Description

Uitgeverij 010 [Published Date: 1990]. Hard cover, 31 pp. Bi-lingual text in English and Dutch. Edition of 600 (unnumbered) copies. Good/ NO dust jacket. Grey cloth covered boards have light bumping to edges and spine, light fading along top edge and light overall scuffing. Binding tight. Pages have very light aging around edges but are otherwise clean and unmarked. Explores the concept of distance in photography, discussing how photographers construct an image that represents reality while also abstracting it. It includes essays by Chevrier that analyze the work of the featured artists, emphasizing how their photographic techniques influence the viewer's perception of space and time. Artists featured include: Jean-Marc Bustamante, Paul-Armand Gette, Andreas Gursky, Raoul Hausmann, Craigie Horsfield, Jean-Luc Moulene, Thomas Struth, and Christopher Williams. [From Introduction] The photographs in the exhibition and the book, De Afstand (Distance) rearrange and sublimate the unavoidable: reality. That, in fact, is what photography is for, even when the visual arts maintain that they need photography. In these photographs the landscape, or fragments of it are constantly reappearing. Not for the sake of nature as it is, which distinguishes a landscape from the artificial nature of a park or a bouquet but because the landscape stresses what has always existed evolves, and regardless will continue to exist. Furthermore, the landscape is a place which invites us to look, without forcing us or explaining how to look at it. Other photographs tell about the course of things: the past, the present and the immediate future are mixed up and blurred and distant places are juxtaposed with one another. The photograph thus becomes - again - a construct of a time, of a place and of people's activities. The people who populate the portraits do not just want to be looked at, they also look at us. These photographs invite the viewer, they need him, to create a dialogue. But there is always that 'distance', an alternative, to explore and confirm the independence of the photographic image as a work of art. In this book we invited Jean-Franqois Chevrier to make a selection from the works that are included in the exhibition. He chose and described one photograph by each of the artists and determined the sequence in which they appear. It is as if the adulterous affaires of photography and text are e-enacted. The artists were asked to tell the reader what 'texts' they themselves considered important in relation to their own work. Every artist reacted in his own way, while Bartomeo Mari sketched the library of Raoul Hausmann, who died in 1971. We hope that this book may be a contribution to the discussion concerning the relationship between photography and the visual arts. . .