A HOUSE OF CLAY by Erik Gustafsson Photo Collection

About the productJapanese

Swedish photographer Erik Gustafsson's monograph is a collection of works by a man whose everyday bird calls resonate with the cycle of creation and destruction that takes place in his darkroom.

In this book, the artist puts his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise: the "truth of photography" - to elevate the mundane, to seek meaning in the everyday, to take seriously even the smallest occurrences in ordinary life, and to evoke gratitude and admiration for consciousness, sensations and emotions.

The warmth of the lives he captures - sometimes extraordinarily ordinary, sometimes tender and intimate, other times profound and complex - is digested and incorporated into images in the darkroom, a place where the creative process itself becomes self-inflicted: a cycle of shooting, printing, failing, bending the rules, repeating, scanning.

Balancing the conscious with the accidental, the artist's moments of magical realism speak to the enduring and permanent reality of images that remain unfinished, ready to be altered, manipulated and overwritten. Even the finished form of the printed page is challenged here: images are inverted, rotated on the page, engrossed by sequences stacked with visual disjunctions and (dis)associations, only to be dissolved and folded back again. The House of Clay is then reshaped when the prints are immersed in chemicals again.

The birdsong of everyday life interacts with cycles of darkroom creation and destruction in Gustafsson's expressive monograph.

In A House of Clay, Gustafsson places his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise, a truism of photography: to elevate the everyday, to find meaning and take seriously the smallest of occurrences in ordinary life, and to invoke a sense of gratitude and wonder toward consciousness, sensing and feeling. the image: cycles of photographing, printing, failing, dodging rules, repeating and scanning.

Balancing consciousness and coincidence, Gustafsson's moments of magical realism speak of a permanence, a perpetual present, where the continually unfinished image can always be, at a later stage, altered, manipulated ? and rewritten. In A House of Clay, even the finality of the printed page is punctured; images flip and rotate across the page, accumulate sequences and stack up heady with visual (dis)association, only to dissolve and fold, the print submerged again in the chemicals, the house of clay reshaped again.

Product Information

release date Available now

Part numberGPHT12065W-9781912719549

Specification softcover／152 pages／208 x 288 mm

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