I’m listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two (Expanded Version), though I should be listening to the original score for Ilias’s book Forecast (Origini Edizioni, 2023, Second Edition). I apologize to Daphne Kotsiani, Y. Fotiadis, D. Joss, and I. Dimitriadis, who have added an audio piece of sculpted piano interludes that one can hear by scanning the QR code in the book. I have listened to the elegant piano accompaniment previously. I also find The Selected Ambient Works perfect for a read-along, and I now endeavor to write with the same soundtrack in mind. It fits the book’s atmosphere very well. I am not even sure why I am declaring all of this. Perhaps it is a feeling of guilt about the piano.
I am very much excited by the prospect of listening to sound with a photobook, a labor that I have devoted a year or so to myself with a previous project. Mikael Siirilä, Mark Templeton, and my project, Mondo Decay with Nun Gun, are just a few examples of photobooks with sound accompaniment. Other photographers like Jan Philipzen and Wolfgang Tillmans are also artists who make photography and music, and I firmly believe that music often motivates many of us much more than photography itself. Hence, the crossover remains a fecund area of exploration. In some ways, adding audio to a book experience might seem like a type of pacing was necessary, so certain parts of the sound work with the flipping of pages, but I do not think this is necessarily the case in this book or others. The idea, instead, is to have two mediums conveying a similar feeling, and one can heighten the experience of the other.
Soundscapes such as those found in the Ambient Works Selection present a sublime syncopation when I leaf through the pages of Forecast, a book that presents a somber, solarized, and grainy black-and-white affair. Some images with gatefold openings feel immersive and nearly cinematic when you get absorbed in the work. Though a smaller book, it does not affect the feeling of being immersed in the artist’s landscapes, which are grainy and stretched and feel like they are dissolving in front of you. There is a feel of Provoke-Era Japanese Photography in the mix. I am reminded of Takanashi Yutaka’s Toshi-e (Towards the City) as a first reference. The harbor in Georgiadis’s book (likely Thessaloniki) is reminiscent of the coves and harbors in Takanashi’s masterpiece.
The grain and the ephemeral feeling that I feel in looking at the work also reminds me of Taki Kōji architectural images in the “fourth and Fifth” Provoke volume Mazu Tashikarashisa no Sekai o Sutero (First abandon the world of certainty, or First, Discard the World of Pseudo-Certainty’, or First, Throw Out Verisimilitude). These images are stretched past the limit of easy viewing. Though Georgiadis pushes the grain of his pictures to noise, they never stray that far as they return a European sensibility that I can only describe as romantic, but with the pathos of ennui that more accurately describes the time in which they have been crafted as much as the former Japanese artist’s works did. When I mention romantic it is to suggest a hint of humanism in the work that I find purposefully lacking in the examples of Japanese photography that I mentioned.
Georgiadis’s dreamscape has several constant themes attached to the work. First and foremost, there is the harbor that I have mentioned, but there is also the recurring motif of people slipping in and out of shadows, their multitude uncertain. There is no single protagonist. Thus, the work itself is less cinematic or narrative and more of a series of images that feel like a prolonged establishing shot, perhaps in the vein of Bela Tarr, where everything happens slowly and from a distance until one is brought into proximity with the people and in this case, birds, the other central motif that carries the slippery sequence of images with an atmosphere of uncertainty. The close-up framings of some of the portraits create an anxiety similar to images that I find in the early work of Eikoh Hose and the book Adam and Eve (1970) by Nobuyuki Wakabayashi. They are frontal and close, and the viewer’s distance to the unknown person can sometimes (purposefully) feel claustrophobic.
The birds are also worth mentioning in conjunction with Japanese photography for the apparent reference of Kerasu, or Ravens by Fukase Masahisa, where the winged animal takes on the mantle of flight and depression and anxiety. In Georgiadis’s work, the swallow continues to be a presence that is not precisely anxious, but it is cloaked in syrupy black monochrome and underscores the proximity to the harbor itself, the more central character of the story, in my opinion. The lack of fixity of the bird as it carries us through the sequence, landing where it pleases, can be seen as doubling perhaps of the photographer himself picking up and setting down to make photographs. I am also reminded of Yusuf Sevinçli’s books, particularly his book Oculus.
With Forecast, I am excited by the world that Ilias has created. Being a fan of the Origini publishing team, it feels like a good fit for their projects. They have a great way of handling atmospheric black-and-white work that functions as a shrine-building to specific projects, and I feel, for the most part, their handmade editions cater to the artist first, with design and an undergirding principle. That said, their design is also getting increasingly refined. You can feel that in this title from 2023, but also the newer by Claudine Doury and, more recently, the exceptional Bernard Guillot volume. I am curious what form Georgiadis’s next book will take, but I believe he has found an exceptional format here with the publishers. Highly Recommended.
Ilias Georgiadis
Forecast
Origini Edizioni