V.D. AS DUST ALIGHTS

Vincent Delbrouck

AS DUST ALIGHTS

THE HIMALAYAN PROJECT – PART 1
Self-published by V.D.
WILDERNESS self-publishing project, Loupoigne (B), May 2013
Limited edition of 200 copies with unique cover titled, signed and numbered by V.D. with his red marker
Each copy also includes 2 loose prints and 3 colored paper documents/poems by V.D.
240 x 320 mm (9,4 x 12,6“) , 56 pages, softcover
Offset printing on Papyrus Original Gmund Tactile Cream paper
Layout by V.D. and Philippe Koeune at Valley the Valley

Collector edition : 30 collector copies coming with a A4 C-print (ed.80) of “Roofplants”, all slipped into a very special and beautiful silk Tibetan book-pouch with a V.D. in red color tape stuck to it

ISBN 978-2-9601337-0-7

Extraits

Ces photographies sont extraites d’une série en cours d’accomplissement : Après tout. Elle sera montrée en novembre 2012 à Paris.
Au commencement, aucun souci d’unité thématique. Si des liens entre les images se tissent après coup, je les assimile à des terminaisons nerveuses. Vouloir parler de la vie de son esprit en plein milieu du monde sans être saisi par le délire, c’est un souci quotidien. La seule question qui vaille pour moi aujourd’hui.

These photographs are from a series is being made: Après tout. It will be shown in Paris in November 2012. Initially, no worries of thematic unity. If links are forged between the images after the fact, I equate them with nerve endings. Want to talk about the life of my mind in the middle of the world without being seized by the delirium is a daily concern. The only valid question for me today.

Amaury da Cunha

www.saccades-images.blogspot.com
www.amaurydacunha.com

Castelmezzano

Domingo Milella : A view from Castelmezzano

Outer edges of some buried age. A view from Castelmezzano: rupestrian cultures in the Mediterranean region and beyond

Castelmezzano, Basilicata, 2010

Castellaneta, Basilicata, 2010

On the 3rd of September in Castelmezzano, Italy, opened Outer edges of some buried age. An exhibition curated by Chiara Capodici and Fiorenza Pinna featuring the work of photographer Domingo Milella. The exhibition takes place at Palazzo Coiro, an old aristocratic palace in the centre of the village, and it is visible only by daylight.

Pietrapertosa, Basilicata, 2010

Outer edges develops around the concept of landscape, identity and memory referencing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notion of Post-history as the acknowledgement of an inevitable clash of ancient and modern times in a society that is slowly losing any sense of community and belonging.

“I am a force of the Past. My love lies only in tradition. I come from the ruins, the churches, the altarpieces, the villages abandoned in the Appennines or foothills of the Alps where my brothers once lived […] Or I see the twilights, the mornings over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world, as the first acts of Post-history to which I bear witness, for the privilege of recording them from the outer edge of some buried age.”

This site-specific exhibition moves from a study on the identity of the village of Castelmezzano and reaches out to the countries and the populations that settled along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea—Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Greece—and Mexico in search of territories marked by a similar ancient history and cultural experience of the landscape.

Acitrezza, Sicily, 2009

In his journey Domingo Milella explores and compares the different expressions of a sense of belonging and community which leaves a legacy that, impressed on the stones, determines the face of the landscape. Territory and identity are considered part of a collective history and memory that connect these cultures throughout the globe.

Domingo selects specific places and stories following a fil rouge that takes him on a historical pilgrimage from Castelmezzano to Mexico via the regions of Southern Italy and the Anatolia. The images of the rupestrian settlements in Phrygia, Cappadocia, Giza, Polignano, or Mexico City all reveal how deeply intertwined the relationship between man and nature has been over the years.

