dienacht – Magazine for Photography, Design and Subculture

Photobooks you and me need to have

Leon Kirchlechner: Nowhere | Pre-order

dienacht Publishing and Der Greif proudly present Leon Kirchlechner’s NOWHERE. Pre-order until June 1st and receive your signed copy on the release date, June 6th!

»Nothing […] is anywhere ever simply present or absent.« – Jacques Derrida

Was there something? Or nothing?

With no horizon, one’s view into the distance is impeded. Scanning, searching, one’s gaze comes to a standstill in Leon Kirchlechner’s photographs. The eye may slow, but it doesn’t find repose. The peace is not contemplative: it is restless. The restricted field of view has a narrowing effect. It makes the room strangely dislocated, denies me the geographical coordinates that would give me a feeling of safety. And so, even as the onlooker, I remain dislocated in the usually centrically, often symmetrically composed images. I can’t make sense of this centrality. Nor is it reassuring. Although it gives me pause, it doesn’t offer anything for me to grasp. It’s not the enjoyable, thought-provoking stillness that many works of art inspire. Rather, it’s an oppressive, constricting stillness, one that causes alarm.

»I was immediately enthralled by what I saw,« explains Leon Kirchlechner. »An inky black hole opened up suddenly and incomprehensibly in the cold, bare ground. It appeared to swallow the light. The unstructured, almost two-dimensional black was deceptive; the thought of falling into it made me shudder. How deep was it? What was in it? Was there anything? Or nothing? I expected something. I suspected something. I knew that nothing would happen and yet I was as if hypnotised. Filled with an illusory fear I stood still – and looked at what I could not see.«

This experience has become encoded in his images. The unknown that prompts these seemingly so unremarkable existential tremors within us. That what one sees before oneself is not what one senses. Namely that what appears in the image is not even present. But that absence is exactly what arrests the gaze. The actual subject of the photograph, its raison d’être, is beyond the picture. “The absence of the imaged subject is nothing other than an intense presence, receding into itself, gathering itself together in its intensity,” wrote Jean-Luc Nancy. This is addressed fundamentally and unremittingly in Leon Kirchlechner’s images.
What is present in the image is, in fact, what is absent.
Text: Prof. Ulrich Fleischmann 

Co-Published by dienacht Publishing and Der Greif. The pre-orders will be shipped on June 1st.

Hard cover, clothbound
offset printed, thread stitched
30 x 22 cm, 64 pages
Print run: 800 copies, numbered
PREORDERS ARE SIGNED!
29.80 €

Please choose:

Nowhere – Limited Edition – Book + Print

Get a signed, numbered copy of Leon Kirchlechner’s photobook »NOWHERE« together with a limited, signed print. You can choose one of the four following photographs (see above). All four photographs are available as a limited edition of 5 copies, size 50 x 33 cm.

In case of purchase please indicate the photograph of your choice (№ 1 to № 4) in the comments field.
All orders will be shipped by June 6th.

BOOK: 30 x 22 cm | 64 pages | numbered & signed
PRINT: Inkjet Print
Image size: 50 x 33 cm
Paper size: 52 x 35 cm
Print run: 4 x 5 copies | signed
4 photographs to choose from
300 €

Laia Abril: Thinspiration

After the shock comes the anger. It is disturbing when you see in real-time how lively human bodies dissolve into nothingness.

Laia Abril collected internet pictures of women who commemorate anorexia and photograph themselves doing it. She also collected instructions on how to get extra skinny, and posts in internet forums which demonstrate and document with what “lightness” and how baseless the young (most of the time) women addict themselves to this cult of losing weight. That in principle – in extreme cases – their vita is slanted towards destroying knowingly their bodies.

Thinspiration however is not a book aiming at shocking. The arrangement is elaborate and excellently realized. The pop up sites display “more”, and so you feel like diving into a world – exposing yourself to it – whose abyss you had not known before and did not want to know.

www.laiaabril.com/project/thinspiration/

Julie Hascoët & Guillaume Thiriet: SISMO

Important is what is missing: an explanation, the orientation and the harmony on the pictures. In fact there is a text on the website which says, what it is not about, but the pictures keep their secret. They put the viewer into a condition, you are torn between curiosity, astonishment, fascination and weak and strong discomfort. The pictures show little and tell much, and this over-winning simplicity is what constitutes SISMO.

http://s-i-s-m-o.tumblr.com/

Rimaldas Vikšraitis: Naked

Rimaldas Viksraitis takes pictures of people in the rural areas of Lithuania. He photographs people who live a simple life often accompanied and soaked by alcohol, who hardly have any perspectives and do not expect them either. Anyway they are not hopeless pictures; they are full of easiness and lightheartedness, they are uncomplicated and funny although the reality – seen from the outside – probably is anything but funny. Rimaldas however does not compromise the people, he emphasizes the humanity – he often shows them naked, at home or outside, in unpoetic, rough but sincere pictures. He does not show their brokenness but vulnerability, love, grief, madness – the full life.

www.heden.nl

Gabriel Orłowski: Anti-accent

dienacht Publishing · Edition proudly presents Anti-accent, a limited book (100 copies) by Gabriel Orłowski, every copy arrives with a numbered Print!

