I get a rapturous effect when I search through early twentieth-century illustrated books on archaeology. I know that it is a relatively niche endeavor, but there is something otherworldly about the effort that allows my imagination to stir in ways that are not easy to equate. Some of this is because the images are fantastical. They do not seem of this world. Another key component to this is that they are not always incredibly printed. I have a copy of Deutsche Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Bildern by Carl Schuhhhardt, which has, amongst many incredible neolithic objects found in Germany, several architectural structures that look alien and are accompanied by several vistas that look as though they are from a different planet altogether.

I also get this feeling when looking at Kurt Hielscher’s photobooks. He is not a very well-known name at present, but a man named Casper Molenaar is working hard to keep his reputation from sliding into the unknown. Hielscher was a German-born (now Poland) photographer who was photographing across Europe between the wars, and his images, as seen through the many volumes of his books, show a romantic sensibility with a tinge of melancholy as to suggest he knew that the world might be on the verge of change. At the outbreak of WWI, he made his way to Spain until the war’s end and produced the photographs that would make Das Unbekannte Spanien (1922). It is a fine volume of images, though, in the Southern European countries, one can argue that the romance is embedded in the landscape and that not much has changed since.

Yet, in the work, the people and the traditions have certainly shifted in aesthetics. At the time of shooting, Europe and the rest of the world underwent drastic technological and cultural changes, leading to modernity and a shedding of custom. In  Das Unbekannte Spanien, one feels the 19th Century in the images, which still feels positively ethereal compared to the present. This strange shift of visuality affects me as it allows my mind to wander into the fantastical, more so than the present-tense photography that I have experienced in relation to how they relate to the present that I live in.

The feeling I get from looking at those images is one of dislocation, yet it is a dislocation that I associate with a curiosity that allows me to project. I get this feeling from viewing nineteenth-century travel photographs of vast, open frontiers of places that had yet to be overpopulated or overbuilt. I find these places in pictures from India, the Middle East, and often in Egypt, where the temples and more identifiable objects like the sphinx had yet to be sold off to the tourist trade. I have an image of the sphynx before it was unburied and some images of the various Nile cataracts from Thebes, Abu Simbel, and other architectural images that feel incredibly Martian, as if they were erected on that planet and existed in a place that I can hardly imagine. Most of this is because they are covered in sand, and many have been rebuilt to varying degrees, which I can peruse from my computer. 

I have similar images from Athens, a city I often visit, where the Philopappos monument remains bare and without the vast line of tourist buses that line up at the Acropolis for eager tourists to see the ruins of the ancient world feverishly being reconditioned to suit the economics of the trade. These views and the views found in those archaeological books let my imagination wander and demand nothing from me other than curiosity and the ability to enjoy what the pictures offer. It is the same with the Hielscher books. I can enter, but those points of reference feel uncanny, scattered, and unreal. In this, my ideas of knowledge, geography, and self dissolve into the pursuit of fantasy. Often, this is aided by a distinct lack of people in these works, though with Hielscher or a photographer like Atget, some wandering souls deviate and wander into the frame but feel like apparitions, bodies without clarity or distinction. They are effigies locked in celluloid, on glass, and in ink.

In regards to the phenomenal posthumous book La Cité des Morts by Bernard Guillot, published by the esteemed team at Origini Edizioni, with graceful editing by the artist (before passing) and Ilias Georgiadas, I can say much of the feeling that I have with the other works mentioned. I feel there is a ghostly anachronism present in the book that is hard to place. Perhaps that is because it deals in ancient fragments of Egypt’s first and, therefore, oldest cemetery. This, coupled with the monochrome black and white carving of heavy shadows out of stone and reminding one of the graphic nature of Egyptian architecture, makes the images proceed into sacred and ancient territory.

The photos by Guillot, a French painter and photographer who made Egypt his part-time muse, are hard to place. It is almost as if they had been made without photography itself in mind at all. As aides for paintings, they exceed in atmosphere and are uncomplicated by photography-for-photography’s sake-isms. The images are directly about the place or Guillot’s point of reference and are absolved of being about the technical aspects of photographs nearly entirely. When I say that, it is not to suggest they are not good or that they are not masterful, but like Atget or several photographers who can glean that essential nature of a subject and rend it from their authorship for the sake of the subject itself, it is an exemplary body of work that feels out of time and out of place in the late 20th Century.

Another photographer from history that I equate with these images is Girault de Prangey, the other insatiable French visitor to the Middle East, whose 19th-century daguerreotypes of the Mediterranean exceed similarly. Some of the unpeopled nature of those photographs has to do with the technical matters of producing daguerreotypes with their slightly longer exposures and set-up times, but also with de Prangey’s desire to shoot from the side, at walls, and upward-most of these elements can be found in Guillot’s work. There is a heavy symbiosis between the French artists’ capture of the Middle East. In de Prangey’s case, he photographed Syria and other locations, but the similarities are remarkable. Interestingly enough, the French have always had an appeal with the Middle East for better or worse. Photographically, there are many reference points from J.P. Sebah to Auguste Salzmann (a photographer whom I am also reminded of in Guillot’s book).

This is the sleeper of the year regarding photobooks. Guillot’s photographs themselves feel fresh. I cannot think of an easy contemporary parallel outside of Mark Ruwedel’s Ouarzazate, published by MACK in 2018, a book that examines the disused Moroccan film set as a subject. What makes the book especially attractive is the physicality of its handmade presence. I have been paying more and more attention to Origini Edizioni and think they have begun to crack the complex code of small handmade editions that feel complete and solid and ensure that an artist’s vision or legacy is kept intact with such a design-heavy project.

This is not an easy way to make books. The labor involved includes many long hours of pre-planning to execution. Often, when you see books with this level of hand-made quality, the sameness of at-home book block inkjet printing begins to show and feel similar to other artists working in the same vein. For me, this book gets into new territory where it feels solid, utterly different from what else is out right now, and as mentioned, there is a power of restraint in the physical side of the book that makes this in line with the type of small press literature books that collectors covet, and it is still made in an edition of 250, which means it is not exactly an artist book, but upholds that ingenuous element of lust for creativity that you find in much more minor editions. The care and thought put into this title, with its exemplary execution, safeguard an incredible artist’s legacy. You should pick this up. It fires on all cylinders—Highest Recommendation.

Bernard Guillot

La Cité des Morts

Origini Edizioni

Original Press