Thursday, July 29, 2010

William Eggleston - Mystagogue, From 2 and 1/4, 1999.


An essay by Bruce Wagner....

Do we care for anything but mystery? And does anything matter more than its apprehension? During our days, we try so hard to find and hold it; at night, we find it then can't remember. Though our nights and days begin, unfold and end, soaked in it, we want schedules, agendas, and appointments to give mystery dumb order. A birthday does that. A supermarket. A handgun. A phone book. A driver's permit.

These form the diary of our days. Bill Eggleston has spent a lifetime composing a different calendar, and in that sense, each of his photographs is a numbered day--our days are numbered--and together, they make a wall calendar of mystery that might hang in the very garages of Mr. Eggleston, in a natty undertaker's suit, might stumble upon midst his meanderings. We can speak of the nature and theory of photography, its philosophy, its formality and offhandedness, the random solemnity and theorem of arbitrary borders and cropped fields; we can even speak of the fabled, magical mundaneness of Mr. Eggleston's cars--some bright, some husks--and merciless, merciless facades, his unapologetic faces and deadpan dogs, his bright-dark trees and monolithic, colored, geomantic vision (colors at once faded and vivid), urban and country. but what do these things tell us, collectively? These sharecropped fields, these flat, sacred landscapes? Are they sorrowful images? Are we already dead, looking at them? Is a radiator of itself a sad thing, sadder still when topped by artificial flowers? No: neither sad nor ironic but rather the thing Mr. Eggleston's itinerant eye fell upon and snagged--there's mystery in what is selected but that isn't our concern--and he feels such tenderness toward those things, those transcendent characters, radiators and false flowers, colloquial signs and ghost cafes, gasoline and soda logos and startled foliage (there's a tree in this calendar that a saint decamped from moments before it was photographed) beneath blue skies. There is more than mere utilitarian mystery in power lines and obsolescent vats. And there are people, too, neither said nor ironic--like everything captured by Mr. Eggleston's expeditionary eye, like everything he sees, they are heartbreaking and indifferent then we are heartbreaking and indifferent, watching them. So we are left with a mirror, and a calendar that is a prayerbook, for a religion we will not join: mystery. We like to think ourselves practicing mystagogues, but we will not abide.

* * *
Not long ago, the photographer was watching the sky at dusk. It was cloudy and there was no moon. A boy beside him asked, 'Mr. Bill? Are there stars always out?' How that moved him! The images in this 2 and 1/4, then, are those small stars. A calendar of psalms dedicated to mystery. They are sad and joyful and indifferent, and will not go away when daylight comes.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Wolfgang Tillmans - Everything is Illuminated


The British Journal of Photography visits Wolfgang Tillmans.

On first sight, Wolfgang Tillmans’ east London studio has a relaxed feel, verging on the messy. But look closer and you notice the meticulously organised files cataloguing invoices, alongside boxes of letters and out-of-date films. The objects around this studio are often the subject of his photographs, and in many respects it helps explain his work.

With their informal style and seemingly loose approach to subject matter, Tillmans’ photographs have been mistaken for casual snapshots. Don’t be fooled. He has deliberately abandoned “the language of importance”, but his images are carefully thought out and are often partly staged.
“I guess there is a tendency for any artist in any field to want their work to be noticed,” he laughs. “But the artists who are a little bit more interesting go beyond that and realise that of course it’s much cooler to make it all look effortless.”

Despite the apparent ease of style, Tillmans’ work is instantly recognisable, and he’s become one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. A decade ago he was the youngest person to ever collect the Turner Prize, as well as the first and only photographer, and he has the rare distinction (for a photographer) of being given a solo at Tate Britain in 2003 and at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

Tillmans didn’t get into photography until he was 20. Born in 1968 in Remscheid, a small town close to Cologne where the work of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) photographers such as August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher was “in the water”, as he puts it, his first exhibition was a collection of images photocopied on a Canon laser printer.

“It probably seemed a little mad to people that I had this drive and this belief that the work was good and that it mattered,” he told Fantastic Man magazine recently. “And that somehow if this mattered to me, there might be some relevance in it to the outside world… I have always felt a sense of purpose, that I had something to say and that I wanted to say it.”

