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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Complete Works | Vincent Van Duysen
Photo essay by Alberto Piovano (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
Photo essay by Alberto Piovano (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
M Residence, Mallorca, Spain, 1996-1997 (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
VL Residence, Bruges, Belgium, 1999-2000 (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
DC Residence, Waasmunster, Belguim, 1998-2001 (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
Capco Offices, Antwerp, Belgium / New York, USA, 1999-2001 (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
Copyright Bookshop, Antwerp, Belgium, 2000-2001 (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
VVD Residence, Dendermonde, Belgium, 1998-2003 (Photograph by Alberto Piovano)
Desk and Chair for Bulo, 2004 (Photography by Alberto Piovano)
Neutra Outdoor Collection for Tribù, 2008 (Photography by Alberto Piovano)
On Vincent
Vincent’s work is human;
it possesses many qualities
that we value in people.
It is calm yet determined.
It is reliable yet surprising.
It is sensual, but discreetly so.
It is sober yet spirited.
In other words, it is like a good friend,
like Vincent himself.
Ann Demeulemeester and Patrick Robyn
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‘Verwechseln Sie bitte nicht das Einfache mit dem Simplen’
(Don’t confuse minimal with simple)
Mies van der Rohe
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Complete Works
Vincent Van Duysen : Ilse Crawford : Marc Dubois
Thames & Hudson
2010
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The Art of Rachel Whiteread
Ghost, 1990.
Untitled (Black Bed), 1991.
Untitled (Wardrobe), 1994.
Untitled (Cast Iron Floor), 2001.
Valley, 1990.
Water Tower, 1998 – 1999.
Untitled (Amber Bed), 1991.
When referring to the specific atmosphere of a space, one often speaks metaphorically, filling it with fear, sorrow or tension. In this context, the essential presupposition is the initial emptiness of the space, which allows the viewer to fill it with something. Hardly anyone has interpreted this process as literally as the British artist Rachel Whiteread. Characterized by a certain monumentality, her sculptures push towards a chain reaction of emotional, symbolic, metaphorical, personal, and ethical/political reflections.
The viewer searches for signs to explain the vague feeling inside, tries to discover personal traces of the inhabitants in the spaces, or projects his or her own visions on or into it. Recollections, memories past and present, private and public, themes of intimacy, domestic life, childhood, loss, and death come to the fore, but the uniformity of the plaster, rubber and concrete yields nothing; blocking any sense of narrative or identity.
These spaces reveal no symbols from which one might read a personal spatial meaning or even a history. Within the solidifying of spatial volumes, the possibility of being becomes lost. The fact that the material and shape of the objects have a certain resemblance to tombstones or even mausoleums – which has been claimed repeatedly about Ghost – nourishes a feeling of permanence and finality; a feeling that can only be described as hollow.
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The Art of Rachel Whiteread
Chris Townsend : Rachel Whiteread
Thames & Hudson
2004
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The Image as Rememberance | Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Civitavecchia, March 19, 1982
Civitavecchia, March 19, 1982
Bagno Vignoni, 1979-1982
Bagno Vignoni, 1979-1982
Bagno Vignoni, 1979-1982
Just outside Citta Ducale, ‘Church in the Water’, November 1982
An instantaneous mirror of memory, every photograph leaves a motionless trace of what has been, a fixed imprint of something that is no longer what it was before,a silent simulacrum of someone who has disappeared forever from our field of vision. And, as a simple act of remembering, the photograph seems to testify only to the disappearance and death of people and of the feelings that bind us to them, of things and of places where they belong.
Seen in this way, the act of remembrance is the recording of information imposed on the mind by exterior reality, according to the linear logic of necessity, the inexorable law of nature, the Euclidean mechanism of cause and effect that structures and governs human history in the shape of tragedy. The artist Tarkovsky says, must be ‘capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life’,* the deep complex truth of a life in which he was raised as the heir of one of the greatest poets of the generation of Pasternak, Mandekshtam, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.
