In celebration of the release of ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO, available now for preorder, Australian-born graphic designer and creative director Brodie Kaman will be hosting book launches in Paris (March 1), London (March 5), and Berlin (March 8).
Spanning the years 2016 to 2020, ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO is a raw and unfiltered archive of Kaman’s non-commercial work. It brings together fragments, photographs, scans, and private visual material produced alongside, and often in tension with, his high-profile career in music and culture. Across 332 pages, the book assembles a body of work that exists outside briefs, clients, or commercial outcomes, operating instead as a record of lived experience, observation, and experimentation.
The book unfolds in two distinct movements. The first half presents an assemblage of found material, notebook pages, scanned ephemera, and visual experiments, fragments of a private studio practice that never sought public form. The second half shifts into a direct photographic register: iPhone images made in real time, capturing people, places, bodies, accidents, humor, damage, tenderness, and decay. Together, these sections form a continuous visual field in which the everyday, the abject, and the intimate collapse into one another.
Kaman’s reputation has largely been shaped through his work for some of the most visible figures in contemporary music and culture, including Lady Gaga, Don Toliver, FKA twigs, Nine Inch Nails, Mark Ronson, and Miley Cyrus, where his visual language is often understood through spectacle, branding, and cultural reach. ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO presents the inverse, a private, unresolved, and frequently uncomfortable visual record that reveals how that same language is forged through failure, obsession, repetition, and risk.
The book’s foreword situates the work not as confession but as evidence of friction between a body and the world, of marks left by time, and of the ways images accumulate into structure. What emerges is neither diary nor document, but something closer to a living system of scars, headlines, snapshots, gestures, and debris organizing themselves into form.
Published by Year Zero, ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO is both a significant artist book and a rare insight into the unseen foundation beneath a highly visible creative career. RSVP to attend the inaugural launch after party in Paris.
Brodie Kaman
ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO
Published by Year Zero
softcover, 336 pages
Edition of 300
