The idea came to Max Siedentopf in the shower. A former art director at KesselsKramer, the Amsterdam creative agency known for its irreverent approach to everything, Siedentopf teamed up with designer Yuki Kappes to create Ordinary — a quarterly fine art photography magazine with a brilliantly simple concept. Each issue revolves around a single mundane household object. Twenty artists from around the world receive that object and are asked to make it extraordinary. The object itself comes stapled to the cover in a plastic bag, a literal extra inside the magazine.
Issue one was plastic cutlery, limited to 250 copies worldwide. Then came the kitchen sponge, the cotton bud, the sock, the rubbish bag, air (the bag arrived empty), the straw, toilet paper, the tampon, and finally the CD. Ten issues, ten objects, then done. Siedentopf and Kappes deliberately kept the brief as open as possible — no editing, no direction, just the object and the invitation to push limits. Contributors ranged from established photographers like David Brandon Geeting and Daniel Stier to non-professionals, because Siedentopf believed creativity is not restricted to artists.
The design reinforced the philosophy. Printed at A4, each issue was dedicated to double-page spreads of photography with almost no text. What little type appeared was set in Arial — the most ordinary of typefaces. It's Nice That, 1854 Photography, and Stack Magazines all covered the project extensively. Issue ten, the grand finale, centred on the compact disc: a once-ubiquitous object that had become, by then, thoroughly ordinary. Ordinary ran its course exactly as planned — no extensions, no encores — proving that sometimes the most interesting creative constraint is knowing when to stop.
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