ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Mårten Lange
ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Photographs: Mårten Lange

Text: Alexander von Humboldt excerpt from Kosmos 1845

Publisher: Mack

96 pages

Pictures: 59

Year: 2012

Comments: Hardcover clothbound, 21,5 x 14,5 cm, b&w photographs. In very good condition. Out of print.

Small black & white images with their subject seated center frame bounce around the pages, some on the right, some the left, others paired. The size and simple presentation make it feel a bit like a guidebook with the text missing, a visual index of natural objects and phenomena. Indeed, Lange set out on his project with a list of things that he wanted to capture, sometimes finding them by chance, while others, like the whirlpool, required a good deal of planning. We see a cave, a snake, a cloud – a pumpkin, the sun in a puddle, a black sheep – a sun pillar, a seal, an aerial view of a lake. All photographed with the weight in center frame, scale becomes forgotten and objects in the small beautiful photographs appear like specimens for study. Connections are made. Some are presented through sequencing – a chunk of amethyst, cracked sun-died mud – but just as the empty pages are only translucent enough to show the outline of the image printed on the reverse, these photographs are never very far away from each other. The elephant’s eye seems to be repeated in a cloud, and also the curl of a leaf – which itself somehow resembles the arc of a dead honeybee, and the twist of the fawn with its nose to its haunch. The images talk to each other through the pages, and one is encouraged to go back and forth, remembering and connecting again and again.