with work by Jan Hoek, Marie-José Jongerius,
Stephan Keppel, Paul Kooiker, Mariken Wessels,
Witho Worms, Rein Jelle Terpstra
Curated by Taco Hidde Bakker
Vriend van Bavink asked essayist Taco Hidde Bakker to bring together photographic work by the seven Amsterdam-based artists whose work he discusses in his book "The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain". In this book Taco Hidde Bakker addresses the philosophy, politics, and art of photography in 20 essays.
The Exhibition The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain features recent and older works by Witho Worms (a coal mountain printed with its own carbon and portraits of a deceased man and woman printed with their own ashes); Marie-José Jongerius (palm trees in Los Angeles); Stephan Keppel (architectural motifs and urban textures from Amsterdam recycled through scanners and printers); Rein Jelle Terpstra (a selection from his collection of amateur black-and-white negatives of Dutch landscapes during WWII in which the war is nearly absent); Paul Kooiker (a diptych from the Eggs and Rarities series); Jan Hoek (collaborative portraits with photographers from Kenia); and Mariken Wessels (works from the Femina Ludens series).
The Exhibition celebrates the first anniversary of the essay volume "The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain" that is published by Fw:Books. Copies of book will be available for purchase during the exhibition.
The book "The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain" was made possible by a grant from the Mondriaan Fund
Fragment from The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain's essay
’The Uneasy Realization of a Model: Left in the dark with Tom Callemin’ :
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It is tempting, and perhaps dangerous too, to compare a photograph with a poem. What could they possibly have in common? A photograph might call for words, a poem might conjure up an image, but nothing internal seems to link the two variables. A photograph and a poem, however, share an important theme, namely time––and likely also that of the perfect image. “Prose is cinematic, poetry is photographic,” Flemish novelist and essayist Stefan Hertmans once said. Is it because poetry, in contrast to prose, often crystallizes into a singular image, put into words in condensed form? And more important in poetry than prose is how the poem appears, its typographic setting on the typed page. A poem is not a snapshot, but rather a composed or composite photograph—or one resulting from long exposure time, in which patience, perseverance, and all kinds of inconveniences have been compressed into that single image. Poetry is also literally that which has been made (from the Ancient Greek noun poiesis, which also alludes to something that has been brought into being that did not exist before).
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