Magic City Two:

There is life before meeting Chloe Ferres and a different life after. A box of ingredients goes into the mail, travels across the seas to sunburned Australia, and what comes back is always a visual wonderland. “Magic City Two” is no exception. The second collaboration between Miami based Andrew Kaufman, Chloe and myself. I did very little on this publication. Sick, tired and busy does not make for a good collaborator, but these other two more than made up for my puny efforts. For me, these books are wildly interesting and are every bit as important as any book I’ve done or will ever do. There is something so fascinating about coming up with an idea, working on that idea and then engaging with others to make it more than what you could have done on your own. There is still a place in the world for the monograph, albeit a downsizing place, and these small, fluid publications, for me, are so much more fun to think about, dream up and complete. There are no limits here, no long timelines, no budget restrictions, just permission to do anything you can imagine. I guess I’m an oddball. I don’t look at these books and think about massive sales, revenue or fame. I think about what it felt like to make the pictures, to have the conversations and to see these things unfold, LITERALLY, on these pages. All I can think about now is…what’s next? As you can see, this is a book designed to be FOLDED. Those creases you see in the spreads aren’t white space but rather the edges of the pages folded to reveal a secondary image only completed by making the fold. Insanely creative design from Chloe. The folds create new spreads from the parts and pieces of others. Yesterday I showed this to a half dozen people who all asked “Where do I get it?” And this leads to the final point. Neither Magic City One or Magic City Two is for sale. We decided the books are too personal to be sold to strangers, so the only way to get one of these babies is to have a personal experience with one of us. I know this might seem strange from the outside, but for some reason it feels right. — Daniel Milnor

Magic City Two is an idiosyncratic photobook, exhibited as finalist in the 2015 Ballarat International Foto Biennale One For the Books Prize and the Australian Phonebook of the Year Awards.