This is the most surprising book we received this month.
Its title: The Disappearanceits publisher: Esotopiesits author: Nathalie Bauer.
She presents it like this:
The Disappearance / Project (2018-2024)
Like other so-called current news photographers, I follow current events without distinction of gender, one day the demonstrations, the next a Haute Couture fashion show.
In 2018, while working as a photo editor for a large press agency, I photographed the locations and settings where the shows took place, once everyone had left. This project is first called After Pictures. At the same time, what was called the Yellow Vest crisis began, and I went to the first acts in Paris. Not out of a desire to take news photos but rather because here is an opportunity to photograph a crowd in reflective yellow vests – 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 about garbage collectors at tourist hotspots in major cities with the title “Stars & Monuments”. I use the same principle when I photograph the Yellow Vests…
Later, I think of these two media events as a mirror – the GJ and the fashion weeks. They respond to each other like 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 photographed. This image will be the beginning of my investigation into the town of Vendôme, a small provincial town where I learn that a large luxury house has set up shop at the same time as the Yellow Vests begin. Maybe there is a connection, this girl in the photo came to show her anger because she had to move premises after the group arrived in her town? The text is in two parts, an ethnography on the one hand, on the world of agency photographers, and a story of the action then, on the installation of the luxury group in Vendôme, two mirrored texts which resonate 'one in the other.
The Disappearance / Text
Photography, if it wants to be able to provide knowledge, cannot do without text. The information that photography lacks most is time. Not only the time that separates us – us 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 frozen by a rapid exposure time of a few thousandths of a second, or on the contrary a long exposure which 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 narrative in the perpetual present, and in the more than perfect, 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 by the saddle maker, which allows them to arrive at an unexpected and irregular pagination. They are neither a foreword, nor an introduction, nor a description, nor a legend.
The Disappearance / 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 a book index or a purely technical note, it gives clues for understanding a level of reading of the images and takes pride of place on the back cover. Moreover, there is no hard cover, all the pages have the same weight, there is strictly speaking no cover or body of the book, reflecting the desire for a certain erasure of hierarchies. It is a half-jacket (no need to explain why it is fluorescent yellow) which covers the book, gives it its visual impact and begins the game of hiding/revealing that the text inserted on the images produces throughout of the book. No glue was used in the bound version, the book is – like a garment – paper folded, cut, sewn. Its manufacturing required manual steps, as if echoing the shadow work of those who are often called small hands in the world of luxury, and to whom 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 redo the book yourself. -even. Unbound publishing is also a way of being able to offer the book at a lower cost and therefore of promoting its circulation, reflecting a desire to publish books for the greatest number of people.
Nathalie Bauer: The Disappearance
Esotopies
Format : 19.7 x 28 cm
Soft cover – Singer® seam binding for the hardcover version
44 pages of photo booklet and 20 pages of inserts
Photographs and text: Nathalie Bauer – bauermagazine.com
Design and model: Marion Brazier – ObjetSensibles.com
French/English
From €20.00
https://www.esotopies.com/catalogue/p/la-disparition
www.esotopies.com
