The Sea of Love (with signed C-Print)

Max Pam
The Sea of Love (with signed C-Print)

Photographs: Max Pam

Text: Max Pam

Publisher: Editions Bessard

232 pages

Year: 2019

Comments: Hardcover with dust jacket and rhodoïd, 30 x 22 cm. Limited edition of 1000 copies, with a c-print (19 x 12,5 cm) signed by Max Pam. In very good condition.

Max said: The Sea of Love is a book that samples the cultures I have lived in over the decades. Its also a book that samples the way I work, how that work has evolved and how processes of obsessive behaviour have been compressed into research via the device of the book. Its also a book that interrogates the human condition, desire, family, territorial peculiarity and otherness. The opening chapter is reflective of the brutal “you can only worship me, you cannot leave me” love the populist despot offers an entire population enforcing loyalty to Big Brother through fear, buttressed through a massive apparatus of security and repression, as well as systematic brainwashing.

The following chapter riffs off an open ended love obsession with Francisco da Goya’s La Maja. His depiction of her is a sea of love. The first time I saw her in the flesh, at the Prado Museum, I stood in front of her for hours, swimming through her, around her, longing for the impossible catharsis of requited love to break over me.
Each chapter needed to reflect the love narrative in my life driven as it is by diverse, impossible to anticipate contingencies. This career of mapping emotion as a photographic process has been on a long slow burn, muted or sensitised by shifts in geography and body chemistry with flexing seasonal spikes that are as unpredictable as they are endless. It took me years to ride this lovely dragon in a way that made any sense at all other than the raw first
thought best thought addiction I had to that kind of life.