ToiletMartin PaperParr Book - Toilet Paper

The world-famous artist Maurizio Cattelan and curator Sam Stourdzé offer a reinterpretation of the history of color photography throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, through the works of some twenty artists who broke free from the medium's documentary status, and iconic images from Toiletpaper, to explore the common roots of the image and the imagination, flirting with the worlds of surrealism and pop. The book invites you to journey through the history of color photography across the 20th century through the sharp, vibrant lens of 19 artists including Martin Parr, Guy Bourdin, Pierre et Gilles, and others. The journey, structured into 7 chapters, leads us into vibrant and saturated worlds where color strikes the retina and engages the mind.
Often disparaged and rarely taken seriously, color photography has nonetheless allowed photographers to let loose, taking out their palettes to repaint the world. Many have liberated themselves from the documentary assignment of the photographic medium to explore the shared roots between the image and the imagination, flirting with pop, surrealism, bling, kitsch, and the baroque.
The conquest of color in photography followed shortly after the invention of the medium with the first scientific trials in the mid-19th century. In 1907, the first industrial color photography process was established with the autochrome, created by the Lumière brothers. A century of chromatic experimentation then began: from ordinary scenes to philosophical and political reflections, color transcends the simple tool to become a central narrative element.
Whether magnifying the details of a daily scene, redefining the codes of beauty in magazines, or capturing politically engaged subjects, color photography offers an intensely chromatic vision of the world. This diversity of perspectives and practices testifies to a common thread: the desire to reveal things differently, by breathing into images the life and emotion that only color can convey.
Maurizio Cattelan and Sam Stourdzé thus revisit the history of color photography through the 20 issues of Toiletpaper. The images created for the iconic magazine serve as a narrative thread, contaminating and bursting into the pages of the book to establish a photographic dialogue and metaphorically create an imaginary group of iconographic friends.
Works by Martin Parr, Miles Aldridge, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin, Juno Calypso, Walter Chandoha, Harold Edgerton, Hassan Hajjaj, Hiro, Ouka Leele, Arnold Odermatt, Ruth Ginika Ossai, Pierre et Gilles, Alex Prager, Adrienne Raquel, Sandy Skoglund, Toiletpaper, William Wegman, Madame Yevonde.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Villa Medici, Rome, from February 28 to June 9, 2025. Edited by Sam Stourdzé and Maurizio Cattelan. Published in March 2025
English edition 24 x 28 cm (hardcover) 192 pages (170 ill.)