The Main Event
The main event. For Petra Mueller the main draw with photo-books has always been the radical forum of experimentation on the part of the photographer. For instance, there’s the example of Edward Ruscha’s Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass , which is made up of only ten photos, and a whole lot of blank pages, and which has always startled — every time. It’s in this tradition of working with books and photographs that Petra presents the One Page Photo-Books; which weren’t arrived at via Ruscha however, but through working on her photo-book called ‘the what’ (read front to back cover) or ‘what the’ (read back to front). All the images in the book are already on the cover, as a thin band of negatives (copies of the original analogue film negatives) joined to hold the book neatly closed, looked at in positive form via iphone image filters.
Basically it’s a photo book that can be opened but doesn’t need to be.
The book launched at Gallery PFOAC in 2017; and with the addition of the practical, literal text ‘what is a book of photographs’, at Art and the Book, Vol2mtl in 2019.
-> the Queries
-> the Queries. Photography, especially fine art photography, and especially artist photo books have worked really hard to privilege the power of photographic image, without text. The Queries agrees to disagree on this point as a hard and fast rule. Is not the photo-book something more than legislated set of rules & regulations?
Identity of an image
Identity of an image. People have identity. Places have identity. It’s a bit of a shocker to realize that we may also have to deal with the identity of an image. It’s a question that came up in the making of ‘the what’ , about genre and viewers expectations. The photos were taken in a small Inuit village on upper Hudson’s Bay, mid winter, over the course of a month, outside, as a place to rest the eyes, on the way to and from visiting people in their homes, with an old analogue camera immune to the cold, with a work non-disclosure agreement so that anything seen or said in the homes remained private. Not because of anything nefarious, but because in some circumstances the private lives of people sometimes must remain private. How to get all that into a photo-book. The start to all this was to slow things down, to get people to rest their eyes, and just look at the unreadable strip of images, in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable format. That work of how to rest our eyes and operate in a somewhat unfamiliar, uncomfortable format continues in the One Page Photo-Books.