Magdalena Wysocka and Claudio Pogo

Thursday, September 24th
11AM–12PM

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In 2026, Magdalena Wysocka and Claudio Pogo celebrate ten years of working together as Outer Space Press, a Berlin-based publishing and bookmaking studio. Outer Space Press was born from a dream of true independence.

Since 2016, the duo has been producing, printing, and binding photobooks by hand in their studio, creating over 25 authored publications and becoming an active presence on the international photobook scene. Their experimental approach embraces the materiality and imperfections of print, challenging conventional ideas of photographic reproduction and authorship. Alongside publishing Wysocka and Pogo create canvas works using found photography and unconventional approach to Risography: subverting the process’ serial nature to produce unique, large-scale pieces.

Their presentation during 'In The Fold' conference will offer a unique insight into ten years of Outer Space Press: its independent self-publishing philosophy, experimental processes, relationship to archives and found imagery, and the evolving possibilities of the photobook as an artistic form.

Outer Space Press’ presentation is kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Republic of Poland and Adam Mickiewicz Institute. 

About:
Magdalena Wysocka and Claudio Pogo are Berlin based artist duo working in the fields of artists’ books and archives. Their work revolves around collecting found books and photography, deconstructing and transforming images to create new visual narratives. 

The focus of their practice is reinterpretation of the photobook format through experimentation with often imperfect printing processes.

Magdalena Wysocka (b.1987) received her MA Degree in Printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (2012). Claudio Pogo (b.1978) studied fine-arts and photography in Bremen. He founded PogoBooks Publishing in 2010. 

Since 2016 they publish and distribute their collaborative work through their imprint Outer Space Press. 
outerspacepress.com

Thursday, September 24th, 2–2:45PM

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More information coming soon!

The Eriskay Connection will be on view in Penumbra’s Project Space.

About:
Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work joins photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and presently teaches photography at Parsons School of Design.
allietsubota.com

Rob van Hoesel is a Dutch book designer. In 2011 he founded The Eriskay Connection, an independent art book publisher focusing on contemporary storytelling at the intersection of photography, research and writing. His work is characterized by a conceptual approach, co-authorship, and the importance he gives to meaning and communication. Van Hoesel has been awarded at Dutch and International book design competitions, such as: Best Dutch Book Designs, European Design Awards, Aperture/ParisPhoto Photobook Awards, Deutsche Fotobuchpreis and more.

The Eriskay Connection is a Dutch studio for book design and an independent publisher. We focus on contemporary storytelling at the intersection of photography, research and writing. In close collaboration with authors we make books as autonomous bodies of work that provide us with new and necessary insights into the world around us. The key for us is to convey the essence of their work through high-quality editing, design, and production. Our editions are mainly offset printed and bound in the Netherlands and we strive to work with local producers and sustainable materials as much as possible.
eriskayconnection.com

Friday, September 25th
4–4:45PM

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In this lecture, Victor Sira looks back at more than three decades of making books, from handmade book dummies and larger offset publications such as Bookdummies and Caracas: Homecoming to the recent Europass and Weekend, small print-on-demand editions made around particular exhibitions and moments. Using these books as case studies, Sira considers how his way of working has changed alongside the photobook itself. The lecture looks at a moment when years of experimentation have created an enormous number of books, while the economic conditions for artists, publishers, exhibitions, and independent spaces have become increasingly difficult. Rather than seeing this only as a limitation, Sira considers how working at a smaller scale can create a different kind of freedom, keeping the book close to the photographs, the exhibition, and the circumstances that make it necessary.

About:
Victor Sira, a Venezuelan photographer based in New York City, works with video and artist books in addition to photography. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the W. Eugene Smith Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Sira has held numerous teaching positions, including at the ICP–Bard MFA Program in Photographic Studies. He has also taught at the SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design and currently teaches Photobook History in the MFA Photography Program at Hartford Art School. Additionally, he has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. Sira is the co-founder of bookdummypress.
victorsira.com

Friday, September 25th
5:15–6PM

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Photographer and writer Arturo Soto will present Border Documents, his latest publication, which blends documentary photography and short stories. Joined by Victor Sira, the conversation will explore the role of interplay between written and photographic components in shaping meaning and constructing narrative in photobooks, and how this, along with the material properties of the object, contributes to an experience that may amount to more than the sum of its parts.

