ultraphotographic – Ultrasparky

Finding a creative jump-start

For the past couple of years, a small town near the foothills of the Italian Alps has welcomed a dozen-or-so passionate typographers and I to spend our holiday not on a beach or by a pool, but rather immersing ourselves in Italian type history. Summer in the Veneto has plenty of charms for the typical visitor – incredible food and wine, sunny skies, beautiful vistas – but this group is more likely to get emotional about vintage wood type, ornate printing presses, and rare type specimens.

*The 1895 journal of the Nebiolo type foundry, in the collection of Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, Cornuda.*

All this inspiration is part of TipoItalia, a two-week residency at Fondazione Tipoteca Italiana, a museum of type history in Cornuda, about an hour north of Venice. Tipoteca holds an extraordinary collection of material gathered from printers and typefounders all across Italy, and it serves as the home base for a creative getaway. Participants of TipoItalia get to see all kinds of type and lettering – inside the museum and out – and work together in the museum’s print studio to transform what they see around them into new work, experimenting with letterpress printing, bookbinding, and digital type design.

Evidence

First, a quick callback to last month’s post about my experience at DiaTipo in São Paulo is purely for the sake of my vanity. The photographer covering the event got this absolute glamor shot of me that is one of the rare photos of myself that I actually enjoy.

Export your blog

I used to run a Tumblr “mood board” for my zine that had a little over 8 years of content, much of it dancing around the line between obscenity and legitimate expression of sexual identity. When Tumblr was sold recently, I didn’t expect the new Tumblr censorbots to do a good job of making the distinction, and I’m fucking angry that I need to worry about it. With Tumblr’s new policy of crawling through and removing adult content, I have a weary fear that queer content is going to suffer.

So once my backups are done and filed away for my future reference, I’m folding my Tumblr blogs and deleting my account. I’ll still be around on Instagram at @pinkmince, and as always I’d like to encourage everyone to stop by pinkmince.com to check out the zine that gave birth to this project, and expresses the end result of all of this gathering and inspiration and thinking.