Jonk travels the world in search of abandoned places. Today, he has visited more than 1,500 of them in around fifty countries on four continents.
He has just published his 11th book, titled Urbex Black & White.
He sent us these images and this text:
There is something special about black-and-white photography—something deeper, more poetic, more sensitive. And even though I don’t photograph people, and the few garments that appear in this book are in rags, I told myself that after ten books, the time had come to tackle this subject. The idea came to me in 2019 when I came across these four Rolodexes in a foundry in Auvergne. I thought they were magnificent. As almost always, I didn’t touch a thing before pressing the shutter. The wall they were against was perfect. The light coming from the left was perfect too. I didn’t have to think twice when it came time to choose the cover of this book.
Even though I began by using a wide-angle far more often than a zoom, I’ve been photographing details since my beginnings in these abandoned places. The proportion of tight shots increased as I worked toward this book. Lately, they’ve even become the majority.
I’ve already presented four black-and-white series: airports, mannequins in shop windows, deserted playgrounds, and life amid the remnants of the USSR. Readers who—besides being loyal—are curious will find them on my website. Even if some of these series are indirectly linked to abandonment, I had never shown my photographs of abandoned places in black and white. All the images in this book are previously unpublished.
The depth, poetry, and sensitivity of black and white mentioned above marry perfectly with my world of abandoned places, especially when you linger over the details they offer. Torn curtains billowing in the draft, stopped clocks, dismembered dolls, and overturned chairs offer a thousand shades of gray—because that’s what this is about. It’s no accident that the Greeks had three different words for “gray.” Same in Latin. When light gets involved and bathes dusty billiard balls on a pool table, or a majestic piano that hasn’t resonated in a long time, they’re all there—the thousand shades. Gray is full of mystery. Far from neutral, it’s the color of nuance, of ambiguity. It’s also the color of contradiction, between the positive associated with white and the negative associated with black. Gray is complex; it’s the meeting point of all possibilities.
Jonk
Jonk : Urbex Black & White
Éditions Tempus Fugit
Language: French
Format: 26.5 cm × 21.6 cm
ISBN: 978-2-9590720-1-7
Price: 35 euros
https://www.jonk-photography.com/en/urbex-black-white/
