A document about cold love - (ONLY 100 COPIES - SIGNED)

Thomas Vandenberghe
A document about cold love - (ONLY 100 COPIES - SIGNED)

Photographs: Thomas Vandenberghe

Publisher: Stockmans & Stieglitz 19

Year: 2017

Comments: Softcover, japanese binding, tight folds, with obi, 130 x 180 mm. In silver foil envelope. First edition, 2017. Edition limited to 100 numbered and signed copies. With two small inkjet prints.

"From 1946 to 1966, Duchamp worked secretly to an installation entitled Etant donnés, an image of a naked woman lying with her legs widely spread holding a gas lamp, visible only through a pair of peep holes, one for each eye, in a wooden door. That holed wooden door, among others, was a voyeuristic device that changed the way of looking at the image, enriching the object of art and desire with a self-reflexive, strongly narrative, layer.

Thomas Vandenberghe's last book shares quite an affinity with this way of seeing, challenging, at its turn, the way of browsing a photobook. Revisiting the French-folded appeal of his previous Can't pay you to disappear, here Vandenberghe leaves the pages totally blank and literally hides his cold love story inside the folds, proposing a scenario à rebours, pushed on the verge of the white page amnesia. The project was taken in Bangkok in January 2016 - during the three-week trip with AM Projects, while preparing the psychedelic 3AM - and documents, as the receipt that ties the whole book might insinuate, a stray love affair.

This alluring photobook is an inspiring voyeuristic tool, inviting to a peeping Tom experience, since the tight folds leave you just a narrow crack to spy through : "I wanted to play with an uncomfortable viewing. The pictures inside the folds are not important, but just a vague reminder. The only things that remain are the portrait of the girl and a paper file, the proof of my love affair."

Thomas Vandenberghe's book has the appeal of a hidden track, a ghost story that has been printed in such a way as to avoid detection by a casual reader. And while peeking inside its folds, two small prints might pop up. But that's another pair of holes to peep through when you'll get it."

Larisa Oancea