→ some books I wanted to buy: Anouk Kruithof, Elisabeth Tonnard, Horses Think Press

This was a busy arty weekend in London -  Art16, Photo London and Offprint happening all at once! As a restult, George and myself went on a stroll around town, which included visits to Oliver Wood Rare Books (beautiful books by Daisuke Yokota), Parafin Gallery (got a copy of Michelle Stuart's catalogue), Peter Harrington on Dover Street (a fascinating exhibition of travel and exploration books), Photographers' Gallery (got a copy of Erik Kessel's "Brussels Beauties") and - Offprint, where I found those three books, which I wanted to buy very much (but I did not). 


I.

Becoming Blue
Anouk Kruithof 
2009
20,5 X 27,5 cm, paperback, 102 pages
ISBN 978-3-86895-024-3


 
Blue has many connotations: it is the colour of Virgin Mary, conservatives and melancholy. Photographer Anouk Kruithof exploits the latter one in her book of portraits, as she plays with the tension of the disrupted calm and stillness. Kruithof catches her subjects unawares to project an image of surprise. Dressed in blue and posed against a plain blue background, the subjects are caught by the camera at a moment when they least expect it. The books is effectively pasted with blank spreads of light blue slowing down the rhythm into a meditative flow - a very cinematic experience.


II.

The Lovers
Elisabeth Tonnard
2015
Edition of 100. Digital print, 24 pages.

What this book does well, is reconsidering the value and the meaning of decontextualised object, though interpretative possibilities of the photographs isolated in (and from) space and time. This book is based around screenshots made while watching ‘Discarded: Joachim Schmid and the Anti-Museum,’ a video about Joachim Schmid’s work, realized by the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2014. At one point in this documentary Schmid is at a flea market in Berlin, looking through a pile of junked photographs. For a brief moment his perusal and the movements of his hands caused the stack to tell the story captured in the book. It's minimalist look and spacious layout place images into a void, open for new stories and relationships.

III.

Visitor 
Ofer Wolberger
7.8 x 11.5 inches (198 x 292 mm), unbound, soft cover
Printed in black and red ink, risograph
56 pages, edition of 200

 

all Visitor images are from Shane Lavalette

Another recontextualised portrait comes from an ongoing project Visitor, which uses images made in the lobby of one building in midtown Manhattan. The project takes as it’s ‘found’ material the crudely made and heavily pixelated visitor badges that are made when an outsider intends to visit a company or person within an office building. All the Visitor portraits depict the same unidentified woman in an array of poses and with a wide variety of facial expressions. The images appear voyeuristic and strangely intimate while referencing the look of video surveillance footage.

Egidija