Customer: Marco Bakker Fotografie

Question: How can we turn the pictures and thoughts of Vali Myers into an unique and special collectors item?

Solution: Together with the outstanding and professional photographer Marco Bakker we decided to develop 2 notebooks in a luxury box, made out of special paper.

The value of tekst and image can be enhanced, by collecting them in a unique special edition print.
Vali Myers (August 2^nd, 1930 – February 12^th, 2003) is seen by photographer Marco Bakker as a ‘free spirit’. She is an Australian artist  who has spent a large part of her life living with Gianni Menichetti, artist and poet, in what Marco calls a “wildlife oasis” near Positano, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. In 1950, Vali acquires cult status because of her lifestyle and her special work.

In the early 1970’s Gianni met Vali in her ‘wild kingdom by the sea’, as he describes it himself. For more than thirty years, he lived together with her and her animal kingdom through good times and bad. And they were, as it were, “struck by fate.” After Vali passed away in 2003, Gianni continued to live in this ‘wild kingdom’ to, as he puts it, protect their unique piece of earth in the way Vali had imagined.

In May of the year 2000, Marco Vali visits Myers and takes many beautiful pictures of Vali in the last years of her life. Together with poet Gianni Menichetti, he is making a special reference work about her exceptional way of life. Marco sees it as a tribute to Vali Myers who is a great source of inspiration for him. With this special edition ‘Running Before The Wind’ Marco wants to show what a ’true free spirit’ Vali Myers was.

“Running Before The Wind” contains a collection of photographs and the most poetic passages from letters from Vali to Gianni, that together best represent Vali’s special way of looking at nature, all living animals and the world of humans. “Animals and nature are what they are and within them you will find great beauty.”
People think that Vali created a dream world, but it wasn’t a ‘dream’, that was ‘real life’, according to Marco Bakker.

The execution of the product:
Together with Marco we created two notebooks in a luxury box.
The paper that we chose is Tintoretto Gesso from Fedrigoni.
Het papier dat we kozen is Tintoretto Gesso van Fedrigoni. A particularly beautiful uncoated paper with a beautiful structure.

The covers of the notebooks were printed in 1 color screen printing, but then twice on top of each other, in order to get a particularly good coverage on this textured paper. The pink cover was printed with black on Tintoretto Ceylon Cubeba and the blue with silver on Tintoretto Ceylon Ginepro.

The interior was also printed on Tintoretto Gesso on an HP Indigo, which uses liquid inks to create the correct stroke in the paper, and is most similar to conventional offset printing. This way, you do not get the annoying and false ‘gloss’ of ’toner’ on the paper, as with other digital printing techniques.
Marco’s photos, which are usually transferred in black and white, have been lithographically processed in advance and deliberately processed and printed into full color (cmyk) in order to achieve the correct black and white color tone.

The notebooks are bound using a unique singer stitch with respectivley black and silver threads, matching the screen-printed covers.

The luxury box and storage case for the notebooks is made entirely of black solid cardboard, covered with Tintoretto Gesso Black Pepper and provided with a beautiful blind embossing including the title ‘Running Before The Wind’.
It is a custom-made ‘hinge box’ which is ‘zipped’ at the corners and glued in a special way to form a unique storage cassette.

Due to the special appearance and execution of this collection, most signed copies were sold out in no time. Orders followed from all over the world and in particular from Australia and New Zealand.

The reaction of the customer:
Amazing !!! I am so happy, it is beautiful !!!

Everything about the work of pohotgrapher Marco Bakker you can find on his website: Fotografie Marco Bakker, marcobakker.com.
The idea and graphic design was made by Jan van Mechelen from ZEE typographic design.

Sources:
Running Before The Wind and the video about this special project.