Damiani Editore releases Knowledge of the Raw, the book includes 140 photographs by the American photographer David Seltzer.
In his foreword for the book, Eric Fischl talks about why he finds Seltzer’s images so captivating: “From looking at the photographs in his monograph, Knowledge of the Raw, I imagine David Seltzer to be a man with a gruff and smoky voice, rough hands, and a demeanor that exudes impatience and passion. When I look at his photographs, I hear voices. I hear the voices in his head and I imagine a man who talks to himself loud enough and clear enough for us to overhear him.”
“When you pick up his book, you can open it anywhere and page backwards or forwards. It doesn’t matter. The photos don’t follow a chronology or a sustained narrative. The book is more like a diary, a portrait of a life being lived. The photos are printed, painted, scrawled onto, scratched into, clawed at, and defaced. He uses black not as light or absence of light, but as mineral, as ore: physical, dense, sooty, not to be inhaled.”
The large-scale images, personal and frequently graphic, focus on issues of love, lust, aging, lives lived on the fringes. Working primarily with analog technology, Seltzer often layers his images by etching the negative itself, and/or by hand applying various toners or mixed media to the surface of the print, extending the viewer’s take on the image.
From the exhibition catalog “Rough Cuts,” Miles Barth, the founding curator of the permanent collection at the International Center for Photography, describes Seltzer’s modus operandi: “He holds the camera to his own life the way someone attempting suicide might point a gun to his head…Seltzer is not afraid to expose a raw nerve. The situations in his photographs dwell on emotions not often recorded and memories not usually retained. They are part documentary, part the author’s not-so-subtle commentary.”
BOOK
Knowledge of the Raw
David Seltzer
Damiani Editore
160 pages, 140 photographs
ISBN: 9788862084178
40€
http://www.damianieditore.com
www.davidseltzerphotography.com