About:
Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer and writer. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018), A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021), and Border Documents (2025). Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York, an MA in Art History from University College London, and undergraduate degrees in Film and Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He curated the exhibition Foreign Correspondence at the Architectural Association and participated in the first edition of Forecast Platform at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the books Decolonization and Diversity in Contemporary Photography, Imaginaria and the Subjective Atlas of Mexico. Soto's critical writing has been published in VII Insider, C4 Journal, Photo-Eye, The Brooklyn Rail, Objektiv, ASX, among other places. He lives in Los Angeles.
arturo-soto.com

Friday, September 25th
6:30–8PM

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John Gossage, Raymond Meeks and Jenia Fridlyand talk about their books recently published by the Agency, an imprint project co-founded by Gossage and Fridlyand, and produced in collaboration with Steidl.

Jenia Fiedlyand
Mango Season

Jenia Fridlyand (born 1975) grew up in the Soviet Union in the years just prior to perestroika. Visiting Cuba in the second decade of the 21st century, then, felt like an uncanny homecoming. While both tangible and familiar, the grim fabric of the communist quotidian kept unraveling for Fridlyand under the bright, tropical sun. With a large format camera and a photographic practice rooted in the American tradition, Fridlyand traveled around the island during several extended trips. She intuitively trained her lens on moments and scenes with the potential of holding both the known and the novel--from a pair of donkeys silhouetted against hilltops, a customer at a barber shop and a pair of rocking chairs seen through an open door, to drops of sweat on a man's curved back and sweet fruit hanging ripe on a tree.

Raymond Meeks
A Commonplace Book

Raymond Meeks' (born 1963) newest photobook edited by John Gossage. Untethered from sequence or narrative, Gossage's image selection unveils a breadth of visual style and approach, varied in form but unified by Meeks' singular sensibility. Gossage's initial impetus for the book was his realization that Meeks had "made some of the most stylistically various single pictures that I had ever seen in a serious photographer's work." And so was born, in Gossage's words, this book "of remarkable things, pictures that are as rich individually as they are in the narrative of Ray's books, but in a different way. They stand convincingly in a style of variation with certainty, always having the feel and thought of a single author."

John Gossage
An Abridged Dictionary of Sculpture

American photographer John Gossage (born 1946) is renowned for his engaging, subversive and crafted artist's books and other publications. Across over 50 black-and-white images, Gossage considers the changes objects undergo when they are photographed. Whether a pile of archive folders, a dirty beaker, a heap of baseball caps, a plank of wood or a tuft of grass, he photographs these objects against the same background of white paper, their shadows often asserting as much presence as their concrete forms. With so much of the objects unclear (their volume, scale, weight, three-dimensionality), and each having lost its original purpose, Gossage questions how much of the sculpture's essence has been preserved in his photographs. Positioned as a dictionary of sorts, this book describes the sculptures rather than embodying them.

Landon Nordeman, Maite Mérida, Mariamma Kambon, and Patricia Voulgaris

Saturday, September 26th, 12–1:30PM

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2026 Penumbra Risograph residents Mariamma Kambon, Landon Nordeman and Patricia Voulgaris present their limited edition risograph photobooks made during their residencies over the summer.

Landon Nordeman
Fifty-Five

Mariamma Kambon
Call Me Brother

Patricia Voulgaris
Disappearing Not Death

2024 Risograph Resident Maite Mérida presents her latest Risograph publication, ARTIFICIO, extending her discourse around progress that treats nature as a resource and makes us believe we are free. ARFTIFICIO is Merida’s second publication, following Era invierno cuando removimos la tierra / it was winter when we removed the soil, reflecting on the legacy of extractivism & massified monoculture in Chile through the story of her father, a forestry industry worker.

Saturday, September 26th
2–2:30PM

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Sara J. Winston, co-chair of the Photobook Long Term Program (LTP), will discuss her most recent books: Sugar Honey Iced Tea, co-authored with Ileana Ramirez (For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025); Too Visceral to be Intelligent (self-published, 2026); an unfixed pilgrimage, co-authored with Jared Ragland (forthcoming with Composite Press, 2027); and infusion (forthcoming with Saint Lucy Books, 2027). She will explore the interconnectedness of these works and the long-term nature of each volume.

