into pilgrimage. What strikes me is not just the act of travel, but the method: pouring over images, sobbing, Googling, retracing steps, making fiction out of fact.

This is sparseeing in action. An archive (even a family album) is never just evidence — it’s a script waiting for us to play-act the missing scenes. Authorship here isn’t about inventing new stories, but walking into someone else’s, inhabiting their viewfinder, letting your own body become the stand-in.

A diamond made from ashes, a trip made from photographs: both are alchemical gestures. They prove what artists have always known — that grief has a material form, and that memory is a creative medium.

The question I keep circling back to: when we restage the past with love, is it still documentary, or does it become a kind of fiction that feels even truer? by @pro_voke

Reposted from @williamkentridgestudio
🎥 Slade Lectures 2024: A Natural History of the Studio

Kentridge’s studio is not a room, it’s a scatter. Dust, cutouts, drafts — fossils of thought that never fully leave.

That’s Sparseeing too: saving fragments, holding onto the half-finished, letting fictions leak into the archive.

The studio is less sanctuary, more rehearsal. A mess we learn to live inside.

@moi_joyona @pen_scratch_ by @pro_voke

I SPEAK IN BIRDSONG: I found a shy little #boy who could whistle. He imitated bird sounds using just his hands placed in complicated ways around his mouth. He wanted to be a #bird. Maybe. There’s something about the hills and soaring birds.

He passed me by pretending as though I hadn’t caught him in on his secret. One that he shared with only the birds. I followed him down the hill to his mother’s tea shop. I went out in desperation to grab a few #chocolates. Bribing was now the only option.

As I returned, I came back only to find, the boy sitting across the table from me. He wouldn’t meet my eyes-one of his looked past me, the other somewhere off to the side, and yet I could feel him watching, somehow.
He gave one more sound, long and stretched -a hawk’s #cry, like it had flown far to get here and lost something on the way.

He finally did come along to letting me record his secret on my #phonecamera , but was extremely hesitant at first. But us now being in his mother’s canteen helped me ease into the situation. It was his safe place he finally sang and it was #loud.

#FieldNotes #TeaTales #SoundOfTheHills
#PortraitsOfSilence #SecretSongs #BirdCalls
#StoriesFromTheRoad #QuietEncounters
#TeaShopStories #UnspokenConnections by @pro_voke

GoatGaze.

#passionfruit #dreamsoftheoceanlife by @pro_voke

"Things in themselves and things - as - they - are - for - us. Often by chance, via out-of-the-way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular "deep" text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy. Quickly—precariously—coming as it does from an opposite direction. If you are lucky, you may experience a moment before."

–From Susan Howe's "Spontaneous Particulars-The telepathy of Archives" (New York : Burgin / New Directions, 2014)

Upcoming #book #photo-book @alkazifoundation #sparsee-ing @moi_joyona @pen_scratch_ @caferegal35 #architecture #archives #fiction by @pro_voke

"Make the book unheroic", said Mr Bharucha’s ghost, with the hills of the yet-to-be-built industrial township of Jamshedpur, serving as backdrop behind him.
The diary was held close by Mr K M Bharucha in his travels far and wide. They are bits and pieces of what he chose to prefreeze, how he chose to remember. Steeped in personhood, the diary traces the journey of a man's becoming, of his envisioning. While the diary of Mr Bharucha is a book that could have been subject to an infinite number of rearrangements still, the strength of the “arrangement" lies in its courage: the courage of a lone man with a camera to put something out into the world, in print; something confounding and generous in equal measure. Confounding in it's discreetness. Generous in his invitation to tell the story of human endeavour.

- A day in the diary of Mr Bharucha.

From our upcoming #photobook (SPARSEEING) with the help of @alkazifoundation @pen_scratch_ @moi_joyona

#grant #photobookgrant #southasia #parsee #tatanagar #photobook #alkazifoundation by @pro_voke

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

Here at @pro_voke.academic we think of #50differentways in which the old #newspaper can be defined by the word "paper" especially when the world relentlessly continues to focus of the first word "news".

#playingwithform #corrigendum #corrections #printisnotdead
With @pen_scratch_ and @moi_joyona by @pro_voke