He showed the work in various venues in Hamburg, where he lived for three years after finishing school, then moved to Berlin during the tumultuous months of 1989, when the city’s wall divide was spectacularly torn down and the party began. Yet just a few months after arriving, he moved again, this time to a seaside town on the south coast of England best known for elderly sunseekers. He’d read that Nick Knight, who’d made his name blurring the boundaries between fashion and documentary with shots of skinheads and youth culture, had studied photography at Bournemouth School of Art and Design, and applied to go there himself.

His sheer drive marked him out early on, say his former tutors. “I was interested, and knew what I was interested in,” he says. “Or not even that – I was passionate.”
Unaffected gaze
Primarily influenced by artists who worked with photographic images, such as Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Robert Rauschenberg, Tillmans had every confidence in photography as an art form. But he found his signature style when he stripped away the accoutrements of art, shooting apparently unglamorous subjects with simple flashlight bounced off the walls.

“I saw all the students, including myself, try out interesting lighting techniques, and it was the heyday of cross-processing and lith-toning and wide-angle lenses,” he says. “It dawned on me, ‘Why are these images not really looking like what I see, what I feel with my eye?’

“So I embarked on looking for ways to approximate what my eye sees and came up with these portraits that I then became known for, including this realistic palette and normal light and normal lenses, but also this unaffected gaze. A lot of people in the early days found that almost hostile or rejecting because, I guess, a lot of pictures when I was growing up were of young people smiling or being funny or acting as if they excused themselves for that phase they were in. Whereas I saw myself and my contemporaries as serious, complex human beings, and that was enough.”

These resulting images, such as Julia (1991), showed casually posed friends and associates, often in homely domestic spaces, though many of these acquaintances were involved in the 1990s techno scene.
Tillmans also documented London’s Chemistry Club and shot stories for i-D (one of his best-known images, Lutz and Alex, sitting in the trees was shot for the style magazine), which rather confused some when he was nominated for the Turner Prize. The critic Matthew Collings, for example, told The Observer he had “no idea why Tillmans is supposed to be an artist. If he wins the message will be the Tate… wants to get down and boogie in an embarrassing way with the youthful airheads who read The Face”.

Collings’ comments were inaccurate – Tillmans has never shot for The Face – and the photographer still finds the subculture tag slightly frustrating. He’s stated he “never set out to be a photographer of the 1990s, the techno generation”, he just shot the people he had access to. But he’s also said he shot the ecstasy generation because he felt closest to them, and that the portraits he most values are of the people he loves. This, combined with his still lifes of everyday objects such as fruit and half-empty milk bottles, have led some to further confuse his work as primarily diaristic.

It’s another misinterpretation, he says, although he admits that after 25 years in photography he can see some of his own history in his work. “I have a very varied subject matter, but it is actually not everything,” he says. “It’s not every plate I’ve eaten off – it’s a particular plate maybe once a year. It’s not like I’ve photographed every seat I’ve sat in, every bed I’ve slept in…

“There are different reasons for portraits. There are those of the friends I’m close to, others I’ve made because I think that person is important, or does something important that I want to amplify. Others I see almost literally as an exercise in flexibility. There are two or three magazines that can approach me about portraiture, because I generally like what they do, and then it’s a random thing. A person suddenly gets proposed and you have to deal with them, sometimes in 20 minutes in a hotel room. They don’t have any idea of who I am or the status I might have in my world, so I just have to function on this one-to-one human level. There’s no safety net.”

In fact, he says the possibility of failure is at the heart of any good portrait. If you go into a situation with a preconceived idea, he argues, you’ll get a picture with that idea; if you go into it with an arrogant or dismissive attitude, you’ll get bad results. He’s fond of saying that although photography always lies about what’s in front of the camera, it never lies about what’s behind it, and he adds that photography is “an incredibly true medium in regards to the intentions that are behind the camera”.

