This is the most surprising book we received this month.
Its title: La Disparition, its publisher: Esotopies, its author: Nathalie Bauer.
She presents it as follows:
La Disparition / Project (2018-2024)
Like other so-called current news photographers, I follow current events without distinction of genre, one day demonstrations, the next day a Haute Couture fashion show.
In 2018, while working as a photo editor for a major press agency, I photographed the places and settings where the delegates took place, once everyone had left. This project was first called After Pictures. At the same time, what was called the Yellow Vest crisis began, and I went to the first actions in Paris. Not because I wanted to take news photos but rather because here was the opportunity to photograph a crowd in reechoing yellow vests – the high vis jackets – and thus show the paradox between these “high visibility” vests and the invisibility of those who wear them. It was my end-of-year project when I was a photography student in London, a series of images on the garbage collectors of the major tourist spots in the big cities which was entitled “Stars & Monuments”. I use the same principle when I photographed the Yellow Vests…
Later, I think of these two media news events as mirror images – the Yellow vests and the fashion weeks. They respond to each other as a form and a counter-form, two facets of the same sociological phenomenon, the translation into collective performance of the same reality. Looking again at my images of the Yellow Vests, I discovered Vendôme marked on the jacket of a girl I had photographed. This image was the beginning of my investigation into the city of Vendôme, a small provincial town where I learned that a large luxury house had set up shop at the same time as the Yellow Vests begin. Perhaps there was a connection, did this girl in the photo come to express her anger because she had to move premises after the group arrived in her city? The text is in two parts, an ethnography on the one hand, on the environment of agency photographers, and a narrative then, on the installation of the luxury group in Vendôme, two mirror texts that resonate with each other.
La Disparition / Text
If photography wants to be able to provide knowledge, it cannot do without text. The information that photography lacks the most is time. Not only the time that separates us – the viewers – from the moment when the image was taken, but also, and this is fundamental, the time contained in the photograph. Is it a scene captured by a quick exposure time of a few thousandths of a second, or on the contrary a long exposure that makes the movement disappear, or the photograph of a still scene? The story takes place 6 years ago. 6 years, neither really History, nor current events. It is a temporality that the Disappearance explores, between a narrative in the perpetual present, and in the pluperfect, the past of the past.
The text of La Disparition is like a second book, hidden in the first, a book sewn into a book. It disrupts the sequence of images, the inserts are assembled by hand, not with an inserter, which allows them to arrive at an unexpected and irregular pagination. They are neither a foreword, nor an introduction, nor a description, nor a caption.
La Disparition / Object
The book questions the very idea of what a photo book is and the place of text. Here the colophon has all its importance, without being an index of the book number or a purely technical note, it gives clues for understanding a level of reading of the images and takes the place of choice of back cover. Moreover, there is no hard cover, all the pages have the same weight, there is no cover or body of the book, strictly speaking, reflecting the desire for a certain erasure of hierarchies. It is a half-jacket (no need to explain why it is neon yellow ) that comes to cover the book, give it its visual impact and begin the game of hiding/revealing that the text inserted on the images produces throughout the book. No glue was used in the bound version, the book is like a garment folded, cut, sewn paper. Its manufacture required manual steps, as if echoing the work in the shadows of those often called the little hands in the world of luxury, and to which this book pays homage. The book also comes in an unbound edition, which allows you to take the images separately and pin them to the wall, or to separate the text from the images, to keep only the text or only the images, to undo and remake the book yourself. The unbound edition is also a way to be able to offer the book at a lower cost and therefore to encourage its circulation, reflecting a desire to publish books for the greatest number.
Nathalie Bauer : La Disparition
Esotopies
Format: 19.7 x 28 cm
Softcover – Singer® stitched binding for the hardcover version
44 pages of photo booklet and 20 pages of inserts
Photographs and text: Nathalie Bauer – bauermagazine.com
Design and layout: Marion Brazier – ObjetSensibles.com
French/English
Starting at €20.00
https://www.esotopies.com/catalogue/p/la-disparition