Sanctuary-Monastery, Phrygia, Turkey, 2011

Soganli, Turkey, 2011

Valley of Ilhara, Turkey, 2011

The Arabs took advantage of the natural architecture of Pietrapertosa to preserve the safety of their community. They used to take refuge in the hole of the mountain that overlooks the town—after which Pietrapertosa was named—to observe without being seen. Similarly, the image of the Tomb of Midas depicts the encounter of nature with archaic and modern civilisation. The tomb, as a symbol of the myth, is carved in the stone while a person holding a digital camera stands in front of it photographing the monument. Lastly, Mexico City which is represented as a crossroad of three different cultures—the Aztec, the precolonial and the modern state—all of which indelibly imprinted their own identity onto the face of the city.

The interventions of man shaped the landscape the same way as the landscape influenced the development and the identity of the society.

Elisa Badii

Domingo Milella, Outer edges of some buried age. A view from Castelmezzano: rupestrian cultures in the Mediterranean region and beyond

Until October 3, 2011

Palazzo Coiro
Castelmezzano
Potenza
Italia

Tlatelolco, Square of the Three Cultures, Mexico City, 2004

Giza, Egypt, 2009

All images Courtesy of Domingo Milella and Brancolini Grimaldi

http://www.treterzi.org
http://www.brancolinigrimaldi.com

The exhibition is an initiative of The View From Lucania, a project devoted to the South of Italy based in Basilicata. TVFL in collaboration with the township of Castelmezzano, which has financed the exhibition and the whole project.  www.theviewfromlucania.com

thanks to La lettre de la photographie

Omoide Poroporo

David Favrod

Omoide Poroporo

50 pages

21.4 x 24.5 cm

signed and numbered + 1 unbund photograph

First edition of 100

ISBN 978–3–03747–019–0 KODOJI PRESS I usually find it hard to speak about myself. I always stumble in the paradoxes of «who am I ?». In terms of factual information, I surely appear to be the most well informed person about my own self. But as soon as I need to communicate about who I am, I tend to do it through filters, selecting what I want to communicate, and how I wish to do it, in accordance with my interests and sensitivity. So what can be the objective value of the way that I picture my family and my life ? How much does it concretely relates to reality or not ? David Favrod 2010

The Singled Person

Softcover 15 x 19 cm., 64 pages, Schaden.com 2009, ISBN 3-932187-75-X, EURO 18.00

The Singled Person was originally conceived as a projection for seven screens, viewable simultaneously. Seven photographers are presented in this book, sharing their different visions of the singled person.
Yet, who is this singled person; the photographer, the subject or both?
Whether the subject is physically alone or in a group, everyone here remains in a state of alienation, just as the photographer, no matter how intimate or close he is to his subject, remains alone.

In order to transform the projection into print form the different artists’ works are intermixed, emphasizing the central concept rather then the individual photographer and allowing the viewer to connect emotionally, as recurrent moments of life are summarized, displaced, connected, or just pass by.

With photographs by Michael Ackerman, Morten Andersen, Thorsten Kirchhoff, Peer Kugler, André Lützen, Hisashi Murayama and Filippo Romano.

Peer Kugler

Thorsten Kirchoff

Michael Ackerman

André Lüetzen

Hisashi Murayama

Morten Andersen

Fillipo Romano

Projection – installation views

le ban des utopies

Cyrille Weiner

“La valeur des villes se mesure au nombre des lieux qu’elles réservent à l’improvisation” Siegfried Kracauer, Rues de Berlin et d’ailleurs, 1964

Le ban des utopies, 2007

album japonais Moleskine, 60 pages pliées en accordéon, tirages jet d’encres pigmentaires, tampons d’encre

édition limitée à soixante exemplaires, pour Cheminements 2008 Le paysage comme terrain de jeux, Centre de photographie de Lectoure

Museum

Pierre Debroux

Presque Île

Cyrille Weiner‘s exhibition at villa Noailles

Following on from Joël Tettamanti, in 2004, Olivier Amsellem, in 2005, Erwan Frotin, in 2007 and Charles Fréger, in 2008, the Villa Noailles will exhibit, from the 18th of October to the 6th of December 2009, a new photographic commission awarded on this occasion to Cyrille Weiner. Weiner’s work has already been shown at the villa in 2005, during the exhibition Oui, avec plaisir, which was dedicated to the architect Patrick Bouchain, and for which he specially photographed a number of Bouchain’s works.

