The words 'amateur artist' conjure up a picture of Victorian ladies and gentlemen sketching in watercolours out of doors. This text challenges such an image, describing and illustrating over 200 works from the British Museum's collections.

Contemporary Norwegian painter Fredrik Vrslev (b. 1979) presents his new series in this deconstructed exhibition catalog/artists book, All Around Amateur. Inspired by sunsets taken with his iPhone, Vrslev re-creates the images on canvas by using a mechanical trolley used for marking lines on roads or sports fields. The rows of applied color are rubbed into the canvas resulting in resonant toned paintings mimicking the glow of the sun. The paintings are installed to create a massive line of shimmering tones recalling the color field paintings of Rothko. The artist book, accompanying the solo exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, is available as two different versions, each made up of 320 one-to-one digital images scanned from eight of the new sunset paintings and reproduced in the book sequentially, left to right, top to bottom. Full-bleed scans in each volume together reproduce an entire wall of paintings. Following the images are newly commissioned texts by Ina Blom, Martin Clark, and Steinar Sekkingstad plus an interview with artist Anne Pontgnie.

The first thorough investigation of the part played by the amateur photographer and of the struggle to legitimize photography as art.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.