“You could say these are just pictures of clubs, but you know thousands of people take pictures of clubs and none of them look just exactly like mine,” he says. “That’s a proof. I don’t mean it as a proof of how brilliant I am, it’s a proof of how specific photography is, how truly psychological.”
Subversive eye
Tillmans’ still lifes reveal another aspect of this democratic approach. He’s described the eyes as subversive because “they are free when used freely” – that is, they ascribe value to what’s seen in front of them, no matter how expensive or banal the subject. But although many of his still lifes show ostensibly everyday scenes, in fact many are staged, and if they’re not, they’ve acquired meaning for him over a long time before shooting.

The title of his 2003 Tate Britain show, If one thing matters everything matters, has been misinterpreted as meaning that everything is equally important, he says. He didn’t mean that every milk bottle is of equal value to him, nor is he taking a straight inventory of the objects around him. He meant that any object has the potential be a worthy subject, nothing is per se excluded from consideration.

“I don’t think, ‘Oh this normal apple is actually quite beautiful’, that wouldn’t cross my mind,” he says. “There isn’t a programme saying, ‘Hey let’s make something normal look good’. I genuinely think it’s good. And that doesn’t exclude a precious object either. I might take pictures of very inexpensive things, but I’m also interested in the special [he’s shot gold bars, for example]. It’s almost that I transfer the special in the everyday and the everyday into the special.”

His constant question to himself, he adds, is “Can I make a picture out of this?” The titles of his images sometimes function in the same way – sometimes he’ll pick out a seemingly incidental aspect of the image, in an attempt to sharpen the viewers’ senses. “It’s again in keeping with my approach, you know – don’t be so sure about what you think you see, be open, look twice,” he says.

This emphasis on the image runs through Tillmans’ abstract experimentations too. Although he’s always shot abstracts, after the 1990s he started working on process-driven pieces too, for example the Blushes, Peaches, Starstruck, and Freischwimmer series. These images are often talked about as fragments of hair or skin, which Tillmans puts down to the sheer fact they’re photographic – if they were paintings, he argues, viewers wouldn’t try to read them in terms of reality.
These images draw attention to the materiality of photography, he says, and the fact that images don’t simply depict reality, “something that is not really well understood by the general public”. Beyond that, he says, they’re not so different to his other work. He’s a picture-maker, and “anything goes”.

“Photography is matter, or it was matter before digital, and they [photographs] are objects,” he explains. “They are an embodied image, which is a picture, and the abstract works pronounce that more, even though the concern for me is the same if I take a picture of a stained t-shirt and put it on the wall.”
Common experience
He always shows his abstract images alongside figurative work in the pin-up, installation-style exhibitions for which he’s become known. Selecting a large number of pictures, in some installations even including photographs culled from newspapers as well as his own, he prints them out as inkjets, then tacks them to the walls, or (as in the Truth Study Center project) lays them flat on crude, wooden tables.

Abandoning glass mounts and frames is another bid to reject “the language of importance” and “the reek of mimicking painting”, but it also leaves the images free to “battle it out”. He doesn’t want to promote one image above another, he says, just as he doesn’t want to prejudge his subjects because “the world is so full of interesting things”.
What matters is being open-minded enough to really look, and what’s special about photography is that it can point towards what you actually see, he argues. “I chose the medium because I can say what I want to say with it,” he states. “Photography allows me to make very expressive things but keep them still related to and grounded in reality.”
Loss of ego
That reality, of course, is shared with other people, and Tillmans told Influence magazine in 2004 that he liked the fact that photographs join him to the world and connect him with others. “I can get in touch with somebody when they recognise the feeling, ‘Oh, I felt like that before, I remember jeans hanging on the banister, even though I’ve never seen that exact pair’,” he said.
“It’s this universality that interests me, how this individual’s experience relates to a shared universal experience,” he adds, a position not a million miles away from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, which argues that each individual, subjective response is universally shared by all.

But, typically, Tillmans has another, more common sense of universality – the loss of ego implicit in clubbing, and in losing the self to a mass of people and music. It’s this sense of fellow feeling and communication that makes it all worthwhile, he says, not his spectacular success in the art world.
“Regularly, people tell me how they see the world differently because of my pictures, that they somehow see things in their own life that they take a picture of in their mind’s eye,” he says. “I find that super, such a reaction is really rewarding. That is real success – not the price that my pictures go for, but that actually affecting a fellow human to see something with open eyes.”