Presque île is the result of a two year residency at the villa Noailles. This series explores a protected area – the Presqu’Ile de Giens, the Iles d’Or, and the coastline of Hyères, Toulon and its suburbs – from the perspective of appropriation. Through these landscapes, the local installations, and the locations, Cyrille Weiner offers a poetic stroll, along with a reinterpretation of the imagery of the islands and the coastline.

A catalogue is co-published by villa Noailles and Archibooks.

A WALK ON THE EDGE

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face. [Jorge Luis Borges]

For two years, the photographer made repeated, sporadic visits to the peninsula and the neighbouring land. He preferred to go before or after the high season, in chilly February, in still sensual June, or in September when tranquillity had returned. In Giens, he followed the footpaths that crisscross this rugged region. As he walked up the stony paths and down the slippery, ochre, clay slopes, snagged here and there with the roots of knotty pines, his destination was always the image. It would appear to him at a bend in a narrow passage through the tall yellowish grasses, where a walker was approaching, leaving the sea below, absorbed in their stroll and oblivious to the photographer’s lens; or behind a massive wall of pale rock, in the form of a small red back, bent towards the still distant sea. The image captured often shows a passenger on the move, in a landscape that seems everywhere to flaunt its magnificent indifference to this fleeting presence. Nature appears as sullen and harsh. It does not offer propitious spaces, adapted for human leisure; nor does it allow itself to be conquered; it lets itself be visited, gently touched by the walker.

The photographer invariably selects people who are submerged in some vast landscape, in the suffocating heat of the paths and the wooded areas dotted with slender tree trunks that they lead to, in the blue sky and the sea whose whitecaps endlessly draw the eye and feet. The person surveying the scene, marooned in the landscape, sometimes engaged in a family activity, often absorbed in the rapt contemplation of the infinite – alone or in a shared solitude – is offered what no property rights can lay claim to: the horizon. Their contemplation sometimes leads to delight when they surreptitiously glimpse the complicit echo of the sparkling water and the metallic glint of the mica on the sand. At this point, they know that, at the end of this narrow path, they have invented ‘their place’. No matter if they have to share it with others, providing they do not make a noise.

Returning on another day, they discover that the light has changed, the air is no longer the same and the atmosphere is different. As Emerson put it, ‘Nature always wears the colours of the spirit.’ No longer able to recognise their haven, they set off again, resuming their quest. They have to visit many shorelines before they can find their own. The edge of the world marks the beginning of the self. Henry David Thoreau wrote:

Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions of your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be
Expert in home-cosmography.

During these successive visits, the photographer, while remaining at a distance, immersed himself in these chimeras the better to fix them. His images embrace the fantasies of the people in them, the other half that their eyes take in beyond the picture frame. He brings back from these trips not a topographical survey, but rather views of the mind, impressionistic drawings, which, one after the other, form the shifting map of a cosmography of the self.

[Raphaëlle Stopin, Excerpt from the catalogue Cyrille Weiner, Presque Île]

18 October – 15 janvier 2009
Opening – Saturday 17 October at 5:30 pm
Villa Noailles
Montée Noailles
83400 Hyères
France
T +33 4 98 08 01 98
contact@villanoailles-hyeres.com

Dérive

Guy Debord and Situationist the Theory of the Derive, and Pyschogeography.

