19.06_26.08.1945

Publisher:  Danilo Montanari Editore
Language: English – Italian

Photography: Andrea Botto
Concept and Design: Andrea Botto
Hand-bound: Andrea Botto and Legatoria Universo

On June 19, 1945, photographer Andrea Botto’s grandfather, Primo Benedetti, was released from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp and began making his way back home to Tuscany.

This book, which won third place for the 2012 Kassel Fotobookfestival Dummy Award, retraces that journey via online image searches for the names of cities he passed through and dates of his travel (such as “Hanover, 1945”). A sprawling set of black-and-white images are scattered across the page spreads: bombs exploding, bodies in uniform, Nazi weddings, and anachronistic tattooed punks. Small documents scanned from Benedetti’s passport, transfer papers, and letters home are printed on different types of paper and bound into the journal-format book. Lesley Martin calls it “a memory palace astutely built from the flotsam and jetsam of the Internet image archive.”

Prizes:
Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014, finalist
Les Rencotres d’Arles Author’s Book Award 2014, finalist
Premio Ponchielli 2014 “Best book of the year”
FotoBookFestival Kassel Dummy Award 2012, Third Prize