GASPARINI Paolo | Megalopolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, San Paolo

Rare Exhibition monograph presented as an Artist Book. Photo by Paolo Gasparini and design by Yvette Garcia. Glossy pictorial hard boards with white titles on the cover, as issued. A tall book, it is spiral-bound, enabling the viewer to turn the pages easily at random. Each page is cut clean into three horizontal sections. Each section reproduces images of a city. The pages can be turned in any sequence so that a different combination of six images forms into a doublespread, in innumerable possible combinations.  "Paolo Gasparini has been making committed and interesting photobooks for over 30 years...Megalopolis continues a theme that has occupied Gasparini for many years: the political and and economic impact of the United States on Latin America...The volume is spiral bound, and every page is cut into three horizontal sections, each depicting a different city. These can be turned in any order so that a different combination of six images across a double page is brought up each time, and we never know which city we are in. Gasparini is making the point that the all-embracing consumer society of the United States...has drained large metropolises of their uniqueness...Gasparini has always been a street photographer in the Garry Winogrand mold, so the artefacts he looks at--shop windows, street furniture, cafes, office buildings, cars, political posters and graffiti, and, above all, signs and advertising hoardings--make his case for him easily enough" (Parr & Badger The Photobook: A History Vol.II).