Fétiches by Camille Holtz

Éditions FP&CF is a French non-profit organization that aims to share the works of illustrators and photographers through small-run publications and zines. Their editorial direction focuses on original topics, as can be seen in one of their latest publications: Fétiches by Camille Holtz. The young photographer and film director offers a dive into the world of canine beauty contests, through a series of photographs and a variety of texts, which include descriptions of dogs with the specific vocabulary used in this context, interviews, or even poems, each of them representing an aspect of this particular environment. The strangeness of this relationship to animals is shown through overexposed flash-light photographs or close-up shots of dogs, one or the other technique making the animal weirdly still or even abstract.

To express the status of precious objects that these dogs have acquired, Guillaume Grall from Building Paris designed a booklet whose preciousness is felt through its different papers: a thick light grey cover, a glossy paper for the photographs, and an apricot colored stock for texts in the center. The photographs alternate with text set in Trianon, designed by Loïc Sander and available from Production Type. Trianon has a versatility that many Didone fonts don’t show: following a research on the creation of Didot’s small sizes, Sander came up with a family of five different styles with matching italics, which express the different aspects that can be found in the original design of Didot, from readability to its usual contrasted impact. Trianon was initially designed for text and comfortable reading; its use in Fétiches accompanies the reader while keeping the characteristic elegance of Didot. It almost looks like an ironic twist of fashion magazines such as Vogue or Elle, except the models are replaced with pedigree dogs: the ambivalence shown in Camille Holtz’s photographs and texts is therefore made visible in the design of the publication.