“(…) I don’t really want to know whether the characters read beatniks, nihilists, right-wing journalists, liberal gibberish or SF writers. Neither do I feel the need to identify them with the music they listen to. We can guess that they probably don’t listen to club music, for example (although they seem to enjoy the disco ball). (…) I think that Anti-accent, even though it portrays people involved in the ‘punk scene’, with all their artistic influences, this aforementioned ‘fall’ of the ideas has a marginal meaning. These photographs ‘are punk’ more than they ‘show punk’. They seem to rather invite you to ‘punk’, than guide you through all the sweaty rehearsal rooms. ‘Punk’ understood as a certain idea, an ethos, a rebellion, showing your bruised ass off to the middle-class conventions. ‘Punk’ that pushes you into action, that has you co-create a community. So, not to repeat anything, Anti-accent rather is a rehearsal room, than shows you one. A rehearsal room that’s familiar to anyone, who doesn’t come back home before the evening cartoons. These photographs seem to come alive with whatever we put into them ourselves.” – Mateusz Romanowski

Gabriel Orłowski was born in 1989; he lives in Warsaw, Poland, and is a member of Merkabah and Acid Lindgren, experimental hardcore bands.

Softcover, 100 pages, full colour
Size: 15 x 21 cm, thread stitched
Print run: 100 copies
Will arrive with ONE out of five numbered prints, 13 x 18 cm
Designed by FLUUT

28,00 Euro

Quentin de Briey: 10×15

The book does not have secrets; it does not show series, no completed work, no portfolio but just pictures. All in the same size and each one standing on it’s own. Photos you just take by the way, personally, empathetic, full of atmosphere.

10×15 is a collection of pictures, of beautiful and good photos and some which tell entire stories. And even if the book does not have secrets – the single pictures do. It does not make sense to discuss the book here, because it is all about the pictures. Get this book!

www.quentindebriey.com

Neu im Shop: Caspar Saenger

On the 12 pages of the book you can see 10 of the artist’s milk teeth on a black background that  highlights their sculptural shape, amplified through caries and being wornout. The images make one  think of object photography of  human relics and astronomical photographs of celestial bodies.

Size: 23 x 34 cm
4c offset print & letter press
Edition of 300 copies

9,00 Euro

Neu im Shop: Paula Holtz – The Rooted

In my project I investigate the close attachment that young people from Princeville (Québec, Canada) have to their remote home town which can, at first sight, appear somewhat bleak.

Princeville is situated in the countryside between the towns of Québec and Montréal in the eastern part of the province, and has approximately 5,700 inhabitants. The living conditions in the region play a huge part in the special affinity the inhabitants have with their town: there are lots of jobs, sufficient housing, educational institutions and recreational activities. People seem to have a real sense of well being when it comes to their surroundings, the countryside and their fellow inhabitants. The province of Québec, along with the French language and culture, was constantly contested during its history in North America. Even today the Province maintains a special status in Canada and its inhabitants have a deep sense of national pride.

The representation of traditional and modern appears again and again in my work. As if standing before a backdrop where time has stood still the young people, who appear modern and globalised, are in stark contrast to their surroundings, to scenes of an ideal world where tradition is still evident.

Size: 23 x 29 cm
68 pages
Circulation: 50 copies (numbered and signed)
Digital print
Thread stitched

25,00 Euro

Claudia Eschborn: 1520/21

dienacht Publishing proudly presents: a very special, limited Artist Edition (40 copies) by Claudia Eschborn.

The fascination for Albrecht Dürer’s graphic work and – as a result of this – an intense curiosity, lead through a variety of ways to the reading of Gerd Unverfehrts book „Da sah ich viel köstliche Dinge“, which tells about Dürer’s travel to the Netherlands in the years of 1520/21.

This journey, narated and interpreted in that book, together with extracts of the journal Albrecht Dürer wrote during his travels, are basis to the presented photographic series under the title of 1520/21.

The places that Dürer once visited, the things he saw, formed the route the photographer traveled – and while trying to find something of what the artist had seen, had experienced those days, the photographer tried to capture the own personal impression of these scenes.

The series of work splits into sketchy, vaguely seeming polaroids and very concentrated large format photographs – an involvement of diverse intensity, according to the respective places and personal emotions.

– With a text by Christoph Tannert –

Print run: 40 copies + 5 AP, signed and numbered

Single Prints in an artist-made cardboard box | 45 large format photographs printed on 300g Lessebo Design natural, and 43 polaroids printed on 170g Lessebo Design natural | Print sizes: 23 x 26,5 cm and 12 x 12 cm (Polaroids) | 98.00 €
Please choose:

Neu im Shop: Schlaflos

Ein Fotozine von Christian Conrad, Lars Kiss, Susann Probst und Yannic Schon, die auch bei Zimmer/117 mitwirken! Sehr schön und liebevoll gemacht ist diese Sammlung aus 4 einzelnen Heften zum Thema Schlaflos.

4 Hefte, Format: je 11 x 16 cm
insgesamt 104 Seiten, in Schuber
Offsetdruck
Auflage: 200 Stück

18,00 Euro