- Title: No Pleasure Cruise
- Artist: Sjoerd Houben
- Designer: Austin Redman & Sjoerd Houben
- Editor: Annelies de Mey & Sjoerd Houben
- Imprint: Self-Published
- Printer: Mas, Istanbul, Turkey
- Publication date and place: July/2018 , Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Edition: 400
- Format, binding: Softcover, bound with and elastic bad. Text part is staple bound.
- Size: 29,8 x 24x8 cm
- Number of pages and images: 84 pages, 76 images
- Type of printing and paper: Offset; Image part: Sappi Magno Gloss 170 gsm, GardaPat 13 Bianka 115 gsm, Text part: Inside; Munken Lynx 130 gsm Cover: Munken Lynx 240 gsm (with gloss lamination)
- Retail price: 25€
Book description:
Can happiness be captured in a photograph? With 'No Pleasure Cruise' Sjoerd Houben reflects on how we perceive and experience happiness, and the drive to control it. Government and advertising try to push forward a linear idea of happiness. Contrariwise, Houben understands happiness as a rhizome that may take many different forms.
His photography is a studious approach to the paradoxes of interpretation of the theme, portraying diverse personages and their stories within a broader social narrative. For example, happiness as seen through beauty, aging, memory, youth, the human body or emotion.
Houben’s work holds individual experience at its core; however, the theme and concept tie together these experiences into a cohesive unit.