Wolfgang Tillmans is on show at the Serpentine Gallery until 19 September.

MoMA presents - The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to today


The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The advent of photography in 1839, when aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality, brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in the perception of art. But if the photograph's reproducibility challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very personal form of perception and offered a model for dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art.

In his 1947 book Le Musée imaginaire, novelist and politician André Malraux famously advocated for a pancultural "museum without walls," postulating that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become "the history of that which can be photographed." Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. There were many reasons for this, including the immobility of sculpture, which suited the long exposure times needed with the early photographic processes, and the desire to document, collect, publicize, and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of darkroom manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers have not only interpreted sculpture but created stunning reinventions of it.

The Original Copy looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of what sculpture is. Conceived around ten conceptual modules, the exhibition examines the rich historical legacy of photography and the aesthetic shifts that have taken place in the medium over the last 170 years through a superb selection of 300 pictures by more than 100 artists. Some, ranging from Eugène Atget and Walker Evans to Lee Friedlander and David Goldblatt, are best known as photographers; others such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi and David Smith, are best known as sculptors; and others, ranging from Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, to contemporaries such as Bruce Nauman, Fischli/Weiss, Rachel Harrison, and Cyprien Gaillard, are too various to categorize but exemplify how fruitfully and unpredictably photography and sculpture have combined.

The exhibition will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich, where it will be on view from February 25 through May 15, 2011.

Bruce Nauman. Waxing Hot from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs. 1966–67, 1970, 2007.
Inkjet print (originally chromogenic color print)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gerald S. Elliott Collection
© 2010 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Andrew Phelps - a book about skateboarding or is it?






One of the great things about making photobooks is that you get to swap with friends and colleagues who share the same passion. So it was with pleasure that Andrew Phelps gave me a copy of his new photo / artist's book, 720 (2 times around). Self-published this year in an edition of 100 the book is a reminiscence and meditation on Phelps' life as a skateborder 20 years ago.
But the book is more than just that. Comprising photographs made amongst "the relics of corporate wasteland" taken over by kids as a their own skater paradise, the pictures are about loss, change and impermanence. The pictures give me the feeling that I love to find in photography, the sense that something I don't know about has happened here and something else is about to happen. The book is a conceptual piece full of unintentional art works that came about out of circumstance and were brought to life through Phelps' eye and camera. Scenarios given another life beyond the obvious and beyond the original corporate intention and later that of the skateboarders.

This is a book that I have returned to many times and I see something fresh every time. If you're lucky you might be able to still get hold of a copy by going to Andrew's site: http://www.andrew-phelps.com/

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Leonard Cohen - there is a crack



Here are some lines from Leonard Cohen's Anthem.....

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

And two cracks from me, the first made in Lodz in May and the second in Auckland earlier this week.....

Friday, July 16, 2010

Rencontres d’Arles 41st Edition



France’s celebrated Rencontres d’Arles is perhaps the most important annual photographic event in the world.
Over the years Arles has played host to many of the most significant figures in photography. Ansel Adams, Brassai, André Kertesz, Martin Parr and most recently Nan Goldin have all graced the programme, which comprises exhibitions examining contemporary photographic practice and emerging markets – Argentina this year – as well as themed retrospectives such as a Mick Jagger series.

Antoine D'Agata showed work from his Jerusalem series in a show curated by by Christian Caujolle alongside work by Michael Ackerman, Sugimoto, Anders Petersen, and Chris Marker – where seemingly distinctions between art and documentary were rendered irrelevant. D'Agata's images from Jerusalem and the Crush-art body of work by Marker were both presented as grids, each with its own emphasis on how the human face might become inhuman, whether through acts of war or a more abstract process.

Jerusalem is shown above together with a portrait of Antoine I made after I bumped into him on the terrace at Bataclan one morning in May.

The 41st edition of the Rencontres d’Arles opened on Saturday 3 July and will run until 19th September 2010.

