Xavier Connelly in the Dawn Press studio. All photos by Katherine Gillespie
Xavier Connelly was experimenting with Japanese printing way before it was cool. One of the first people in Melbourne to buy a risograph, he’s been running his own riso service, Dawn Press, since 2010. The clunky 80s machines have since taken the art world by storm, and Connelly’s clients now include photographers, artists, illustrators, self-publishers, and musicians.For the uninitiated, risograph is a printing system manufactured by the Riso Kagaku Corporation since 1986. Originally designed for use in offices, it’s a weird hybrid of laser printing and photocopying that provides a cost-effective alternative to silk screen or high resolution digital printing.
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Connelly was drawn to risograph when the trend was fairly new. In 2010, an acquaintance who owned a machine showed him the ropes. At that point, its capacity to print detailed photographs and artworks was almost totally untested, but Connelly was eager to push the boundaries a bit.“I studied photography so I really wanted to get it to print photographs,” he says. “But no one had done it at that point. There was one place in the UK that had done it successfully and I thought, ‘If they can do it, I can do it’.”
Having previously outlaid thousands of dollars to publish an art book with some friends, he was already incredibly frustrated with the cost of commercial printing. The solution seemed obvious: DIY.“I guess I was either stupid or headstrong, and just decided to get a printer,” he tells us.It was a financial investment, but Connelly had correctly anticipated the emergence of a riso culture and knew it was only a matter of time before the machines became more popular.
“There were three or four riso places in the UK, maybe one in America, and that was all that existed at the time. And yet I could see that it was the beginning of something, or it felt like it was.” he explains. “I knew I’d want to print with one if it was commercially available to me.”“At that point all of my friends were artists or in bands and I thought, ‘Hey, if even just a handful of those people work with me then I can print band posters and flyers for gallery shows and zines’. It was enough to make me believe it would be possible.”
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As anyone who has printed with one will tell you, risographs are not conventional printers. They’re idiosyncratic and unpredictable; when printing multiple colours especially, you can expect there to be mis-registration—essentially, every print will be slightly different. Connelly sometimes finds himself puzzled when certain clients approach him. “What does happen is that people want to print with me but their content isn’t suitable,” he says. “Sometimes their work doesn’t allow room for the kinds of mistakes that come with printing on riso.”
“So often, people don’t understand how to choose which images are appropriate for which printing format. It’s a snowball effect because as time goes on, people are printing less, and they have even less understanding of how it works.”Of course, many riso fans enjoy the eccentricities of the medium. “Even when I don’t think something looks good or is suited to riso, people do celebrate those mistakes,” Connelly says. “Similar to how people like Holga light leaks, or want to listen to the crackling of a needle on a bad record player; all of the things that are self-referential to the process of how something has been made.”
The strange, low resolution aesthetics of a riso print can be strikingly beautiful, but much of the appeal also lies in the mysteries of the machine itself. An outdated yet cost-effective printing method that’s at once nostalgic and oddly futuristic, it’s easy to romanticise the risograph.
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