One-Thing-After-Another

One-Thing-After-Another suggests that editing the order of images means editing reality itself.

One-Thing-After-Another is a visual reader of post-war British history. Drawing from an archive of 3000 images, the volume reshuffles the material contained in The Book of Knowledge, a popular eight-volume encyclopaedia from Fifties Britain tailored to a readership of juveniles, and containing short illustrated articles on a wide range of topics from astronomy to religion, magic and zoology. Moments and places in time collapse into a single liquid montage, which suggests that editing images of reality means editing reality itself. The book questions the role of photography in shaping political reality.

Inspired by the game present at the end of each of The Book of Knowledge’s eight volumes, Shibboleth designed a picture quiz bellyband. On the front are all the images Mick Finch has used to build his narrative sequence. On the back, the descriptions of the same images are to be matched with the spread in which they appear in the book. The bellyband is used as a starting point for workshops and classes operating at different levels of image-reading.