First noticed in 2009 with The Great Unreal, an hallucinogenic photographic road trip across the United States, the Swiss duo TONK (Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs) recently published a two-volume work: As long as it photographs / It must be a camera.
It’s a laconic thumbing of the nose to the endless debates about the future of photography and the evolution of the medium. In the style of the first offbeat amateurs and artisans like Miroslav Tichy, Onorato and Krebs built their own cameras using tortoiseshells, windows and foam mannequins. Under the name Honour & Crab Ltd., they then sold the cameras on eBay and incorporated conversations with potential buyers into their book.
There is humor in TONK’s work, whereas there is little in most contemporary photography. They have a playful and fascinated grasp of the camera—there’s ghosts inside!—and of the form in which they present their work. (Here, it’s printed on A3 paper, 600 grams). “We’re having good fun,” say the artists, who assure us that the turtle-camera works, as does another one of their inventions, a sort of chamber on wheels that they use to print directly onto photo paper from the lens.
Antoine Soubrier
Tonk
60 pages
25 euros