For the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei’s father, ‘death does not exist/ we are all immortal/ and everything is immortal. At Seventeen/ one should not fear death, nor at seventy./ Being and light alone have reality, darkness and death have no existence,/ We are all already on the shore of the sea/ and are among those who drag the nets/ while immortality gleams beside them./ Live in the house and it will not fall down./ I shall call forth any century at all,/ to enter into it and build my house./ This is how your children and wives/ will sit with me at the table,/ One sole table for ancestor and descendant./ The future is happening now.’*
Within this genealogy, Andrei Tarkovsky… believes that ‘an artistic image is one that ensures its own development. This image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential of the affirmation of life. Whatever it expresses – even destruction and ruin – the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith. Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.’*
* Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1986
* Arseny Tarkovsky, ‘Life Life’, in La steppa [The Steppe], Pistoia, 1998
* Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1994
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
Edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Introduction by Tonino Guerra
Thames & Hudson
2004
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Candida Höfer | Libraries, 2005
Albertinum Dresden | 1999.
BNF Paris | 1998.
Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar | 2004.
Biblioteca Nacional Madrid | 2003.
MOCA Los Angeles | 2000.
Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden | 2002.
Národní knihovna Praha | 2004.
Candida Höfer photographs rooms in public places that are centers of cultural life, such as libraries, museums, theaters, cafés, universities, as well as historic houses and palaces. Each meticulously composed space is marked with the richness of human activity, yet largely devoid of human presence. Whether it be a photograph of a national library or a hotel lobby, Höfer’s images ask us to conduct a distanced, disengaged examination through the window she has created.
Not purely architectural photographs, her rhythmically patterned images present a universe of interiors constructed by human intention, unearthing patterns of order, logic, and disruption imposed on these spaces by absent creators and inhabitants. Her photos of ornate, baroque interiors achieve images with extreme clarity and legibility while the camera maintains an observant distance, never getting too close to its subject.
Born in Eberswalde, just north of Berlin, in 1944, Höfer was a student at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art from 1973 to 1982, embracing film before going on to study photography under the tutelage of Bernd Becher. Since 1975 she has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and released a number of volumes with Thames & Hudson, including Candida Höfer: A Monograph, published in 2003.
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Candida Höfer | Libraries
Introduction by Umberto Eco
Thames & Hudson
2005
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The Image as Rememberance | Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Myasnoye, 1980
Myasnoye, 1980
Myasnoye, September 1980
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, October 2, 1981
Seated on the railing of a balcony against a backdrop of pale birch trees, a handsome woman, her lips closed, gives a hint of a smile. A young solider, his machine gun slung over his shoulder, stares ahead with an intense melancholy, his face stiffening under his bearskin cap, decorated with the five-pointed star of the Red Army. An old house, it’s logs worn and split by the passage of time, stands alone, immersed in the light, along the line of shadow at the edge of a wood.
These are Andrei Tarkovsky’s most beloved black and white images, the ones crucial to his destiny: his mother Maria Ivanovna, his father, Arseny, his childhood home at Ignatievo. Tarkovsky selected, reproduced, and pasted these and other photographs from his family album into a black diary he carried with him. A visual sequence of his life, a presence from the past that would accompany the director in his preparation and making of the film The Mirror and would stay with him, like a portable flashback that could be replayed again and again in moments of home-sickness throughout his short life, right up to his exile in Italy and his death in Paris on December 29, 1986.
Acceptance of the history of the people and the family of his birth, acknowledgment of the cultural tradition in which he was raised, a profound love of the desire for freedom and the creativity of mankind, made in the image and semblance of God: these are the foundations of Tarkovsky’s art. ‘In all my films,’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people… those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being here. …I always felt it important to establish that I myself belong to a particular tradition, culture, circle of people or ideas.’*
The vitality of his sense of belonging also comes from accepting, acknowledging and loving the little images of his own genealogy, these humble traces of daily life observed through memory, viewed by remembering. Just as the dream sequence that runs through Ivan’s Childhood, awakens the little orphan to the sacrificial fulfillment of his destiny, so too does The Mirror reflect the decisive moments of the story by literally reconstructing those black and white photographs on the set as backgrounds for some of the scenes.
*Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1986
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
Edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Introduction by Tonino Guerra
Thames & Hudson
2004
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Instant Light, Andrei Tarkovsky
For many millenia,
man has been striving after happiness;
but he is not happy, Why not?
Because he cannot achive it,
becuase he does not know the way –
both these reasons.
Above all, however,
because in our earthly lives
there must not be ultimate happiness,
but only the aspiration towards it,
in the future;
there has to be suffering,
becuase it’s through suffering,
in the struggle between good and evil,
that the spirit is forged.
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Instant Light, Tarkovsky Polaroids
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History of Our World 
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