Tino Zimmermann - Developments (signed)

Self Published 2024

Tino Zimmermann‘s spectacular 528-Page artists' photobook debut, "Developments", isn’t the socio-documentary milieu study it appears to be. It’s a photographic novel—not in the quirky, comic-like sense, but in a profound, well-orchestrated, almost unheard-of way. The narrative unfolds through a series of developments: Drugstore photo envelopes from a private archive that came into being after the artist discharged himself from the psychiatric ward, rejecting medication and discovering photography as a means of self-therapy in the process of recovery.

Through fragments that incorporate analogue and amateur photographic processes, screenshots and handwritten texts, the reader gets absorbed in a complex story: one that draws a palpable image of depression, the intertwinings of mental illness, societal rejection, the hardships of creatively inclined youth in working-class environments and substance abuse issues. It concludes, therapeutically, with what feels often impossible for neurodivergent people: Self-Acceptance.

A unique and complex artists’ book, with each copy hand-finished, marks an astonishing one-man effort that likely could not have been realized like this by a large publishing house.

528 pages, 230 × 315 mm, 600 color plates, Hardcover 

First Edition of 500

Each copy manually finished by the artist 

Sewn-bound, Offset printed in FM-Screen