The Looking Game
M.F.G. Paltrinieri & Mirko Smerdel
Akina Books
Softcover
110 pages
130×180 mm
2013
ISBN: Not available
In 1968, on the run from the Californian police after the first of a series of crimes, the serial killer and amateur photographer Rodney Alcala moved to NYC. Here, while attending film courses at New York University he assumed the alias John Berger, the same name as the British writer and art historian famed for the BBC TV series “Ways of Seeing”.Is this only a mere coincidence? Did Alcala know about John Berger? Starting from these questions, The Looking Game sets up a series of connections between Berger’s words and some of the images taken from Alcala’s archive of pictures made available online by the Huntington Beach Police in 2010.The Looking Game is the first installment of The SubNarratives, an ongoing project by Mirko Smerdel and MFG Paltrinieri. Taking the shape of a series of case studies, the aim of the collaboration is to investigate the characteristics of photographs as documents and the ever shifting relationship with the stories they tell.
Akina Books is a London based independent publishing house of hand-made photobooks, run by Alex Bocchetto and Valentina Abenavoli.