Auckland - Birds






I've always liked Hans-Peter Feldmann's little book, The Little Seagull Book (Walther Konig, 2004) which presents a series of photographs Feldmann made while on vacation in Scotland in the 70's. These ordinary seagull pictures celebrate the simple beauty of nature and the very essence of life.

Here are some birds flying west into a darkening winter sky that I photographed yesterday afternoon from the deck of the Devonport ferry as it headed into Auckland harbor. What can be more fundamental and inspiring than observing this incredible performance.... I'm not sure what the bird is, possibly the short-tailed shearwater, a migratory bird that heads south in the Pacific at this time of year.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Lester B Morrison at the Kassell Photobook Festival






It was a pleasure at last to meet Lester B Morrison in Kassell at the recent Photobook Festival. Lester kindly gave me a copy of his set of 4 NEW zines, in a bag complete with a sprinkling of you guessed it, Little Brown Mushrooms. The zines: Library of Broken Men, Lester Becomes Me, Lonely Bearded Men and Lost Boy Mountain each in an edition of 500, deal with the existential issues of loss, lust, loneliness and identity.... the reclusive Lester allowed me to make his portrait which I really only wanted because of the T Shirt.
Here it is.... together with some pages from Lost Boy Mountain.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

The 3rd International Photobook Festival, Kassell May 2010






This post is way overdue but I wanted to make it because as festivals go this one was hard to beat. Held in the Kassell Documenta exhibition hall the festival brought together everybody and anybody who has the business and pleasure of "the photobook" at heart. With lectures, booksellers, exhibitions and the buzz of catching up with friends and colleagues it was four exhilarating days.

In between looking at books, (the Schaden team was there in force, Dirk Bakker, Steidl, Joachim Schmid and others from ABC Artist's Books Cooperative to name a few) there were the lectures; Paul Graham, Alec Soth, Rinko Kawauchi, Rob Hornstra, Joachim Schmid, Lesley Martin speaking on Aperture's history, Ferdinand Brüggemann talking about Japanese books.

There was also an exhibition of Best Photobooks with books chosen by 24 international experts among them Gerry Badger, Martin Parr, Guy Tillim, Darius Himes, Frits Gierstberg, Paul Graham, Alec Soth and others.... the award was supported by a beautifully designed and produced catalogue. Some pages are shown above....

Then there was the book dummy show and prize with a call for entries for unpublished photographers to submit a book. This year over 400 books were entered and the best 50 were on display. This year's winner was the photographer Werner Amann and his book American.

I could go on but will simply suggest you put June 1 - 5 in your diary for next year, the 4th International Photobook Festival, Kassell. Don't miss it!

Lodz - some photographs






In a previous post I talked about going to Lodz for their annual photography festival back in May. Lodz has suffered under Nazi occupation, then Soviet domination followed by the collapse of the textile industry. All of this shows on the face of this resilient and enigmatic city. Despite the abandoned buildings and the broken pavements the city has a strange, mysterious beauty. Here are some pictures......

Monday, July 5, 2010

Photographers whose work I like - No 6 / Marcus Haydock






I first met Marcus about ten years ago when I gave a talk at the University of Brighton and he was in the audience. We had a beer after and have kept in touch. Marcus's work has a strange semiotic turn, asking questions and demanding answers. I guess I like his work because he's looking hard at the essence of things with a philosophical starting point very close to my own.

David Chandler the British photography critic and writer has this to say about Marcus's work:

Marcus Haydock's photographs add weight to the idea that photography can be as much to do with sensing as it is with seeing. Like other visual artists and writers, Haydock tries to persuade us that the world turns not only on dramatic events, played out on an epic scale, but on more subtle, barely traceable forces that are continually folding in and out of one another, all around us, at all times. It is here, Haydock's work insists, in the familiar patterns of the everyday, that the world we inhabit and that we make for ourselves can offer up its secrets. Or, at least there are times when we can sense them: in the sudden configuration of a red shower attachment, for example, or in light reflected by a mirror. Haydock's sense is that certain delicate energies are at work here, energies which at times are somehow held in the balance, and become tangible, become felt. Revelation seems to be too strong a word for this feeling, because the moment does not exactly declare itself; in Haydock's work it is not gestural or expressive, and, we might imagine, it is mostly not 'anticipated' - nor is it particularly decisive. Nothing, we feel, is dependant upon it and no specific meaning is waiting to be revealed or understood. We might be tempted to describe this moment in terms of coherence, a glimpse of some form of order, of things falling into place. But these moments, so beautifully preserved by Haydock's camera, would be more correctly referred to as a falling out of place, when this confluence of forces cuts through our habitual acceptance of the world. 'There is a part of everything which is unexplored,' said Flaubert, 'because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.’ It is this sense of the unknown in the familiar that Marcus Haydock has discovered in these photographs. And with it comes possibility, the gift of the world opening up and seen again, as if for the first time. David Chandler, Director, Photoworks

