Do You Know What I Mean | Juergen Teller
All images; Ed in Japan, 2005/2006; originally published as Ed in Japan (Paris: Purple publications, 2006).
…It was unusual and powerful. It was clear that he was putting people in some kind of danger. There was no concern for classical beauty, but it took people somewhere else…
When Juergen starts to shoot he shoots constantly. It’s like a form of intrusion. You almost feel trapped. That’s how he manages to capture those completely uncontrolled moments because he literally traps you in his camera…
That’s how he gets those intimate moments, those unconscious movements of the body and mind. He doesn’t give you the time to organize your own mise en scène. He doesn’t give you time to think about what you are going to do. He anticipates the slightest of your movements, the slightest of your inner thoughts, and that’s how he manages to capture this incredible truth in bodies, in faces. He tries to avoid any conscious expression…
Isabelle Huppert
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Do You Know What I Mean
Juergen Teller : Marie Darrieussecq : Isabelle Huppert
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain / Thames & Hudson
2006
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Debris, Ari Marcopoulos, 2009
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, talking about his feelings or his ideas of relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic outside my house, I don’t really have the feeling that anyone is talking. I love the activity of sound. I don’t need sound to talk to me. I love sounds just as they are.
– John Cage
Whether one is at home or traveling, there is constant visual input. An image-maker is asked to make distinctions and decisions on what to extract. Having been involved in this practice for over 30 years, I try and free myself of expectations, even of my own. I’ve looked at graffiti all over the world. I appreciate its noise. I didn’t look for anything in particular; I didn’t look for skill. I just accepted graffitti’s visual noise. For the last three years I’ve captured what had previously passed in front of my eyes as something that was just there, just the everyday. The noise was like sound to me.
…extracts from the constant visual noise we witness, if our eyes are open. I long to make this book endless. …something that just keeps on going: a book-loop.
– Ari Marcopoulos
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Debris
The Ari Marcopoulos Purple Book
A special edition for Purple Fashion Magazine #12
co-published with Studio Zero
2009
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Bernard-Henri Lévy, Purple Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009
On what compelled him to write his book on the French poet, Charles Baudelaire:
“His metaphysics. It may seem bizarre, but it is nonetheless true. There is a metaphysic of Baudelaire, and it’s the true subject of the book I dedicated to the man. The Baudelaire who was a disciple of Joseph de Maistre, the ant-naturalist Baudelaire, the Baudelaire who praises artifice and make believe over spontaneity, the Baudelaire who only liked women wearing makeup, the Baudelaire who believed that those who said they were friends of the human race had a good chance of becoming it’s assassins. The Baudelaire who despised Robespierre, the Baudelaire who did not believe in community, the Baudelaire who who knew that men are born alone, and die alone, and they go through life almost alone as well. This is the Baudelaire who fascinated me. It is he who, twenty years after I put myself inside his skin in order to feel his agony, accompanies me still today.”
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Les Derniers Jours de Charles Baudelaire, 1988
B
History of Our World 
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