2023 All rights reserved - L'Œil de la Photographie
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Published by Morel Books and AMCThis new book, with its deep blacks and illuminated whites, plunges the reader into a register of images little known to historians.
As the pages turn, the cropped, enlarged and flipped images reveal, through details and impressions, a corpus of several hundred "RPPCs" ("Real Photography Postcard"). In French, we call them "carte Photo". These are hybrid images, halfway between photography and postcard. These original (not printed) silver prints are printed on paper, marketed in particular by Kodak, with space reserved for an address, a stamp and a few words.
In the United States, the practice enjoyed a spectacular boom between 1910 and 1930. In Europe, the practice is much more discreet. Iconography also differs radically from one continent to another. It's more family-oriented and intimate on the old continent, and much more "documentary" on the new.
The soil is dug, worked, cultivated and exploited. Minerals are extracted and vegetables and fruit harvested. The mine, the sawmills, the bars, the fields... And the house: its stoop, its rocking chair, its walls filled with photos and its library, its fences but also its windows to the outside world... This picture book takes us into the twists and turns of everyday life in the villages and countryside of North America at the beginning of the 20th century. Its title, "Dry Hole", is borrowed from one of the RPPCs. It evokes the harshness and adversity of difficult situations, such as an arid land or a dry well.
Handwritten image versos punctuate the sequence of photographic cards. The fragile handwriting carries with it the hesitations of hands less accustomed to writing than to working the land or building a house. The writings are as banal as they are moving, like these few words hastily penned by a father impatient to be reunited with his children, but who doesn't know when he'll be able to return.... Words also appear in images (slogans, restaurant slates, directions) and on images (a place name, a date or a comment). As in an exquisite cadaver, image encounters sometimes generate surprises, adding meaning or confusion.
Photographic cards were produced by local or itinerant photographers, and sometimes sold commercially. More often than not, they were produced by amateurs. They are therefore often "one-off" images. Collected during the pandemic on the Internet, this unpublished material has been transformed here by the book's author. Details are scrutinized and enhanced; images are cropped and recomposed: "Juxtapositions took shape. Intuition reigned," writes David Thomson, who emphasizes the extent to which his eye was guided by the play of light, which sometimes sublimates and sometimes erases to the point of making shapes and faces disappear. From apprehension to joy, fear, sadness, surprise and, above all, courage. "Wonder mingles with perplexity; the nature of people and their ways of being. Moments out of time...".
About the author:
David Thomson is a Canadian collector with a passion for art and photography. He is also the author of " 82 "a book to which the recent " Dry Hole ". Both works are based on collections of vernacular images - WWII soldiers' albums in one case, amateur photographic postcards in the other - and pay particular attention to the backgrounds of the images, to what is not a priori visible, that is, a whole range of emotions and sensations that the linking of images and cropping bring to light.
Dry Hole is available on the Morel Books website:
https://morelbooks.com/products/dry-hole
as well as on the Archive of Modern Conflict website
https://archiveofmodernconflict.com/dry-hole-david-thomson/
And in all good bookshops.
David Thomson: Dry Hole
AMC Publishing / Morel Books
Format: Softcover
Pages: 464
Dimensions: 24 x 17cm
ISBN: 9781907071904
€45.00
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