AKFB produce lovely Eames-inspired photo book for Vitra

“Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects..the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.” Charles Eames’ quotation opens this impressive book designed by Annahita Kamali and Florian Böhm for Vitra, an (almost) entirely visual celebration of the legendary designer though an intriguing selection of images. It’s a curious publication but one that really works, with each image connecting to the next in sometimes extremely subtle ways. As Eckhart Nickel writes in the book’s introductory essay: “We are transported by little, precious elements in every image that correspond to a detail in the next one, creating a kind of hide-and-seek for the traces that design leaves in our life and the ones life leaves in design.”

Though the imagery is uniformly gorgeous the breadth of material ranges from photographs and sketches to magazine covers and adverts, plus paintings, portraits, doodles, landscapes, architecture, animals and illustration. As readers (if that’s the right term for a book with basically no text) we’re bombarded by visuals and yet it all makes sense – we know we’re part of a puzzle and the hidden strands that link one image to the next can be anything, “a colour, a shape or a motif.”

Often when brands do books the results can be less than spectacular, the final object caught between the competing interests of editorial excellence, design sensibility and commercial interest. This one strikes a perfect balance though and is a genuinely interesting addition to any creative’s bookshelf.

As Eckhard writes: “The narrator in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Extinction (1986) praises his beloved uncle Georg, a flamboyant figure with the following words: ‘I owe my understanding of art to him precisely because, unlike my parents, he never dragged me from one famous work of art to another. He never pestered me with them but simply pointed out that they existed and where they could be found.’ This is what this book is about, and why words are unnecessary.”