Monument — Stanley/Barker
editorial design
Monument is a book we designed with the publishing house Stanley/Barker (London). Trent Parke’s deep black photographs spread across the book’s 294 pages, moving back and forth from the farthest reaches of the universe to the heart of Sydney and the people who live there. The book was shortlisted in 2024 at the D&AD awards and received the Creative Review 2023 award in its category.
The work is surrounded by an embossed faux-leather cover featuring coordinates of planet Earth (a homage to the signals sent with the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes).
The endsheets of the book use solution dyed black paper. They are blind embossed and display encoded messages, rendered difficult to access. The texts are composed in Morse code for the opening of the work and in Braille for its conclusion.
The edition also includes a loose steel plaque, which, once removed, leaves the book with no visual traces of language.
The book edges are also sprayed in black. Altogether, this gives the edition a monolithic and cryptic appearance, imbuing it with a unique aura.
The weight of the inner paper subtly decreases as the pages progress, as if the book itself is disintegrating, slowly returning to dust.
