KURTIS, Seba. Kif.

(London): Here Press, 2013.  First edition.  Quarto.  Unpaginated.  Awesome book, ‘Kif’ documents a journey inspired by friendship and loss and tells the tender tale of a small corner of the international drug trade.  Seba Kurtis and Dodo became close sharing a flat as illegal immigrants in Tenerife. The friends took separate paths – Kurtis marrying and moving to the UK to follow his career as a photographer, while Dodo, after a period working in construction followed by a one-off fund-raising expedition to Morocco as a drug mule, died young and alone in Barcelona.  The book retraces the journey Dodo made as a one-time drugs mule from Chefchaouen in Morocco back to Europe.  However, this is not documentary photography. Some of Kurtis’s pictures have a bleached out, over-exposed quality, while others have disorienting or abstract compositions, lending the book a nostalgic air and an entirely appropriate hazy or hallucinatory quality.  A near fine copy printed on recycled paper in reversed linen wrappers.  Not stated but published in an edition of 350 copies, and now quite scarce.