What does it mean to build a photobook around what cannot—or should not—be seen? This interview with Charles Fox, conducted in relation to the ongoing collaboration with Prum Sisapantha titled Hidden, circles persistently around the conceptual and ethical implications of concealment. In a time when photography is saturated with expectation—of visibility, of revelation, of evidentiary power—Hidden […]
‘The primary function of a book is to recreate the author’s ideas in the reader’s mind’. So writes librarian and curator Paul Dijstelberge in the introduction to Máté Bartha’s Anima Mundi. With no other accompanying text or captions, Bartha’s grids of images – all of them shot in urban environments – act, collectively, as a […]
Here at c4, we almost always deal with newly-published books. Hastings-based artist Jo Israel works with books at the end of their life cycle, poring through discarded volumes in search of lost images. In 2021, Israel was leafing through an old book when she came across a ghostly image on the reverse side of an […]
Roseanne Lynch has worked with photography for more than thirty years – first as a photojournalist and a commercial photographer, and more recently as a photographic artist. Since completing her MA in 2010, Lynch has engaged in a systematic investigation of photography’s most basic elements: the nature of light, the materiality of the photographic print, […]
I’m a slow writer at the best of times, but occasionally, books turn up that hold back the process even more. Ina Kwon’s Piles of Earth and Rubble – München/Gyeongju, and Emanuel Cederqvist’s The Ditch arrived on my desk around the same time in early 2022. Together, they kicked off a process of reflection that’s […]
Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. The term hortus conclusus has its origins in the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs – an erotic poem written around the 3rd century BCE, celebrating physical desire and sexual intimacy. It’s lusty, earthy stuff, full of yearning and bodies and fluids, and the garden courses through it, a metaphor both […]
Den Helder is an empty city. Surrounded by the sea. Beautiful light. … But empty, empty, empty the lighthouse scanned the city and sea with its circular light. Lynch-like feeling. The nearby thrift store and another crisis shelter with used stuff intrigued me to capture this flow of junk. I found on the street an old A4 printer […]
Tobias Kappel is a Berlin-based artist whose practice explores the translation processes between various image forms. As well as photographs, Kappel works with screen grabs, scans, and photocopies, often taking images through several stages of reproduction and transformation. Along with her role as co-editor of C4, Eugenie Shinkle has a long-standing artistic practice that explores […]
I first encountered Juergen Bergbauer’s photobook Studies After Nature (Fotohof Edition) when it came out in 2008. Despite struggling to grasp the book’s complex logic, it quickly became a favourite, so when his second book, Le Chiffonnier (Roma Publications), appeared in late 2022, I immediately ordered a copy. Like Studies After Nature, it is an […]
In the 1911 Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys, there’s a diagram showing ten different tents that can be created from a single piece of canvas. The diagram resembles something you might find in a geometry textbook, carefully marked with lines, semicircles, angles and numbers. Contained in a single rectangle are the plans for […]