About:
Sara J. Winston is an artist and writer based in the Hudson Valley, New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on her body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the author of several photobooks, among them Too Visceral to be Intelligent (self-published, 2026), Sugar Honey Iced Tea (For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025), Foibles & Avoidance (National Monument Press, 2024), Shades (Push Pull Editions, 2023), A Lick and a Promise (Candor Arts, 2017), and Homesick (Zatara Press, 2015).

She has two forthcoming monographs: Infusion, her long-term project on infusion care for multiple sclerosis, will be published by Saint Lucy Books in the spring of 2027 and an unfixed pilgrimage, co-authored with Jared Ragland, to be published in the winter of 2027 by Composit Press, an imprint of the University of Oregon.

Sara is the co-chair of the Penumbra Foundation/Image Threads Long Term Photobook Program; Associate Director of the Photography Program at Bard College where she is also Artist-in-Residence and Faculty Fellow at the Ralph Ellison Center; and a contributing writer at Collector Daily. She has received numerous awards and honors, including recent grants from the Patient Caregiver Artist Coalition, Arts Mid-Hudson of New York, and the Puffin Foundation.

On June 29, 2023, Our body is a clock, was adapted and published as an op-ed in the New York Times, titled ‘My body is a clock’: The Private Life of Chronic Care.

Saturday, September 26th
2:30–3:15PM

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Ilisa Katz Rissman will share her approach to image-making as a way of creating emotional connection, slowing down and marking time, as well as how the creative process of bookmaking has expanded her ability to communicate more fully through her work. She will reflect on how working within the photobook as a medium has deepened her understanding of her own work, allowing her to create and discover new layers of meaning through the book form. Drawing on over 20 years of work, Ilisa will discuss her trajectory, from the structure of her first LTP class to the subsequent years she spent developing what would become her first published book, APRIL.
ilkphoto.com

Andrew D. McClees will discuss his private-press risograph book: a river, passed which he began in Penumbra's LTP (2021), and his soon-to-be-released Trade-Edition debut AVALANCHE- due out in October with Los Angeles based publisher Deadbeat Club. These books are a counter-narrative and deconstruction to the practice of Family Work, exploring ways that self and family can function as templates for broader discussions beyond one's self.
andrewdmcclees.com

About:
Ilisa Katz Rissman creates long-term projects centered on people and environments around her as a way to understand her relationship to them in our increasingly anarchic world. Working primarily with large-format film cameras, she aims to foster empathy between subject and viewer, believing our connections are our most enduring. Often threading together seemingly disparate subjects, her work unfolds as a visual stream of consciousness, moving through images of nature and home alongside figures growing from childhood into adulthood, evoking the psychological states of her subjects in moments of transition. Rissman studied photography and film at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA, and began her career in editorial and commercial photography alongside her personal practice. She has exhibited work at the Brooklyn Museum, Galerie Huit in Arles, and the Berlin Foto Biennale. Her award-winning photography has been reviewed and featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Feature Shoot, and Slate. She is currently developing two new bodies of work that expand on themes explored in APRIL while pursuing distinct formal directions. Rissman lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters.
ilkphoto.com

Andrew D. McClees (b. Lewiston, ME) is a Lens-Based Conceptual Artist living and working in and around Portland, Maine. His private-press book a river, passed was principally shot during his time in Penumbra's LTP (2021), and completed January 2026, now sold out and held in the Bates Museum of Art, and the Franco American Collection at USM. McClees went on to attend Hartford Art School's International Photo MFA (2024) where he finished AVALANCHE due out in October via Deadbeat Club Press; which will be accompanied by a solo show at Interloc Gallery in Midcoast Maine. McClees's work proceeds through two modes: Inquiries: open ended experiments repeated under the same conditions to see what emerges, and Jokes: constructions and observations that begin with a familiar premise and push it until it turns on itself - using photography's evidential nature against itself.
andrewdmcclees.com

Saturday, September 26th
2:30–3:15PM

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Join us for the announcement of the very first recipient of the Susan McLaughlin Risograph Photobook Award!

Established to recognize and support the work of artists, printers, and publishers using the risograph process, the Award attracted over 100 submissions from every continent, showcasing the creative latitude of this direct, mechanical process.

Shortlisted publications will be on view in Penumbra’s Exhibition Space and featured online, with one title receiving the inaugural Award of $5,000!