Bill Viola: The Passions book

This book documents a specific body of work by video artist Bill Viola that explores human emotion. Besides reproducing Viola’s recent output visually, the book includes writings that contextualize this project, describe its sources, etc. We wanted to present the work itself in a manner that was both dramatic and different from its analysis. It is always an interesting problem to capture the essence of time- and motion-based media in the pages of a book, and the main collaboration with the artist and the editor during the design process was the editing and sequencing of video stills. Though technically I did not have editorial input, we certainly formulated how the book could be put together and played an important role in the visual translation of the videos. The primary production problem was that the images were in a variety of formats, but mostly in low-resolution 72 dpi scans; the scanning department at Lithographix utilized sophisticated software to doctor the images for sharpness, with great subtlety.