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A gatefold is an oversized page in a book folded to the same size as the other pages but intended to be opened out for reading or viewing. Magazine advertisements use gatefolds. So do National Geographic and other publications.
A double gatefold has three parallel folds. The left and right edges of the paper fold inward and meet in the middle, without overlapping, along a centerfold.
You’ve heard of centerfolds. Now you know about gatefolds.
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b. 1950, South Africa
Fourteen Stations of the Cross (detail)
Stellenbosch, South Africa: The Strange Press, 2007
Edition 5/14
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, museum purchase, 2014-8-1
Opening up these elegant double gatefold pages—one to the left, one to the right—reveals a 40-inch-wide aerial view of a southern African mission station. Two hundred years ago this landscape would have appeared quite different with no straight roads cutting through the sparsely populated terrain.
Keith Dietrich superimposes a computer-generated circular maze over the site of the mission station. A path of red—a metaphor for the “river of blood”—symbolizes the missionary presence established here and evokes the often brutal encounters indigenous peoples suffered at the hands of colonizers and missionaries.
For more information about Fourteen Stations of the Cross, click here.