You can see more of Marcus Haydock's work at: http://www.marcushaydock.co.uk

The photographs here are from the series Insurrection

The Photobook: A History, volume 111? The Cook Book?






Still on the subject of food, rumor has it that Martin Parr and Gerry Badger may be working on volume 3 of The Photobook.
I have it on good authority that the subject of the cook-book as a possible category has been considered.

Here are some spreads from a cook book I discovered in Lodz in the Polish version of a 1 Euro shop. An ideal candidate for Martin and Gerry. This is a book that needs more exposure, one which will rocket in value once it gets the attention it deserves.

I'm not sure what the photographer had in mind when shooting the pictures for this book, but certainly not 100% on the food.

Say Cheese? The University College Falmouth exposes photographer cooks






The 3rd year undergraduate students at The University College Falmouth, as a fundraising effort, and with a book in mind, invited some well known photographers to provide a recipe and a photograph. Their book-work SAY CHEESE? has just been published. Here are some of the culinary efforts.

My advice is that if any of these photographers happen to invite you to dinner say that you have another engagement!

You can order a copy of the book by going to: http://13photographyprojects.falmouth.ac.uk/

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Hans-Peter Feldmann - not about the object but the idea





Hans-Peter Feldmann is one of my favorite artists. I like his process, how he works outside the system (even though the system embraces him for that) and how his work is not about the object but about the idea. He also makes something out of nothing, what can be better than that. And he makes book-works.

Feldmann (Born 1941 Dusseldorf, Germany) lives and works in Dusseldorf and is a major figure in the conceptual art movement and a pre-eminent practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann's approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting. Culling imagery from the swollen vernacular of amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys and trivial works of art, Feldmann reproduces and recontextualizes our reading of them in books, postcards, posters or multiples.
He began working in 1968, producing the first of the small handmade books that would become a signature part of his work. These modest books, simply entitled Bilde (Picture) or Bilder (Pictures), would include one or more reproductions from a certain type - knees of women, shoes, chairs, film stars, etc. - their subjects isolated in their ubiquity and presented without captions.

In the forward to his new book ANOTHER BOOK (Koenig Books, 2010) Feldmann publishes this letter to a friend talking about his working method.

Dear.....
Thank you very much for your letter, from which I learned, how you make your books of such high quality.
But I am afraid, that this is not what I have in mind. Let me give you some thoughts, how I think about my art.
I was very much impressed by the Dadaist, the Situationists, Fluxus, Vienna Actionists and so on. I learned book and magazine making from the Amsterdam Provos. What they all have in common, is, that art is an event, an impression, a feeling and more. It's never really the object. Like in music, the piano is not the music, it's only a tool.

I have two ways to express my art. On one side I do exhibitions and on the other side I do magazines and books. Both have the same importance to me. But I always try to leave not a feeling for valuable items or objects, but an experience. Best sample could be the shadow play. It's actually a bunch of trash and junk, which builds up something completely new in our brains for a certain while. A shadow on the wall.

That's, why I put pictures and photographs with pins on the wall of a museum, not with a frame, that's why I write titles of works by hand below the work on the wall. I do not want to be recognized by material, but by ideas. I even show by purpose bad works in shows, leave trash in a corner and make mistakes in books.

So many words.
But I hope, that you can understand why I could not let a designer do my book. Specially if it is a very good one. He would not accept, that I want to have pictures not printed straight, empty pages, photocopies as the base for scans and so on.