I recently came across the essay “The Poetics of the Derive” written by Vincent Kaufmann. Not being that familiar with Debord’s Derive, and only slightly informed of its predecessor from the Surrealist Andre Breton and his walks through Paris, it quickly raised many questions to tackle. Most specifically the idea of looking at the early photographic works of Eugene Atget, and his systematic walks through Paris cataloging the ephemeral Paris of his time. One which was being demolished to make way for the Modern streets and boulevards that Debord and the Situationist would later lament in the same manner Atget did before. Yet, how might this theoretical construct of the Derive apply to the large amount of contemporary urbanscape photography found in the United States. And even more interesting the actual activity the photographer performs in order to find these locations.

Debord’s Derive is not simple a walk through the streets of the city, of chance encounters. Instead one must move rapidly and decisively through the urban space, with intention. When possible the practice should not be done alone, but in groups of two or three. They should be aware of their surroundings, of the “…ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction…” (link to essay) Thus the most talented photographers who’s oeuvre includes the investigation of the urbanscape. The walk itself, the interaction of operator, camera, and site breaks down the normal relationship we have with public urban spaces. Their activity alone is the Derive.

Breaking the rules of theory to return to Eugen Atget melancholic catalog of a ghostly Paris that is no longer. His photographs present to us the sites slated to be demolished, of the concrete reality of the demolition not just of squares and houses, but of the intricate means and subtle variations of the daily social realities created and maintained through public works and layout.

The pyschogeography. Atget’s photographs of a forgotten urbanscapes now stand like so many rectangular ghost, an archive of ephemera, of power structures that have morphed, shifted, become temporal and translucent. They function as nostalgic tombstones, racked nicely in a file, viewed sequentially, ordered and precise. Are Atget’s photographs any less powerful than they were in his time period? Or does the contemporary viewer see them only as quaint post cards, a romantic bygone era of a dirtier, grimmer, Paris leaving out the pychogeography of that site and the site that will replace it?

If Atget’s photographs have lost their power to be anything more than romantic nostalgic post cards and coffee table books, then what of the contemporary photographers working within the urbanscape. Their photographs present tangible realities, visual stand ins of the power structures, specifically in the United States. Yet is the mere representation of these sites enough, does it go far enough to instigate more than just chance encounters for the viewer looking at the photographs. And what of the Modernist aesthetic formal qualities laid over these sites. Atget’s Paris is grimy, dark, moody. Contemporary urbanscape photographs are made to be as beautiful as they are not in reality. The photographers activity of finding these sites is the derive, the photograph itself is the pyschogeography, the questioning. But unlike the gritty ghost of Atget’s Paris, their contemporary formal presentation, high gloss, bright colours, fends off the questions raised by their derive. Instead the viewer is left with one word, nostalgia. The photograph becomes a representation of the United States political landscape and the power structures in play as it slowly turns and morphs. Instead of critical action and engagement, we mourn. The United States is changing and morphing its political and social power structures while its identity as super power declines. Its intial status symbols and sturctures that came to represent power have shifted, take on new meaning. Like so many tombstones the contemporary photographic formal aesthetic and their beautiful rendering of the dynamic and shifting urbanscape moots any possible critical interaction. Instead we are presented with lovely nostalgia, and pretty memento mori.

Grant W. Ray

http://grantray.blogspot.com/2009/06/debords-derive-and-pyschogeography.html

see also :

http://www.lepointdujour.eu/fr/psychogeographie

Atmosphères

Peter Zumthor

KIRKHäUSER
ISBN/EAN : 9783764388416
175 x 240 mm, 76 p.
2008

Dans cette publication basée sur une conférence donnée le 1er juin 2003 dans la Grange des arts au château Wendinghausen, Peter Zumthor définis en neuf chapitres le processus d’observation et les références qu’il a à l’esprit quand il crée l’atmosphère de ses maisons.
Les images des espaces et des bâtiments qui l’affectent sont aussi important que la musique ou les livres qui l’inspirent.
De la composition au choix des matériaux en passant par le traitement des dimensions et de la lumière cette poétique d’architecture permet au lecteur de récapituler ce qui importe vraiment dans le processus de conception.

La magie du réel

La lumière sur les choses