how we built issue 006 open call poster

sometime in august, lilou walked into opshop in helsinki; a flea market with any and all kinds of things. amongst the racks of clothes and baby toys there are three large boxes of photographs and letters. conveniently, there’s a couch next to them, inviting you to push back all your other plans to dig through one box at a time. most of them are eerie, military snapshots and stiffly posed family portraits. some of them, however, are warm and call to you from the piles of paper. lilou always comes home with a small stack, usually turning them into postcards for birthday love letters.

as we were getting ready to release the open call for issue 006, we looked back at some of the photos, and random details we could pull from. on a photo of a picnic, a tiny still life called out to us. we’ve enclosed it in red below. 

once we had isolated the still life, it needed a little treatment - thankfully by now we had returned to our beloved scanner. we printed it, scanned it on a black and white setting, the simplest and oldest of our tricks to increase contrast and texture, while giving us a higher quality file. 

this is a very small window into a very common process at bog bodies press. our graphics mostly start from accidental findings, and often the unexpected ones are our favorites. not to push you towards hoarding, but keep collecting things - you never know when you’ll find something new in them. 

the open call closes on monday september 9th - dig through your writings and drawings, you never know what details will catch someone’s eye. 

submit your work here!